Google Unveils Search Options and Google Squared 171
CWmike writes "Saying that its users are becoming increasingly sophisticated, Google has unveiled a list of new search technologies geared to help users 'slice and dice' their Google search results, along with a new tool to help them cull information instead of Web pages. Marissa Mayer, vice president of Google's Search Products, said of Search Options in a blog post, 'We have spent a lot of time looking at how we can better understand the wide range of information that's on the Web and quickly connect people to just the nuggets they need at that moment.' Google Squared, set to be released to users as part of its Google Labs program later this month, pulls up information from different sites and presents it in an organized manner."
Chicken or the egghead? (Score:3, Interesting)
Culling data and presenting context-aware results is something that Wolfram is working on too.
Wolfram, a genuine genius, against a company full of above-average engineers. It's a tossup as to who came up with this idea first.
new search pair of dimes? (Score:4, Interesting)
This is an interesting take on the process of searching. In the past I thought good searching required training or insight, but this line of thinking - putting the onus on the search provider - is bold and interesting.
Will Google offer the traditional "colander with wires attached" USB device to read our minds and ignore what we type into the search box? If so, it better be free or people will complain.
Blocking results from certain sites... (Score:4, Interesting)
... would be the most important in my opinion of "user sophistication", a lot of times google will pull a lot of sites quite frankly should be able to be punished by users by users beign able to filter them out of their search results.
That might cause google to pause (ad revenue) but personally there's a lot of google manipulation and I'd love it if users could simply FILTER their results but NOT be able to change them and then let google study which sites are blocked or not to get an idea of how clueles (cluefull) their userbase is
Too specific (Score:5, Interesting)
Has anyone else noticed google's search results are a little too focused, or personalized? I am finding that useful search results that I had clicked on that were only tangenially related no longer come up when I search under the identical terms a second time. While this is good in most cases, I'd like a way to switch off this "focused laser" approach and open up my results more broadly without having to dig past the first 10 pages of results. I feel like google is so specific that I either find my result in the first three results or not at all these days. I feel like I am missing out on the wonders of finding cool stuff that you didn't know existed, since the results are too good and almost never off topic.
Content owners won't they lose revenue (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Regexp and exact word matching options (Score:1, Interesting)
Sounds useful... recursive searching of results, being able to manipulate the summary, that would be fun... and while they're at it a mini scripting language helping the rewriting of results.
find nano(computing|computer|qbit) in_site slashdot.com
result=custom_cleanup_subroutines_for_irrelevant_websites_such_as_nano_the_text_editor()
then have a library of custom searches that people could build on... that would allow people to share custom searches for things such as mp3s, specific types of data such as scientific data, etc...
Re:Too specific (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, it seems that if you are from Germany, you can configure and go to .com all you want, you will always get German search results preferred. Which is not what I want. Especially for forum searches on computer questions. The answers in those forums always seem to be extremely retarded. Then you go over to some international/english forum, and it's like a fresh breeze of reason. No offense... but that is my experience.
In German forums, people will lead you on a totally stupid wrong track, and then go back and forth for pages, generally ruling out the way to the solution, because of that previous assumption. I can't count the times I banged my head on the table because it was so obvious where they went wrong.
Also don't try to correct them. They think they are right anyway, and so big experts, because they installed Suse all alone.
Just go over to some international forum for some serious business, and see their track being ruled out in the second message of the thread.
In that aspect, it's much like comparing the quality of small local TV stations and newspapers to nationwide or international ones.
Re:Google Squared- remember Teoma? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Regexp and exact word matching options (Score:3, Interesting)
I wish Google had the ability to search for regular expressions and exact word matching. Searching for exact words or things that contain other symbols than letters is unfortunately very hard with Google and so sometimes it's useless in situations where it could have been so powerful.
Search options may finally make Google the best search engine on the internet. The Algorithm has never impressed me very much, but getting some of the these options that I used in Lexis Nexis since the mid 90s into a web search would definitely make me switch search sites. I'd particularly like to be able to search for a word within N words of another word, and to be able to specify which word comes first, or give multiple combinations or variations on each word. When I want to find opinions on a TV show, The Algorithm works fine, but Google has never been the best when it comes to just searching for specific phrases that need to be ON THE RESULT PAGE, not on ten pages that link to the result page.
Re:Chicken or the egghead? (Score:5, Interesting)
It seems obvious that for them to publicize this now is a response to Wolfram Alpha, but clearly, Google wants to keep is technological edge over the competition. Now, what will be interesting to see is how much people care about these new search options, and whether or not someone buys Wolfram Alpha.
Re:Blocking results from certain sites... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Counteraction? (Score:3, Interesting)
Sounds to me like Google is simply launching a product to compete against Wolfram Alpha's pending release.
Both products have their problems.
Basically, they grab data from different websites and present it in a way that eliminates the necessity of visiting the actual site.
That's going to hurt a lot of website owners that depend on the traffic they get from Google.
I don't like it and expect a lot of webmasters to not like it either. If they use a separate bot to tabulate the data, it will quickly be blocked by many. If they use the current data they have and the same crawler then say goodbye to Google's dominance in the search market as people block google and request their sites be removed from the index.
With fewer sites in the index the search will become less useful and people will use other options.
What they are basically doing is building something like wikipedia dynamically. The difference is editors in wikipedia voluntarily contribute content. With these new tools, that's not the case.
Re:Counteraction? (Score:3, Interesting)
It may indeed hurt the people who run sites that are not in the top few sites in a crowded niche, but overall, I think a core snippet will help the best-run sites, not hurt them, in most cases.
Re:Regexp and exact word matching options (Score:3, Interesting)
I wish Google would stop serving me AdSense-laden link-farm pages at the top of my search results.
I'd rather pay Lexis-Nexis a couple hundred bucks a year than fritter away my life tweaking search queries.
Re:new search pair of dimes? (Score:1, Interesting)
Will Google offer the traditional "colander with wires attached" USB device to read our minds and ignore what we type into the search box? If so, it better be free or people will complain.
I'll never forget the first time I saw that helpful "Did you really mean..." tip at the top of my search results. Someone had told me over the phone to go download CuteFTP but I heard QFTP. When Google asked me if I really wanted CuteFTP it about knocked me out of my chair.
The Googles are watching.
Re:Regexp and exact word matching options (Score:2, Interesting)
I've always preferred http://www.google.com/search?q=glasgow+is+the+*+capital+of+europe [google.com] to demonstrate this feature.