Category Archives: Google

Google

Your Google results are about to get weirder

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Persuading Google to recreate the same list of results for a search is impossible. Google continually updates its database and index with new and updated pages. Even a few minutes between repeat searches can make a significant difference. Add into this mix the fact that your search will probably be diverted to a different server from the one that gave you your initial results (Google has thousands of servers) and that the second server may have been updated at a different time with different pages. Oh, and Google may have decided to play around with the ranking algorithms and display options on this particular server as an experiment. And are you sure you have entered your search terms in exactly the same order as before, because that can make a difference as well? And we haven’t even started to consider the difference of searching in Google.co.uk vs. Google.com vs. Google.ca etc.

Now we have Google personalized search, and by ‘we’ I mean all of us by default.

Search personalization is nothing new. In 2005 Google announced a new feature that was enabled if you were logged in with your Google account: web history and personal search (see Official Google Blog: Search gets personal http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/06/search-gets-personal.html). If you were logged in to your Google account and had your web history enabled – a record of your searches and sites that you selected from your results – future search results would be adjusted, or personalized, accordingly. And then we had (have) Google Searchwiki (see Begone Searchwiki http://www.rba.co.uk/wordpress/2008/12/11/begone-searchwiki/). Searchwiki – you have to opt-in for it – enables you to delete results from your search results, or move a result up or down in the list depending on how relevant you think it is. Your actions are saved and remembered when you next run the search.

The new Google personalized search is different. You do not have to be signed in to a Google account and by default it is switched on.  The claim is that Google is “helping people get better search results”:

“For example, since I always search for [recipes] and often click on results from epicurious.com, Google might rank epicurious.com higher on the results page the next time I look for recipes. Other times, when I’m looking for news about Cornell University’s sports teams, I search for [big red]. Because I frequently click on www.cornellbigred.com, Google might show me this result first, instead of the Big Red soda company or others.”

The customization is based on 180 days of search activity linked to an anonymous cookie in your browser. See the “Official Google Blog: Personalized Search for everyone” http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/personalized-search-for-everyone.html for further details.

This might sound at first to be a useful additional feature, but think it through. Let us say that in the run-up to Christmas your boss has asked you to look up recipes for chocolate desserts, cakes or puddings for the office party. When your results list comes up you repeatedly click on links for recipes or videos of how to make that extra complicated chocolate soufflé. In your regular day job’s research, though, you are researching the pharmacological properties of the various compounds to be found in cocoa. Your results are now starting to come up with some very odd results, but at least they will be on the same topic. For those of us who research a wide range of subjects Google’s personalized search is going to lose the plot very quickly.

There is then the question of which computer are you using? Do you always use the same computer at work or at home (we have three here)?  What are you going to see when you go to an Internet cafe? And what results will Google present you with if you are a CILIP member and use the IT facilities in the members’ information centre?

Whatever PC you use for your Google search, look in the top right hand corner of the results page. You should see an option for Web History:

Click on Web History and then Disable Customisations based on search activity:

When this first went live, I found that disabling the customisation was not saved from one session to the next. Today, this now seems to have been saved from my previous search session but if you want to ensure that customisation has been disabled I would recommend that you check the setting at the start of every day.

Google, images

Google experiments with Image Swirl

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Having made Google Image Options (including colour) and Similar Images available as part of their standard image search, Google are now playing around with Image Swirl in Google Labs. According to Google it “builds on new computer vision research to cluster similar images into representative groups in a fun, exploratory interface”. In practice it is a combination of similar images and the Wonderwheel.

One of my image test searches is Edvard Munch and Swirl came back with 12 thumbnails of stacked images (12 is the standard number of stacks) :

Click on a group of stacked  images and another set of images “swirl” into view in the form of the wonderwheel:

And you can keep on clicking on groups/stacks of images but still keep the “history” of your selections.

I was pleasantly surprised by the clustering or stacking of the images. I thought that by the time I had reached ‘level 3’ of my browsing each stack would be just different versions of the same image or images with similar colour composition. My Edvard Munch level 3 selection, however, came up with a selection of landscapes with different colours. They did, though, seem to have similar ‘patterns’, for examples paths or what could be interpreted as paths as a major component of the image.

Phil Bradley has also reviewed Google Swirl and comments “Bing is going to have their work cut out to try and catch up.” Far too polite, Phil. I’d say “Bing, eat your heart out!”

Google Swirl looks very promising and I shall be monitoring its progress with interest.

Bing, Google, Twitter, Web 2.0

Twitter search in Bing and Google

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Bing and Google have both announced that they have done a deal with Twitter that enables them to offer ‘real time’ Twitter searches. The Bing service is live now at http://www.bing.com/Twitter/. SearchEngineWatch has an overview of the service at Bing.com/Twitter: A Visual Tour. It looks impressive but as is so often the case with Bing the reality does not live up to expectations.

I have just returned from a conference on chemical information held in Sitges – hashtag #icic09. This should be an easy one for Bing Twitter to handle I thought. Silly me. Up came “We did not find any Twitter results or links for icic09″. I tried it with and without the hashtag – still nothing.  And yet both search.twitter.com and www.twazzup.com had no problem finding tweets from the conference.

Bing Twitter results on #icic09

Twazzup results on #icic09

It also appears that you cannot search on a username. I then compared the results of searches on keywords and names that I knew had been tweeted at the conference: chemspider, chemspiderman, David Walsh, semantic mediawiki, markush. Nothing! It seems that the whole conference has been boycotted by Bing Twitter. I did begin to suspect that the service is not really up and running but searching on Nick Griffin came up with plenty of results and it found a tweet from one of my Twitter network about chickpea curry that had been posted a few minutes before.

There is something seriously wrong with Bing Twitter. Until they fix it and can present credible results I recommend that you give it a miss.

So what of Google’s offering? It isn’t live yet but there is useful discussion and comments on Google Social Search Is Coming & More On Google-Twitter. The main question for us as searchers is whether or not the Twitter search will be integrated into the standard web search or made available as a separate option. Tweets are already included in the web search as I discovered when I did a search on icic09 but they are spread out amongst the results. It would make sense to have a separate search tool such as Google’s Blogsearch. Another option would be to incorporate it into the side bar under “Show options” (See Google new search and display options).

Bing have yet again snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. As for Google Twitter, we shall just have to wait and see.

Google, Presentations, Search Strategies

Presentation: Internet Search – a challenging and ever changing landscape

CILIP in the Thames Valley, 6th October 2009, Great Expectations, Reading

The presentation I gave to CILIP in the Thames Valley on 6th October is now available in a number of locations. At least one of these should be accessible through your firewall!

PowerPoint presentation – RBA web site
Slideshare
Authorstream
Slideboom

Some of the slides have annotations from my blog and new comments so make sure you check out the notes to the slides. Many of the slides are screen shots so they won’t make much sense without the notes or unless you were at the live presentation.

Google, Search Strategies

Google new search and display options

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Some of you may have spotted that Google has introduced some excellent new search and display options. Many of you probably have not – the link to them is very discreet, almost as though Google does not want you to find out about them. Carry out a standard Google search and to the left just above your search results you will see a “Show options” link.

Click on ‘Show options’ or the plus sign and additional search and sort options will appear to the left of your search results.

At the top of the list you can choose to limit your search to videos, blogs, forums or reviews.

Below that are options to restrict your search to “recent results”, the past hour, past 24 hours, past week, past year or to your own specific date range. Not surprisingly the past hour, 24 hours and week pull up mostly blog postings and news articles. “Recent results” seems to pick results that go back about a couple of months.

As soon as you select any of the time options apart from the specific date range, additional options to sort by relevance or by date appear but the date option only sorts with most recent first. For some inexplicable reason sorting by date disappears if you want to specify your own range of weeks, months, or years; results are automatically sorted by relevance.

A word of warning about Google’s date sorting: the “date” of many of the web pages bears no relationship whatsoever to the real date of publication or when the content was actually written. In these cases Google is using the date and time stamp assigned to the page by the hosting web server. Most web sites have been revamped and reloaded at least once in their lifetime and some pages are dynamically created at the time of search. The dates of blog postings and news articles are a little more reliable, although there too you can find anomalies.

If you want to quickly identify articles that fall within a specific time period you may be better off selecting the Timeline but this seems to only include articles from Google Current News and Google Archive News. Also, the list of results below the Timeline graphic does not include every year. You have to click on the bar representing the required years and only then are all the articles displayed.

Related searches is obvious: this comes up with alternative search strategies that you might want to try. For me they would be far more useful displayed at the top of the standard search results rather than being hidden under  “Show options”.

The Wonder wheel is difficult to describe in words as it is a clustering and visualisation tool combined. Click on a link on the first wheel and a second pops up with a different set of clustered links for you to follow. Try it and see if it works for you.

“Images from the page” adds thumbnails of images found on the page next to the text entry in your results list.

The “More text” option gives you a larger extract from each of the pages in the results list making it easier for you to decide which are most relevant for your needs.

And if you are fed up with seeing shopping sites in your lists or perhaps want more, Google has thought of that as well. Simply click on “Fewer shopping sites” or “More shopping sites”. This works very well and reminds me of Yahoo’s Mindset experiment that allowed you to move a slider bar between research and shopping to change the emphasis of the results. Sadly, Yahoo never incorporated it into its standard search and abandoned the project a while ago.

Overall, Google has come up with a winner here. I would not want to use every option for every search so having a bar from which you can easily select and combine them is a great idea. It is a pity that Google has not made the additional options more obvious.

Bing, Google, Presentations, Search Engines, Search Strategies, Yahoo

Internet Search: a challenging and ever changing landscape

CILIP in the Thames Valley evening meeting

Date & Time: Tuesday 6th October 2009,  1800 for 1830 hrs
Location: Great Expectations, 33 London St, Reading

Google threatens to go hyper with its “caffeine” search. Bing is taking over Yahoo. Image search options are expanding: creative commons, colour, similar images. More specialist search tools for the “hidden web” are emerging and Web 2.0 is now an essential part of the search mix. Karen Blakeman will look at the new services that are being pushed out by the major search engines and the alternatives.

This is a free event followed by free refreshments and networking opportunities with colleagues.

An invitation is extended to anyone with a professional interest in the topic

Contact: Norman Briggs, nwbriggs@pcintell.co.uk to advise attendance for catering purposes.

Google, Market Research, Statistics

Google compiles industry stats for the UK – sort of

Google has launched a new page that pulls together industry stats for the UK. Google – Internet Stats, which is biased towards information on electronic and online services and products, gathers data from third party vendors many of which are priced. A list is available at the bottom of the Internet Stats page. You can, though, submit your own “killer fact”.  All submissions are vetted by Google.

There are five categories: Technology, Macro Economic Trends, Media Landscape, Media Consumption and  Consumer Trends. Each section has further sub-categories.

This is not the answer to a market/industry researcher’s prayer. The number of statistics is very limited and the search option only searches within the browsable statistics on the landing page. Do not expect to be able to search for and find data on, for example, UK chocolate consumption! If your query falls within one of the listed categories you may be in luck.

Exactly where Google is going with this and why they have introduced it is not clear. This is a UK-only initiative at present and there is no link to it from either the .com or .co.uk main Google search pages. Neither is it listed in Google Labs. Even the official announcement on “Google Barometer: New! Internet Stats all in one place” gives very little further information.

Google, Search Engines

Directionlessgov: compare Directgov search with a Google custom search

Checking through the last year of postings on my blog I regret to say that I somehow managed to forget to cover the excellent Directionlessgov. This is an “alternative” search option for the Direct.gov.uk web site and uses Google. It has has been set up by the group that is also behind They Work For You and The Government Says.

“We got so fed up with the general uselessness of the multi-million pound shambles otherwise known as the Direct.gov.uk portal, that we decided to build something better in under an hour. Sadly, we ran catastrophically behind schedule, but we still finished before lunch.”

Type in your search and view the results from Google on the right hand side of the screen. For comparison, and to rub salt and a hefty dose of chilli pepper into the wound, results from Directgov are displayed on the left hand side.

A search on my own council’s (Reading) recycling policies came up with the following results:

directionlessgov

No contest: Directionlessgov wins outright!

For another Google custom search engine covering local government, you might also like to try LGSearch, which I covered in March 2009.

Google, Search Engines, Yahoo

Searching for file types made easy

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One of the Top 10 Tips that participants of my advanced search workshops regularly come up with is using file format options to focus your search. If you are looking for an expert on a topic, a conference presentation or a quick overview of a topic then seek out PowerPoint files; government and industry reports are often stored as PDFs; and substantial collections of statistics may be left in Excel format. Both Google and Yahoo have options for file type searches on their advanced search screens, but if you want a quick and easy way of searching both of these search tools for the four main file types (Word, Excel, PDF, PowerPoint), then head for DocJax.

Simply type your search terms into the box and DocJax will pull up a list of all four file formats in Yahoo and Google that contain your terms. You can then limit your search to just one file type by clicking on one of the four logos at the top of the list.

DocJax

I have only one minor quibble with DocJax, which is that it does not deduplicate the results. Other than that, it is an excellent tool for filetype searching. Many thanks to Peter Guillaume for alerting me to the service.

If you prefer to search Yahoo and Google separately, then try Browsys Advanced Finder. Select Files form the menu at the top of the screen, enter your search terms and click on Yahoo or Google for your preferred file type. There is no need to re-enter your search terms for each search – just click your way through the list.

BrowsysFiles

I usually berate such services for not including Bing (formerly Microsoft Live Search) in their lists because Bing does sometimes come up with unique content. Although not included in Bing’s advanced search options one used to be able to simply incorporate the filetype: command followed by the file extension in the search. On testing it today, though, I discovered that the filetype command no longer works in Bing. Like the link and linkdomain commands, it has been obliterated from their search system. Another example of Bing dumbing down their search. This does not bode well for Yahoo: as part of the recent Microsoft deal, Microsoft will power Yahoo search and as a result Yahoo will lose many of its current search features. I’m afraid that rather than stealing market share from Google, Bing’s current approach to search will encourage users to stay with the big G.

Google

Google Caffeine

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A short post prompted by Phil Bradley’s posting on the proposed new hyperactive Google, nicknamed Google Caffeine. See his article for further details and background information, and if you are interested in comparing the current Google with Google Caffeine try Caffeine Compare. I have been running my searches and test searches on both over the past few days and found:

1. No difference at all for the majority of searches.

2. Minor and insignificant differences for a handful of searches

3. For some business information searches, worse and an increased number of irrelevant results with Google Caffeine.

Not much else to say other than I am not very impressed at this stage.