Category Archives: Google

Google, Twitter

A good year for culling Google search options

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2011 is proving to be a vintage year for disposing of Google search options. Google, in common with most search engines and database providers, is quick to announce wonderful new search features but tardy in telling users about discontinued tools. In fact, it generally takes several messages to the Google support forums about something not working in order to elicit the news that a service has been withdrawn.

UK Google Maps property search was one of the first to go this year. Google had done deals with several UK online estate agents so that when you ran a search in Google Maps on your post code together with the word property you were presented with a Google map showing all the properties for sale or rent in your area. You could even specify price range, the number of bedrooms and bathrooms.

Google Maps Property Search

The service was discontinued in February of this year with “low usage” being given as one of the reasons. That’s hardly surprising because after the launch Google did almost nothing to promote it and did not even offer a hint on the UK Maps home page that it existed.

Next to go was starred results. This enabled you to star or bookmark pages in your results list so that next time you ran a similar search they would appear separately at the top of your results.

Google starred results

The ability to create new starred results was removed but your existing starred results remain and will continue to appear in search results (No More Starred Results in Google Search http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2011/03/no-more-starred-results-in-google.html)

The ‘define:’ command was the next to be axed although the same functionality is still available under the Dictionary link in the left hand menu on the results page. Instead of simply prefixing your term or abbreviation with define: you now have to run a search on it and then click on Dictionary. The results are the same but it requires a couple of additional clicks to get there.

Next up were the numerous changes to the appearance and layout of the results page in the runup to the launch of Google+. One casualty was the ‘Similar’ link that used to appear next to most entries in the results page. This would find pages similar in content and from similar types of organisations to your selected page. Although it has gone from the results the related: command is still available and it remains on the Advanced Search screen. Another victim of the revamp was the Wonderwheel. This was a great way of exploring concepts and alternative search terms within a search, especially if you are working in a subject area new to you.

Google Wonderwheel

The closest alternative is the Related Searches option in the menu on the left hand side of the results screen. It doesn’t allow for the same ease of navigation between searches and doesn’t match the variety of terms and phrases that the Wonderwheel offered.

Related searches

The latest disappearance is Realtime search, which returned mostly Twitter results. The contract giving Google direct access to Twitter expired on July 1st and Google have not renewed the contract. This started out as a very useful Twitter search tool as Twitter’s own search at http://search.twitter.com/only returns results from the last few days and many of the advanced search commands do not work. More recently, though, Google Realtime became unreliable and started returning increasingly bizarre results, usually with hashtags because it would automatically correct what it thought was a spelling mistake. You can still use Google to search Twitter by combining your search terms with site:twitter.com but it does not pick up everything. Bing Social is a little better and Topsy.com is generally good but neither pick up everything.

As an example, I recently attended and spoke at the South West and Mid Wales Library Partnership staff conference. The hashtag was #swamp11 and two days after the event the archive document I created in Tweetdoc (http://www.tweetdoc.org/) listed 185 tweets, which tallied with the number in my own record. Bing Social finds 75 tweets, Topsy tracks down a mere 38 and when you force Google to do an exact match search together with site:twitter.com you get a paltry 4 results.

And finally…. a search option that many researchers find invaluable seemed to have vanished over the weekend. A link to the Advanced Search screen had vanished from the Google home page, as had Language Tools. Both are now hidden under the gear icon in the upper right hand corner of the screen.

Advanced Search Link

What will go next? Who knows except Google and they always seem reluctant to tell us. As Gary Price said in his article on the Search Engine Land site (http://searchengineland.com/official-the-google-wonder-wheel-is-gone-84105):

“..taking a service offline is up to the company. Users are free to go elsewhere or share their opinions with Google. What we hope for is simply for the company to let users know what’s going on versus waiting around, speculating, and wasting time.”

Google, Search Strategies

Google still thinks coots are possibly cats (or cows)

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I have been dining out on the ‘Google thinks cats are lions’ story for several months but decided that its inclusion in my presentation at INFORUM 2011 in Prague should be its last outing. (See my blog postings at http://www.rba.co.uk/wordpress/2011/02/12/google-decides-that-coots-are-really-lions/ and http://www.rba.co.uk/wordpress/2011/02/21/update-on-coots-vs-lions/ for the details on this story). Towards the end of my talk I pointed out that Google has now abandoned coots=lions and carries out what I consider to be a normal search for coots mating behaviour, or as normal as any Google search can be. I had checked in Google.co.uk, Google.com and Google.cz a couple of weeks before the INFORUM conference and coots were definitely black, medium sized water birds and not large furry mammals with huge fangs and claws. As I concluded my presentation, though, I saw a few people in the audience staring at their laptops and shaking their heads. One of them came up to me during the break and pointed out that Google Czech Republic was offering cats instead of coots for the first two results. This prompted a quick review of the Google coots/cats/lions situation.

The search: coots mating behaviour

Google.co.uk gives a reasonable set of results but having blogged and included details of the search in so many presentations and newsletters my own pages are taking over the top positions in the results.

Google UK coots search

Google.com gives similar results.

Google.cz however has different ideas. It offers me three articles from Google Scholar and then says “Did you mean cats mating behaviour” in Czech and gives me two results on that subject. The rest of the results are all about coots, so at least Google.cz is giving me my original search as an option rather than unilaterally deciding I really meant cats.

Google Czech Republic and Coots

Looking at other country versions of Google, Google.no and Google.se came up with similar results. Google Germany, however, thinks coots are cows and even throws in a Youtube video:

Google Germany Coots

I am not going to even begin to try and work out what is going on. Three of us nearly went mad attempting to get to the bottom of the original coots=lions oddity. But it does make one wonder even more whether Google can be trusted to come up with even a handful of useful results.

Google, Search Strategies, Top 10 Search Tips, workshops

Kent’s Top Tips for Google search

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This week I was in Kent running a full day workshop on using Google for search. The participants came from a variety of subject backgrounds and interestingly their Top Tips have a slight technical bias.

1. Preview. Click on the magnifying glass next to an entry in your results list to see a preview of the page highlighting areas containing your search terms

2. Google Trends. http://www.google.com/trends Enter up to five topics and see how often they’ve been searched in Google over time and in different geographic regions. This is a way of identifying how people are searching on a subject. Several workshop participants also explored the Websites option: enter a web site URL and see what other sites people visited. This can be useful if you are not sure about the main sites that cover a subject and want to expand your search from the one you have already found; for example enter moveto.co.uk and a list including other UK online estate agent sites appears. It was interesting to see that typing in a UK university web site came up with job and CV pages!

3. Take control. A tip that has been proposed in other workshops – sometimes along the lines of “Don’t let the ******s grind you down!”. Switch off targeted advertising by going to http://www.google.com/ads/preferences/. Log out of your of your Google account so that you are not bombarded with tweets and other stuff from members of your social networks. Use advanced search commands and the side bar on the results page to focus your search.

4. Timeline and time restriction options in the results page side bar for the most recent news but also for historical information.

5. Public data explorer. http://www.google.com/publicdata/home There was a lot of interest in this but some of the participants wanted to merge data sets from different sources, which led them to….

6. Fusion tables. http://www.google.com/fusiontables/Home “Merge data from multiple tables. Visualize your data on maps, timelines and charts.” This in turn led them to ….

7. Google Labs http://www.googlelabs.com/ – lots of interesting experiments including Google Correlate http://correlate.googlelabs.com/

8. For a different perspective, search for pages and sites in other languages using the Translated foreign pages option in the results page side bar.

9. Don’t forget the advanced search commands. It is all too easy to slip into lazy searching habits when everything goes well and results are relevant. If Google starts to do its own thing and comes up with bizarre results then using an advanced search command (e.g. filetype: or site:) or one of the two tips mentioned below usually brings it heel.

10. Two reliable standbys for getting out of a search rut or forcing Google to give you different results: repeat your main term(s) to change your  results (sometimes radically), and/or change the order of your terms in your search strategy.

(Some of my recent Google and search workshop presentations and notes can be found at http://www.rba.co.uk/as/)

Google, Search Strategies, Top 10 Search Tips

All About Google – Top Tips

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As well as the “Anything BUT Google” sessions, I have also been running “All About Google” workshops. The participants are asked to come up with a group Top 10 Tips and a combined list from the last three events is listed below. Many tips were common to all three so the final list has 16 tips. I also spotted people experimenting with the Google Art Project (http://www.googleartproject.com/), Fusion Tables (http://www.google.com/fusiontables/), Google Custom Search Engines (http://www.google.com/cse), Google Internet Statistics (http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/landing/internetstats/), and one person found Google Labs Transliteration (http://www.google.com/transliterate/) very useful.

1. Use the filetype: command or the file format option on the Advanced Search screen to limit your research to PowerPoint for presentations, spreadsheets for data and statistics or PDF for research papers and industry/government reports. Note that filetype:ppt, for example, will not pick up the newer .pptx so you will need to incorporate both into your strategy, for example filetype:ppt OR filetype:pptx

2. Use the plus sign (+) before a term or phrase to try and force an exact match – be aware, though, that Google sometimes still does what it wants with your terms – or use the minus sign immediately before a term to exclude pages that contain it. The minus sign can also be used with commands to exclude, for example, a specific site (-site:nameofsite.com) or a file format (-filetype:ppt) from your results.

3. Include the site: command in your strategy or use the domain/site box on the advanced search screen to focus your search on particular types of site, for example site:nhs.uk

4. Try the two proximity commands. An asterisk (*) between two words will look for your words in the order specified and separated by one or more terms, for example solar * panels. The AROUND(n) command, which is undocumented, looks for your terms in either order separated by the number of words (n) specified, for example solar AROUND(2) panels. Note that AROUND did not work for everyone on the workshop.

5. Usage rights. Use the Advanced Search screens for the web and image search to limit your search to Creative Commons material. The options are in the pull down menu under Usage Rights.

6. Use Google Realtime (http://www.google.com/realtime) for searching Twitter. Other social networks are supposedly included but the results are usually dominated by Twitter. Archives go back to February 2010 and there is a useful timeline that enables you to visualise activity over time and look at specific dates.

7. Use the tilde (~) before a term to search for synonyms. For example ~energy will search for energy, power, oil, gas, electricity or electric.

8. Wonder wheel. This can be found in the side bar to the left of your web search results page. Google pulls out terms and phrases from the top results and represents them as spokes on a wheel. Click on one of them and your search is revised and another wheel created. You can view the list of results to the right of the wheel. Note: the Wonder wheel is not available if you have Instant Search switched on.

9. Change the order in which you enter your search terms. This will change the order in which your results are presented and in some cases can change the search completely.

10. Repeat important terms to change the order in which results are presented. Like changing the order of your search terms, this can sometimes significantly alter the results.

11. Google Reader (http://www.google.com/reader). As well as using to aggregate RSS feeds that you have entered individually the Add Subscription box also allows you to search for new feeds using keywords.

12. Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com/). Although there are serious limitations to Google Scholar and the advanced search options are unreliable it can be very useful in tracking down the details of a half remembered reference. One member of the workshop explained that students often fail to accurately note down articles mentioned in lecturers. The specialist databases do not always retrieve the references in these cases whereas Google Scholar often does.

13. Google Scholar for citations. Although far from comprehensive and sometimes inaccurate not everyone can afford the more reliable but expensive databases. (Note: although it does not cover all subjects it is worth looking at Microsoft Academic Search at http://academic.research.microsoft.com/as an alternative).

14. Quality. Just because you found something through a Google search does not mean it is true or a trusted source, or that it is the most relevant document. Young students in particular often need to be reminded of this.

15. Open up the side bars to the left of your results. The options change depending on the type of search (general web search, images, news, books, recipes) and it is the key to narrowing down your search, especially by date.

16. Stand your ground! Don’t let Google take over. Clear your web history, cache and cookies. If you are responsible for access to the internet in your information centre or library, set up the browsers so that web histories and caches are cleared everytime a user logs out.  (You may need to enlist help from IT to set this up)

 

Google

Google lets you create your own naughty list

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You may have picked up the news that both Google and Bing have admitted to having whitelists of  ‘nice’ sites that manually override their search and ranking algorithms (Google, Bing Have White Lists Of Sites Not To Be Impacted By Algo Changes http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/110310-175043 and Google contradicts own counsel in face of antitrust probe http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/11/google_admits_search_algorithm_whitelists/). No big surprises there, as many of us have suspected that was the case for some time, but Google now also lets you set up your own naughty list and block selected sites from your search results. (We’ve already been able to set up nice lists for about a year – Google SearchWiki replaced with starred results http://www.rba.co.uk/wordpress/2010/03/12/google-searchwiki-replaced-with-starred-results/)

You first need to sign in to your Google account and then run your search as normal. For each entry in your results list there should now be a ‘Block’ option for the site.

Google Block Sites

Click on the block option and you will no longer see pages from that site in future searches. If you carry out a search that would normally contain pages from a blocked site you will see a message saying how many results were blocked. You can manage your naughty list and unblock sites by going to your Search Settings or clicking on the “Manage blocked sites” link that appears when you block a domain. Google says that it is not currently using blocked domains as a signal in search ranking but it may do so in the future.

Yet another way for Google to thoroughly mess up our searches.

Google, Search Strategies

Update on coots vs. lions

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If you have landed on this page thinking that this is a post about your favourite football or rugby team, please note that this is an update on my earlier article ‘Google decides that coots are really lions’ (http://www.rba.co.uk/wordpress/2011/02/12/google-decides-that-coots-are-really-lions/). It has nothing to do with sporting activities unless you count trying to work out what Google is doing with your search! The original post was about how and why Google decided that a search on coots mating behaviour should really have been lions mating behaviour.

The first response to my posting was a comment from Arthur Weiss (http://www.rba.co.uk/wordpress/2011/02/12/google-decides-that-coots-are-really-lions/comment-page-1/#comment-14207).
He suggested that Google was treating coots and lions as synonyms (both are living creatures). I thought that was pushing synonyms too far even for Google. (Sorry, Arthur).

I then had two comments in quick succession from Susanna Winter via Twitter (@Mrs_Figaro). The first is at (http://twitter.com/Mrs_Figaro/statuses/36714410223341568):

Twitter comment on lions vs coots

Moving coots from the beginning to the end of the strategy resulted in an exact match and not a single lion in sight:

Mating behaviour coots

Changing the order of the search terms is a trick I often use to change the order of my results or bring up pages that might be buried in the hundreds or thousands, but I have never seen such a dramatic change such as this.

Susanna’s search strategy ‘coots feeding behaviour’, which came up with an exact match, muddied the waters even more. Perhaps there is a search frequency algorithm coming into play? Are there more searches for lions mating behaviour than for coots, but not lions feeding behaviour? I am not convinced that this explains Google’s insistence on looking for lions rather than our animal of choice. Susanna’s next tweet suggests what is going on (http://twitter.com/Mrs_Figaro/statuses/36715389190676480):

Google spelling correction

What you see is:

Google coots search minus lions

So Arthur was on the right track. (My apologies, Arthur).  What probably happened with our search is, as Susanna said, that Google first assumed a typo and then did a synonym search on cats. What puzzles me, though, is how Google arrived at cats from coots. Surely coyotes or goats would be nearer when it comes to typographical errors?

I have two final variations on our search to confuse you even further.

The first is repeating coots at the start of the strategy. An exact match:

Repeating coots in the search

Now move one of the ‘coots’ to the end of the strategy and Google asks “Did you mean lions mating behaviour coots”:

Repeating coots in the search

I give up!

Google, social media

Google includes your social circle in search

Google has been including search results from your social circle for quite a while. If you are logged in to a Google account it sometimes includes a box either at the bottom or in the middle of your search results page with a couple of “Results from people in your social circle”:

Google Social Circle

Click on the link and it will show you more from your circle.

If you are using Google.com and open up the search options in the side bar to the left of your results there is a “Social” option that will do exactly the same thing.

Google Social search option

Want to know who is in your social circle? Head straight to your Google dashboard at http://www.google.com/dashboard and scroll down to Social Circle. This not only tells you which of your social networks Google is using but also lists who.

Google lists your social circle

Any social networks that you have mentioned in, for example, your Blogger profile or your general Google profile such as Twitter will be included as will contacts in Google Reader, Google Buzz, Google Contacts and Picasa. In addition to your direct connections Google also searches the content of secondary connections that are publicly associated with your direct connections. The A-Z reveals all!

Until now the Social option has been kept separate but Google has started integrating all of these results with the rest of  your search starting with Google.com (see Official Google Blog: An update to Google Social Search
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/update-to-google-social-search.html). So if you are using Google.com and are logged into your Google account you will now start seeing results automatically from your social circle.

Google's new social search

Underneath the social search entry it will say something like “Joe Bloggs shared this on Twitter”. Hover over this and it tell you how you are connected.

I frequently use social media to search for information and advice but I much prefer to choose when and how to do it. I do not always want Google unilaterally deciding to add opinions from all and sundry in my network. Remember, this is not just the direct connections that you have chosen to make but others who are connected to them and over which you have no control. The only way you can shut this off completely is to log out of your Google account. I will reserve final judgement until I have used it more but after only 2 hours of experimentation I am already finding that some searches are dominated by results from Twitter, Google Reader and Flickr. The results look even more cluttered than before and I fear it gives Google even more opportunity to completely mess up the search.

Google

Google decides that coots are really lions

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First of all let us make sure we all know the difference between lions and coots. As far as I can recall, lions are huge, snarly, growly, land animals that are liable to eat you if you cross their path. This appears to be confirmed by Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lions) but of course Wikipedia could be wrong. Coots are  medium sized water birds (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coots) and the worst that could befall you should you antagonise one is a severe pecking.

I was walking by the Thames in Caversham today and took several photos of the birds on the river. One was of two coots who were having what appeared to be a minor domestic or an argument over territory, but a friend suggested to me that what I saw was coot mating behaviour. What do you do in a situation such as this? You Google.

My search on coots mating behaviour came up with:

Google''s interpretation of search on 'coots mating behaviour'

Where the [expletive deleted] did the lions come from?? I just do not understand how Google managed to replace coots with lions. One is a water bird with wings, feathers, and a beak and the other a large, aggressive land mammal with fur, claws and big teeth. But Google, yet again, has decided to go off and run its own search. (See my posting Oi! Google – you have seriously overstepped the mark http://www.rba.co.uk/wordpress/2011/01/03/oi-google-you-have-seriously-overstepped-the-mark/).

So did I get what I wanted by clicking on “Search instead for coots mating behaviour”? Yes I did, but Google still thinks I really want to search for lions and asks “Did you mean: lions mating behaviour”. Google has totally lost the plot.

What Google should have given me in the first place

And the photo that started it all? That can be found on my Flickr account at http://www.flickr.com/photos/rbainfo/5438769506/. I think you will agree that coots are very different from lions (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:P_l_Bleyenberghi.jpg)

Google, Search Strategies

AROUND: Google proximity search operator

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Several people have already blogged about Google’s AROUND proximity operator: Digital Inspiration,  ResearchBuzz, SearchReSearch and Phil Bradley to name just four. According to SearchReSearch the command has been available for 5-6 years, which begs the question “Why has no-one picked up on it before now?” Could it possibly be because the operator does not do what it says on the tin? Perish the thought and wash my brain out with soap and water for even considering such a thing. 

The AROUND command allows you to specify the maximum number of words that separate your search terms. The syntax is firstword AROUND(n) secondword. For example oil AROUND(2) production.

The reason I have not commented on AROUND so far is because – how can I put this politely – I am finding it difficult to find a search in which it is of practical value. I shall illustrate with just one of my searches, macular degeneration, but my experiences with other test and “real” searches are similar. When testing search features the relevance of the documents that appear on the first few pages of the results is more important than the number of  hits, especially as the latter are often guesstimates from Google and can vary enormously depending on which version of Google you use. Nevertheless, the numbers are interesting even if they only serve to confuse us further and I have included them with the screen shots. All of the following searches were run in Google.co.uk

Let’s kick off with a very basic version of my test search: macular degeneration

Number of results: 7,340,000

Macular Degeneration simple search

The results are relevant and as usual Google appears to be listing first those pages where the terms appear next to one another. If we did want to be more precise and reduce the number we could search for the phrase: "macular degeneration".

Number of results: 1,690,000

Macular degeneration phrase search

Not surprisingly the number of results has been reduced significantly to 1,690,000.

Let us now say that my enquirer has come back with an amendment to the original request. They have been told that there are several forms of macular degeneration, for example macular disciform degeneration, and they want a selection of articles covering as many of them as possible. I have a biomedical background and can easily identify the relevant phrases and run separate searches on them, but what if I didn’t have a clue where to start? I could use Google’s asterisk (*) between my two terms to stand in for one or more words.

The strategy macular * degeneration gives us a massive 21,500,000 results, far more than our first basic search if the numbers are to be believed.

Macular degeneration asterisk search

In just the first 6 results we have picked up vitelliform and disciform degeneration, and more are picked up in the subsequent 20-30 results.

Google’s search tips say “If you include * within a query, it tells Google to try to treat the star as a placeholder for any unknown term(s) and then find the best matches.” It is not clear from this whether the asterisk stands in for one or more terms. Adding more asterisks to the search does not alter the number of results, which in any case are only an estimate. We do, though, see very different content and now variations on our terms (for example macula)  are appearing emboldened in the page summaries.

Comparison of asterisk searches

We could try and force an exact match search by placing a plus sign before macular in our strategy, but let’s try and keep this exercise simple.

Now for three searches using AROUND(n). Note that AROUND must be in capital letters, otherwise Google will treat it as just another search term. Specifying the number of separating words as 1, 2 and 3 gave me 1,710,000, 1,710,000 and 1,720,000 results respectively.

Google AROUND operator

The results are very different from the searches incorporating the asterisk and AROUND(2) and AROUND(3) were identical. Also, it seems that with the AROUND operator Google is giving priority to documents where the terms are a phrase and not separated by any other words. It was only when I reached around 650 that I started to see phrases where my two terms were separated by one other word.

Using just AROUND without any number gave me 1,610,000 results that looked very similar to those obtained with AROUND(1).

Logically, one might think that macular AROUND(0) degeneration would be the same as a search on the phrase "macular degeneration". It isn’t!

Phrase versus AROUND(0)

Not only are the number of results different (AROUND(0) comes back with 4, 250,000 compared with 1,690,000 from the phrase search) but so is the content.

Finally, I decided to follow Phil Bradley’s lead and see what happens when I try and exclude the phrase from the AROUND(0) search: macular AROUND(0) degeneration -"macular degeneration". I got 43,000 results in which the terms seemed to appear anywhere within the document, in any order and separated by any number of other words.

In conclusion, despite what I said earlier I think AROUND does work but it is difficult to test because Google always seems to give priority to pages in which your terms appear as a phrase and not separated by any other words. Its effect is probably more obvious if you are dealing with a topic that would otherwise return a very small number of results. The ranking and sorting of the results changes significantly, though, when you use AROUND so it might be worth trying if you are fed up with seeing the same documents and sites again and again. In all of the test searches I have carried out so far I still prefer the asterisk, especially if I want to be able to identify expanded phrases quickly and easily. But, as the saying goes, your mileage may vary. Feedback on your own experiences, please.