Google Category Archive
Google Search Focus
Sometimes I find the Google blog posts to be long winded, high on hype, and low on information value. Yesterday's post about Google Search Quality started out in a similar vein, but it quickly improved and contains a number of interesting points about how Google handles searches and ranking. And for all those who like to say, "Just make it more like Google" and expect that to be a simple fix, please note the way Google describes their hard work on search quality is that "more than one thousand programmer/scientist years have gone directly into their development." Several extracts that...
Major Expansion at Google Translate
Earlier this month Google expanded the number of languages available in Google Translate. While the press release and most other coverage talked about ten new languages, the number of language pairs (from language X to language Y) increased far more substantially. Previously, Yahoo! Babel Fish had the most with 38 pairs. Google not only upped the number of possible languages, but every language listed can translate to the other. So depending on how you count, Google Translate now has over 500 language pairs available! That's a major increase. As Google Operating System notes, the counting varies depending on how you...
Related Searches Moving Up?
So maybe I missed this earlier, but today is the first time I noticed Google showing related search suggestions at the top of Google results. In this case, I just happened to run on search for talking heads, trying to get an example of integrated content. While it worked for that, it also gave this one line of "Related searches:" at the very top. This is the first time that I can recall seeing this at the top. Whether this is just one of Google's many user interface tests that may just run a short time or may continue and...
Google Stop Word Message Gone?
At SearchEngineLand, Barry noticed that Google is no longer alerting searchers that stop words are not searched. Previously, stop words in a query that was not in phrase marks would usually find Google prompting searchers that the stop word in the query is "a very common word and was not included in your search." Does this mean that Google no longer has any stop words? Based on a few of my tests with a small retrieval set, comparing a search with a stop word and another search with a + in front of the stop word, it does seem that...
Scholar Down, Books Up
Dean posted a scathing review of Google Scholar's performance over that past year based on a 32% decline in unique visitors according to ComScore data. More data on the changes at various Google properties between Nov. 2006 and Nov. 2007 are available in a TechCrunch posting. While I am sure that this data does not fully reflect actual Google traffic (and at least one comment on Battelle's Searchblog post says "a staff member from Google . . . tells me that ComScore has some of their numbers wrong"), I still find it fascinating. To no one's surprise, Web search is...
Google Experimental: Ranking
A new Google experimental search option for moving or deleting search results has been spotted at SearchEngineLand and elsewhere. It is not available for everyone, and is not listed on either the Google Labs page or on the list of Experimental Search options page. The help page notes that "To see your changes next time, you must be signed in to your Google account," but I still do not have the option even when logged in. Phil notes that other services like Eurekster have done this for awhile. Even Google has tried this before. In the first version of their...
Flash SearchMash
A new Flash version of SearchMash was found by Google Operating System. I haven't seen many major changes in Google's experimental site, especially since the Google Universal Search launch back in May. The Flash version is a significant change. It includes includes options for tracking a search history (see the left side hidden panel for this and other options), results screen shots from Snap, and access to all the databases available from regular SearchMash. One additional database added to this Flash version is Maps....
Google CSE Interview and Complaints
There's an interview today with the product leader for the Google Custom Search Engine (CSE). I always find numbers interesting: We have more than 100K registered Custom Search Engines, and that's growing pretty rapidly. (Although it will be far more interesting to see how many of these are getting any traffic several months from now.) Since I just put up my Customize Your Own Search Engine page and built a State Libraries: Custom Search page, I might as well mention a few of my complaints with Google's CSE....
Customizing Search Engines and Searching State Libraries
For one of my upcoming columns in Online, I compared the various custom search engines and other tools for building a topical search engine from a subset of a major search engine's database. Tools like Gigablast Custom Topic Search, Google Custom Search Engine, Live Search Macros, Swickis, Rollyo, and Yahoo! Search Builder. I compared a number of features (including the maximum number of sites, whether they support subdirectories, and if they have usage statistics). This information can now be seen on my new Customize Your Own Search Engine page....
Google's filetype: Fixed
Back in January I mentioned that Google was expected to fix its filetype: search so that it would give results even when not combined with another search term. I checked today, and sure enough, filetype:qpw now works without needing any additional terms. So why would anyone really want to do this? Most of the benefit of restricting the search results to a specific file type is when it is combined with other search terms. A search like filetype:pdf might be useful to get a count for how many PDF documents Google has indexed, but Google's estimated number is so wildly...
Bowker, Live, and Geo Books
Last week, Bowker announced an agreement with Microsoft that its Global Books In Print database will be used for "basic and value-added data that will enhance descriptions of books incorporated in the new Live Search Books." Considering that Live Books are primarily out-of-print, out-of-copyright books and that Global Books In Print covers, surprise, in-print books, it would be interesting to know how many matches between the two are found. I have yet to see any examples. Today, Google announces the addition of geographic data to its books. Books are analyzed for place names and a Google Map with a list...
Google to Fix filetype: Search?
At Search Engine Land, Danny has a long report about Google indexing and ranking issues. While other sections of the post talk about an update to the visible PageRank, issues with supplemental results, and duplicate content, I found the short section on the filetype: command most interesting. Like some of Google's other field search prefix commands, filetype: results in zero records unless it is combined with another search term. So filetype:xls finds nothing, but this is supposed to change sometime in the future and will finally let us run a filetype:search without requiring an additional term. Does this mean that...
More Copyright Controversy with Google Books
I'm somewhat surprised that I've not heard more librarians complaining about this. I had not really considered all the ramifications about it. Philipp Lenson on Google Blogoscoped posts about Freeing Google Books. Basically, he notes that Google scans public domain books available from libraries and then appears to add further restrictions for those books including restricting commercial republication and the removal of the "digitized by Google" mark. Since that bothered him, he has pulled 100 titles from Google Books and "set them free" on his own Authorama Public Domain Books site (with the "digitized by Google" mark removed)....
Tips Tipped Over
Apparently, there was enough outcry over Google's self-promotional "tips" that they have removed them. When even Google's own Matt Cutts complains about them, I am not at all surprised to see the tips removed. They were actually removed last week, and I'm finally getting around to posting about it. Whether or not the tips were over the top and too intrusive or not, Google responded well. They received a fair amount of criticism for these tips, even while others like Danny felt that the complaints went too far. In this case, Google seems to have decided that it would be...
Google Self-Promotion Over the Top?
I've been reading some criticism of Google's promotion of its own services on top of other search results. Blake Ross posts Trust is Hard to Gain, Easy to Lose and Phil Bradley says Google Admits It's Failing. Both criticize the "tips" that Google has introduced recently hawking Blogger, Picasa, and Calendar above regular results (but after the top ads, if there are any). One example that Blake uses seems especially egregious. A search for blogs.ca brings up that Canadian free blogging site, but right above it is Google's self-promoting "tip" to try Blogger....
Google Sitelinks Patent
On some top search results, Google adds additional links below the extract that point to subsections of the top ranked Web site. The official name from Google for these subsite links is Sitelinks. See below for a screen shot of Sitelinks for ALA....
Google's More has More
Earlier this month, Yahoo! changed their "more" menu. Recently Google has been expanding theirs. A week or two ago I noticed that on my campus, Scholar had suddenly appeared in the more >> menu. I've checked that frequently, and it was never their or above the search box previously. Other campuses (and even certain other organizations) have reported that a Scholar link was above the search box, but it had not been available to me. It is still not showing up above the search box, but at least it is under more >>....
Google Launches Patents Database
Using scanning technology from Google Books, yesterday Google has launched a new searchable database of U.S. patents at google.com/patents. The blog post has been updated to note some problems with printing and saving, but this is an impressive collection of 7 million patents from the 1790s through to the middle of 2006, with plans to add more recent patents. While there have been many other free patent databases for well over a decade, Google's popularity may help push their version. It has few of the features that a professional patent search might want, but it can help the rest of...
Addresses and Maps for Local Businesses
It looks like Google has rolled out a new feature within their general Web results. When a result is connected with a local business with a known address, a "plus box" will appear next to an address in blue after the snippet extract. Click the plus box to see the map, the address and phone, and a link to a larger map and directions. See Matt Cutts' example and screen shot in his explanatory blog post. It only covers the United States at this point....
Shutting Down Google Answers
Remember when the pay for answers Google Answers service launched how some in the information business thought it could spell the end of reference librarians? Today, Google announced that they are stopping accepting questions and will eventually close down any more answers by the end of 2006. Google will keep the database, which is a good thing since there are some very useful answers within it. But it is ironic to see the demise of this fee-based service, which seemed to make the answers something less than minimum wage and cost the questioners a relatively minor fee. At the same...
Thoughts on Google Side UI
Last week I finally experienced the experimental Google user interface (UI) that has the links to other databases displayed on the left side instead of along the top of the search box. Take a look at the first screenshot that shows the top of a regular results page. It includes links to Images, Maps, News, Groups, and more (which just links straight to the More Google Products page instead of being an Ajax pop-up). Note that Groups is still listed instead of the new default of Video. Also, there is no "Web" link, which since we are already in the...
New Google Book Viewer
Google has launched a new version of its book viewer in Google Book Search. See their take on the chances in the Inside Google Book Search blog post. You will only notice this once you click on a result, and in particular on a Full View or Limited Preview result. The Snippet view has changed a bit with the addition of 'Key words and phrases' at the top and a 'Contents' section and some other additional information depending on the book record. But take a look at a Full View or Limited Preview record to see significantly more differences. The...
SearchMash Update
SearchMash, Google's experimental search engine, has been updated. The Ajax re-arranging of results (which was fun but seemed otherwise useless) is gone. Now results from different databases are displayed in their own part of the page. A screenshot and discussion are available from Google Operating System. Note the boxes for Web, images, and Wikipedia along with the top box for suggested alternative searches....
O'Leary on Google Book Search
Mick O'Leary has an excellent overview "Google Book Search Has Far to Go" for his Nov. column in Information Today. In particular, he compares Google Books Search to Amazon's Search Inside the Book and notes that . . . Amazonâs feature has several critical advantages over Book Search. The most important is that Amazon has the latest books; Book Search does not. Perhaps because of differing licenses with the publishers, Book Search is often several years behind; Amazon has the latest releases and also lists forthcoming titles. For example, Amazonâs feature has the latest books by Pat Buchanan, James Lee...
Subset Searching at Google
Used Google Co-op much? No? Other than developers and experimenters, I have heard little use of Google Co-op, especially for searching. That has all changed with today's launch of Google Custom Search Engine, an application of Google Co-op. The Custom Search Engine was announced yesterday.Like other search engines that search a subset of a larger database, Google's Custom Search Engine lets users specify specific sites to included or excluded, and some can be prioritized over others. Creators can also specify that certain words should be added to the query. Other subset (or vertical or custom) search engines include Yahoo! Search...
Weekend Search Changes
This past weekend, I've been giving several workshops in Monterey at the Internet Librarian conference. It is always fun to give a workshop on Web searching on the weekend when the search engines tend to roll out new features or give otherwise unusual results. I had two such situations this weekend, both of which are back to normal today. First, I tried to demonstrate searching the Yahoo! directory from the main Yahoo! page by just clicking on the "Directory" tab above the search box. On both Saturday and Sunday, when searching "monterey" that way, Yahoo! said there were zero directory...
Searching Computer Code
A new specialized search capability from Google Labs is the Google Code Search, in beta. Unlike regular Web searching, the Code Search allows truncation with the asterisk (*) and regular expression searching, but it is only searching across identified programming code source like JavaScript and Perl. According to the announcement, it is designed to give "programmers a single place to search publicly accessible source code." It has some specialized field searches including file:, package:, language:, and license:....
New Google Groups
The old Usenet groups and DejaNews search engine became Google Groups. Now Google is announcing the launch of yet another version of Groups. The beta has a new interface and several new features. New capabilities include the ability for group owners to create a welcome message, upload a group logo, and customize fonts and colors. The new Pages feature lets users create web pages inside a group as well. Overall, it seems to be moving Google Groups further away from its Usenet origins and more towards what Yahoo! Groups offers....
SearchMash, the New Google?
Google usually runs all kinds of experimental user interfaces, changes to ranking algorithms, and tests of every type on their own site, just letting a very small percentage of their users see the changes and then evaluating the response. Now, Google has actually launched its own experimental search engine a a completely different URL with no Google logo. SearchMash is the new site. SearchMash presents Web results with Image matches off to the right side. Results are numbered (something I always prefer) and can be sorted. Just click and drag one to change the order of the results (although I...
Databases at the Side
Another Google User Interface (UI) experiment screen shot and a method to reproduce it can be seen at Google Blogoscoped. I could not get the Javascript trick to work for me, nor have I ever seen the experiment first hand. But I have seen plenty of other similar screenshots. Another one has thumbnail screenshots of each of the results entries....
Searching with Diacritics and Accents on Google
From the Official Google Webmaster Central blog come this post on How search results may differ based on accented characters and interface languages. This highlights a change in the way Google handles diacritics and gives a good overview of how it still varies depending on the search interface language chosen....
More Library Links in Google Book Search
The Google Blog, in a post entitled "Find the wealth in your library" talks about the expansion of links to national library union catalogs at Google Books. More than 15 union catalogs are includes, not just Open WorldCat. It is not always easy to connect to each of these union catalogs, and I still find plenty of records without a "Find this book in a library" link, even when the books are listed in WorldCat. Gary makes some pointed comments as well....
URL Search: Major Change at Google
What is a search engine to do when a searcher puts a URL in the search box? After years of giving a single match with links to other options, Google has done an about face. Now, enter a URL and Google gives results for pages that match the URL as a text phrase. To get to the old display, just use the info: prefix before the URL. See Matt Cutts' more detailed explanation for why they made the change. It looks like this changed earlier this month, since it was notice on Sept. 1 at Digital Point forums and Search...
Google Subsite Results: Sitelinks
The sharp-eyed folks in the WebMasterWorld forums noticed that Google has posted information about their subsite results, which they call Sitelinks, and how and why they appear in the results below certain site listings. See the image below for an example of these subsite links....
Google News Archive
Google News announces the launch of a News archive search which is linked on the main Google News page (upper right). Instead of being an archive of what Google News has crawled in the past, beyond the 30 day limit of regular Google News, this new archive search is a combination of fee and free content. The fee based content comes from Newsbank, AccessMyLibrary.com, ThomsonGale, Factiva, HighBeam, LexisNexis and others. No list of news sources or vendors is available. Some sources are subscription-only while others offer pay per article options....
Download Google Books and U Mich Access
An Information Today news break discusses last week's announcement from Google Books that for copyright-free books, users can now download a full PDF of the book. Even more interesting is the report of the availability of some of these scanned books from with the University of Michigan's online catalog, MIRLYN. Some of the government publications which Google only shows in snippet view are available in full text via Michigan. The problem is to find these. Try going to MIRLYN, click on the Advanced Search link near the top, change the Format limit to "electronic resources," and then you might find...
The New Google Homepage Layout
In another incremental change, Google has changed the layout on the Google home page. The links above the search box connect to some of Googleâs other databases. Their version of the Open Directory used to be there before it was demoted. Today, Groups and Froogle have been demoted and no longer are visible links on the home page. Video (with a NEW! tag) has replaced them. In a sense, Groups and Froogle are still available on the home page, but only via a click. The more >> link at the right now gives a pop-up menu of other choices for...
Google Censors Badware
In conjunction with StopBadware.org, Google now sometimes censors results. See the PC World news report for more details. Basically, Google gives a warning page when a searcher clicks on certain results. The warning page has a link to the StopBadware site along with a "Or you can continue to . . . " with a link to the potential malware site. I can get it to work for the asta-killer site with a search like asta-killer. On mousing over the title, Google shows the link URL of http://www.google.com/interstitial?url=http://asta-killer.com/ in the status bar. However, the sub-site links under the URL do...
Date Default at Google Reader
Google Reader has changed its default sort to date (in reverse chronological order) according to the Official Google Reader Blog in its Your Wish is Our Command. Google always seems to drag its feet with date sorts. With Web results, date sorting is quite problematic since most Web pages do not have a reliable date. So date sorting of Web results rarely is useful. But with news and other published sources, date sorting is easy and helpful. While Google gives the option for a date sort in Google News, it is not the default. Meanwhile, neither Google Books nor Google...
Dump ODP Description in Google
Google's sitemaps blog, Inside Google Sitemaps, reports a change in its More Control Over Page Snippets posting. Previously, some sites that appeared in the Open Directory would have their Open Directory description show up after the page title in Google results listings instead of the more common keyword-in-context extract (or as Google calls it, a "snippet"). This could become a problem for sites and searchers when the Open Directory description no long accurately reflected the content of the page. Now, site owners can determine whether or not the Open Directory description is used by inserting a meta tag. This is...
Strange Midpage See Also Results at Google
For some time now, Google has been inserting suggested results part way down the page. (Danny reported on April 6, 2006 that Google confirmed that it was no longer experimental but an official part of Google.) It only happens occasionally, but when it does, they have a faint line above and below and start with "See results for" followed by the other suggested search term. Then three results from the alternate search are displayed within the faint lines. For example, a search on office has suggested results for 'office shoes' part way down the page. That is not the alternate...
Google Traffic Breakdown
Bill Tancer from HitWise has several fascinating posts derived from their analysis of Internet traffic patterns. He has one on The top 20 most visited Google sites along with their relative percentage of traffic to each. Due to the interest from that post, he followed up with a similar one for MSN and Yahoo! and then compared each of those three within specific categories. At Google, their Web database got about 80% of the traffic among those top 20 Google properties for the week in quesiton while image search had about 10%. That left only 10% for the remaining properties....
In-Depth Explanation of Google Indexing Timeline
Matt goes on at some length (about 2,000 words) to explain recent changes to Google crawling and indexing process and the Bigdaddy roll-out earlier this year in his Indexing timeline post in his blog. The comments get even longer, but it is an interesting read which explains in part at least why so very old supplementary records have hung around in the Google database for so long....
More UI Experiments and Potential New Operators at Google
Tara reports on her experimenting with Two New Google Operators and Limited Google Clustering based on a report from India about using a type: prefix that would result in response about the category it falls in along with a source citation. The examples are interesting, but as of a week later, it does not work for me. Presumably, another short-lived user interface (UI) experiment. In the same post, Tara mentions two other posts about another UI test. This one has some "refine results" suggestions at the top of the results page, a feature other search engines have had for years....
Google's Four-Pack of New Stuff
With a "Yes, we are still all about search" title Google announces four new products that are supposed to "enhance and improve the search experience for our users." Try them out to see if you agree. Google Co-op is another foray into social networking and collaborative searching. Google Desktop 4 is yet another update to their desktop search with an emphasis on many new "Google Gadgets." Google Notebook (which is not even in beta yet -- it is due out next week) sounds like another bookmarking and clipping application similar to many others out there. Google Trends is initially the...
Study of Google Scholar
The Depth and Breadth of Google Scholar: An Empirical Study from the April 2006 issue of Portal should be available to anyone on a campus with a Muse subscription....
Google Hacking Database
For advanced search geeks, if you've not looked at the Google Hacking Database from "I'm j0hnny. I hack stuff," you are missing a fascinating collection of advanced search tricks. Bear in mind that many of these tricks are designed to find passwords and cracks, but the techniques are well worth perusing anyway....
Alexa & A9 Switch from Google to MSN
It looks like both Alexa and A9 have switched from using an abbreviated Google Web database to using MSN's (although it is labeled Live.com which is more of a different front end to the older MSN Search database rather than a different underlying database). At the moment, there is no longer any image search at A9 (previous one was from Google). Nor do I see Google text ads on Amazon anymore. At this point, there is no official word about the change on A9's press release page nor at Alexa nor Amazon. (Nor does Google mention it in their blog....
Google Scholar on Google Home Page (For Some)
Someone at Saint Louis University has reported that Google Scholar appears as an option on the Google home page from on campus. This has been going on at least for some since June 2005. I have never seen it at Montana State University, so it must only be some campuses but not all....
Sublinks in Google Results
When do Google results contain the sublinks underneath the extract? Michael Nguyne explores this in a post Traffic Determines Google UI Snippet Links. See also Barry Schwartz' post at SearchEngineWatch. I am certainly seeing more examples of these sublinks in Google results. Even if these guesses are not correct as to the why of their appearance, at least we now have a name for them: sublinks. See the image below:...
New Relevancy Study
Danny has a summary of a French relevancy study which compares Google, MSN, Yahoo!, Exalead, Voila, and Dir.com. By one measure (best relevance of top five results), Google and Yahoo! tie for top relevancy scores. Using a different measure (at least one good result in top five), Yahoo! beats Google by a bit with MSN and Exalead not very far behind....
Google Book Search to Link to OpenWorldCat
Like Google Scholar has done for some time now, Google has announced that Book Search will have more "Find it in a library" links to connect to OpenWorldCat records. While I'm glad to see that a librarian at Google makes the announcement, I was disappointed in that few of the records I found had the link. For the many I looked at, it was less than 10%. However, it sounds as if they are planning on expanding that number significantly, and I hope it does increase soon. On a related issue, I am still disappointed that books scanned via the...
Google Scholar Expands International Library Links
Google Scholar has announced the expansion of their library links options (available under scholar preferences) to include library union lists in Hungary, Iceland, Israel, Portugal, Sweden, and Switzerland....
Google Desktop 3
With the latest version of Google Desktop, several new features and new concerns arise. Desktop 3, announced on their blog today, gives users the ability to drag panels from the sidebar to place them elsewhere on the desktop. Sidebar content can be sent via email or chat to other users. Desktop 3 now indexes zipped files, added an advanced search form, and allows more advanced search commands. The controversial new feature is the use of Google servers to enable searching across multiple computers (say your home and office desktops). This is not enabled by default, but if it is, data...
Google's Define Adds Related Phrases
Gary reports on the addition of related phrases at the top of the results when using Google's define: prefix....
Google News Finally Out of Beta
A mere two and a half years after its initial launch, Google says that "We're taking Google News out of beta!" Not all 22 regional of Google News are out of beta, but at least many of the English-language ones are. With the move out of beta comes a feature that suggests stories for users of the personalized news page and keeping search history and personalization enabled. The stories will show up under a "Recommended for. . . " heading....
Remove Google Results
For users of Google's Personalized Search and their search history, a new experiment allows for the removal of pages and entire sites from the results. Matt posts about the new remove result option....
Google Ads Grow
It looks like Google has increased the font size for the headings on the ads that appear on the right-hand side of search results. Google Blogoscoped has screenshots comparing the before and after. Based on my comparisons with before and after, the ad text itself and the URLs are the same size but the header which is the only part of the side ad which is a link is now larger. Previously (in 2003), the side ads had colored backgrounds and the entire colored box. In those days, the ad text was also smaller and lighter colored. Now, the side...
Google Counting Strangeness
Google (and other search engines) have long had a peculiar inability to count their results. It is always an estimate of "about" some rounded number. Repeating a search term can change those numbers, and Danny speculates on some of the reasons why. Just remember, we wouldn't want consistency from Google, would we?...
Remove Google Results
For users of Google's Personalized Search and their search history, a new experiment allows for the removal of pages and entire sites from the results. Matt posts about the new remove result option. Unlike Yahoo!'s block site feature which this mimics, there is no listing of the sites and pages that have been blocked....
Finally, a Google Toolbar for Firefox
For those Google toolbar users who also use the Mozilla Firefox browser, there is now a Google Toolbar available for Firefox along with some other Google Extensions for Firefox. With the Firefox built-in search box in the upper right corner, many users may not feel a need to install it....
Adaptive Searching at Google
Want to see different results at the top than others do? Try Google's new Personalized Search (in beta of course). "Personalized Search orders your search results based on what you've searched for in the past." This new project from Google Labs was announced on the Google Blog. You may have to stay logged in for awhile and build up a history pattern before you see any change in the results order....
Google Print Search Finally
At last Google Print now has its own search form, and you can get more than three book results at a time. Go to print.google.com for the search form....
Google Goes Portal
After many years of promoting its "laser like focus on search" and success as an anti-portal, Google is making another step towards being a portal. With the new "Personalize Your Homepage" available from Google Labs, you can customize all kinds of additional information on your personalized version of the Google home page. See the Google Blog post for more....
More OpenURL at Google Scholar
Google Scholar has opened up the ability to add OpenURL link resolvers to Scholar and have them automatically turned on based on campus IP address ranges. According to their blog post, over 100 academic libraries are already included, and the Support for Libraries help page at Scholar has more details. Most libraries should also check with their link resolver company who may be able to create the appropriate files to enable the links....
Google to Acquire Web Site Analytics Firm
According to Urchin, Google Agrees To Acquire Urchin, an analytics tool used understand users' experiences, optimize content, and track marketing performance. According to the press release: "We want to provide web site owners and marketers with the information they need to optimize their users' experience and generate a higher return-on-investment from their advertising spending," said Jonathan Rosenberg, vice president of product management, Google. "This technology will be a valuable addition to Google's suite of advertising and publishing products."...
Google News Source List
While Google still does not release a list of its sources for Google News (apparently secrecy is "not evil"), an interesting hack is available from PrivateRadio.org that runs a PHP script every 15 minutes and records the sources on the Google News home page. Started March 24, 2005, by today it lists over 1,000 sources which can be sorted alphabetically or by frequency of inclusion on the Google News home page....
Mac-Flavored Interface at Google
Google announced the launch of Google X, an interface that looks like Mac OS X by putting icons above the search box that when moused-over grow larger and name the service. This does make it easy to have more links above the search box. Unfortunately, after launching this, Google has subsequently removed it. No official word, but many presume it was removed due to copyright concerns or complaints from Apple. Anyway, for awhile at least, there is an unofficial mirror in France for the curious....
Open Source Code at Google
Google has opened up a new site, Code.google.com, on which they are providing access to developer-oriented programming libraries and tools. This is intended as a site for "external developers interested in Google-related development." They plan to publish free source code and a listing of our their API services. This will be of interest primarily to programmers or those who might play with API. The initial projects include a Core Dumper, a Sparse Hashtable, and Perftools....
Google News Now Customizable
In its continuing move towards a portal, Google now lets users customize some aspects of the Google News front page. Users can re-arrange sections and even add customized sections with up to 9 stories based on a particular query. More information is available in the Google News: Customized News FAQ. This is available in the 9 languages and 22 local editions of Google News. While these changes certainly make Google News more useful as a starting point for news, it could use an option to reduce the size of each listing. There is a "show headlines only option" which removes...
Updated Version of Google Desktop Search
Not only is there now an updated version of the Google Desktop Search client, but it is no longer in beta. It only runs on Windows XP or Windows 2000 SP 3 or above. But the new version indexes more content (but still not everything). New content types include Netscape Mail, Thunderbird Mail, Netscape/Firefox/Mozilla Web browsing, PDFs, and any meta tags associated with music, image, and video files....
Getting Around Google Print
A recent article "Google's Cookie and Hacking Google Print" describes techniques used to write a script that can create PDFs of entire copyrighted books from Google Print. [More comments on it at Kuro5hin.] The full code is not available and the author let Google know about the issue, but the point is that despite some clever programming on Google's part, there can be numerous ways of getting around the copyright restrictions once a book is in a publicly-accessible electronic format. Not a problem for the out of copyright books, but for those still under copyright . . ....
Problems with Google's Wildcard Word in a Phrase Operator
There are problems reported with Google's Wildcard Word in a Phrase. The problem is that the asterisk seems to represent either zero or one word. It used to represent exactly one word. For example, "a little * * * mischief" used to find only "a little neglect may breed mischief" or a similar phrase of six words. Now it also finds pages with just "a little mischief." The cache copy on those pages says that the search terms only appear in pages pointing to the resulting page, but that does not seem accurate. I think that what now happens is...
Google Weather
Continuing with its trend to add more portal features, Google now has quick access to current weather conditions and a four day forecast for U.S. cities and ZIP codes. Strangely enough, the weather information does not link to a source for more detailed weather information for the locality, even though the Weather Underground (from which Google gets its weather information) does have more detailed conditions and forecasts. This is also available via SMS by sending a text message to the U.S. five digit shortcode 46645 (GOOGL on most mobile phones) followed by the weather query. As Gary notes, Google is...
Google Dictionary Lacks Plurals
Awhile back, Google changed its default dictionary links (from the 'definition' link in the upper right corner that sometimes appears after a single term query or from the linked search terms that appear in the same spot for a multiple term query). Those used to go to Dictionary.com. Now they go to Answers.com, powered by Gurunet. Now, as Gary Stock reports, the links to definitions no longer appear if the word is a plural. Compare the search for test to the search for tests....
Google Movies Shortcut
Google has just launched a search shortcut to help users access local movie showtimes in the U.S. along with film information and reviews. The service is available from any Google search box and via SMS to 46645 or GOOGL on many phones. To find information and reviews, use movies: followed by a word or words from the movie's title. To find local movie listings use the shortcut movies or showtimes followed by a ZIP code or U.S. city name....
Google Scholar Preferences
Google Scholar has added a Scholar Preferences page which lists a few dozen academic institutions. Up to three can be selected, and those institutions OpenURL links will be shown on individual records. They say "Institutional access is currently a small pilot project" which means that if you are not on the list, you probably will not be able to get on it any time soon....
Newly Updated Google Toolbar 3.0
Google has a beta of the 3.0 version of its toolbar. This is still only available for Internet Explorer 5.5+ running on Windows 98 or higher. There is still no Mozilla Firefox version. New features include spelling correction, a word translator, and auto links. If enabled the auto links will provide additional links from the page when an address (link to Google Maps) or certain numbers appear on a Web page. The numbers include ISBNs (links to Amazon) and package tracking and vehicle identification numbers (link to Google's search by numbers searches)....
Google Maps
In its continuing drive towards providing more portal style information, Google has now launched its own Maps project. This beta version uses data from NAVTEQ like many other Web mapping tools. It allows for zooming and dragging the map. It only covers the U.S. and Canada at this point. It can be searched by ZIP code and can map directions between two points. Gary has a more detailed analysis....
Front and Center for Google Local
The local search from Google is now on the main page, as one of the "tabs" above the search box that can lead to other Google databases. This move is good for the U.S. and Canadian versions of Google where the local database is available....
Updated Help File at Google
Gary notes a few changes that have appeared on Google's Advanced Search help page (not on the Advanced Search page itself). It has added more instructions and a section on search operators, changed the "~ search" heading to "Synonym Search," and renamed "Domain Restrict" to "Domain Search."...
Definition Switch at Google
The definition links offered by Google that used to point to Dictionary.com entries now go to Answers.com instead....
TV Searching at Google Video
Google has added a video search tool, Unlike the recently unveiled Yahoo! video search which looks for available video files on the Web, Google's video search is more of a television search since it searches TV closed captioning from CSPAN and San Francisco TV stations. It does not provide access to either the transcripts or the video of the shows "at this time" but only includes some screen shots and KWIC text. Still, this could be useful for finding text occurrences within broadcast TV shows....
More Query Words at Google
Google has finally upped its 10 word query limit to 32. As Tara reports, Google News retains the 10 word limit....
Suggest from Google Labs
New from Google Labs is Google Suggest which performs a standard Google search, but as query terms are entered, a drop-down box presents a listing of up to 10 suggested searches that begin with the letters already typed. The suggestions often contain multiple word queries. In addition, a very rough (and very inaccurate) number of results for each search is displayed. Don't pay too much attention to the numbers since they are even more wildly inaccurate than Google's usual estimates. To use Google Suggest, Javascript and cookies must be enable, and it only works in newer browsers....
Google Print Books Changes
Google has changed its Google Print program for books. Formerly, extracts from books were included in regular search results. Today, Google has announce the expansion of its Google Print Program. While it sounds more similar to what Amazon has done for some time with its Search Within a Book capability, the results are now no longer within regular Google listings. Instead, the links are above the regular search results and only show up for certain queries. Try using books about or books about followed by some word or certain titles such as king lear (but not yet hamlet or macbeth)....
Cache Date Back in Google
Back in the depths of Google's history, their cached copy of Web pages included two dates: the date when Google crawled the page and the reported date stamp on the page at that time. Then, both dates disappeared as Google realized that they showed how old some parts of their database was. Now that they have greatly increased the freshness of their database and revisit more pages more frequently, they have finally added back some date information. The top line in the cache now gives the date Google last crawled the page. It is a welcome and useful addition....
New Option for Define in Google
To get a Google Glossary definition used to require using either the define: prefix or just adding a define in front of a query term. Now it will also appear when "What is" precedes a term....
Google Adds Text Cache Version
Google has added a text only cache version. After displaying a regular cached page, look in the header for a "Click here for the cached text only" link to see the cached page with just the text and without any images. This is discussed in more detail in a Search Engine Watch forum posting....
Google Bug
Danny reports on a strange bug at Google which has allowed someone to remove the home page of several sites such as Microsoft and Adobe from the Google database. Danny received the following confirmation from Google: "We can confirm that less than 10 websites were inadvertently removed from Google's index for several hours [Thursday]. All of these sites have been restored and are accessible through a Google search. The removal occurred as the result of an outside attempt to abuse Google's automated web page removal tool -- a free service we provide webmasters who would like to remove web pages...
Google Starts Blogging Itself
Google has started up a weblog at www.google.com/googleblog, providing one more place to check for news....
Google Announces Email
Must be nice to be rich. Google figures it can afford to offer free email along with 1 GB of storage for each users with all of it financed by context sensitive text ads. Just what I want. I can read my spam and see ads for more. However, at this point, GMail is not open to everyone and is by invitation only....
Yahoo! Drops Google Image Database
Sometime recently, Yahoo! has dropped the Google image database and is using their own, which is basically the one that has been available at AltaVista and AlltheWeb for the past few months. Yahoo! UK is still showing pictures from Google's image database, but I'm guessing that the new Yahoo! image database will slowly be rolled out to all the other Yahoo!s soon....
Google Demotes Directory in New Look
After experimenting for several months, Google has launched its new look today. While the appearance is not too different, one significant change is the removal of the Directory tab and the addition of the Froogle shopping tab. Google's directory is still available, but it is much more difficult to get to. Froogle is still in beta, but now it is being emphasized much more. Other changes include the removal of the "tab" look (which makes the links to other Google databases a bit less obvious), the removal of the color background on the side ads, making less of the ads...
Number Searching at Google
With all the cosmetic changes and bad news this week, I am pleased to see some new and potentially very useful syntax from Google. The number range search lets you search for a range of numbers, say for any number between 5 and 11. It even searches for numbers with and without commas and includes decimals such as 7.23. The number range command consists of a smaller number, two periods, and larger number which can be used in conjunction with another search word, as in score 5..11. Adding a dollar sign invokes the price range search which actually searches for...
Google Print Adds Magazines
The beta Google Print project has added some magazine articles to the book extracts it has had previously. I am not sure when they first started adding these, but I have not seen them before today. It looks like it includes some short full text articles from several Reed Business Information publications such as Electronic News, Test & Measurement World, Library Journal, and Publishers Weekly. The title of each of these is preceded by [MAGAZINE] instead of [BOOK]. Try a search such as site:print.google.com magazine to see some more. Compared to any of the major full-text databases from Gale, Ebsco,...
Google Pushes Local Search
Why is Google launching its Local Search out from Google Labs and integrating it with general search results? Ad revenue opportunities certainly must have played a part in the decision. While their press release focuses on how it helps users find more local information, the ad revenue possibilities have been pushing many local search efforts. With the launch, if a search includes a U.S. location term (like a ZIP code or the name of a town or city) in addition to some other search term. The Local results will display near the top (in a similar location to news headlines)...
New Search at Yahoo! (Drops Google)
As has long been expected, Yahoo! has announced the launch of its own search engine database and dropped Google. After using AltaVista, then Inktomi, and then Google to deliver search results after directory listings (and now that they own Inktomi, AltaVista, and AlltheWeb), Yahoo! now uses its own database. It appears to be primarily from Inktomi, but its results differ from MSN Search and HotBot which also use Inktomi. Several positive comments at first look: It still has cached copies of pages It is a large database, sometime finding more than Google Most advanced search features still work This launch...
Google Site Field Search on Own Now
As noted at ResearchBuzz, Google's site field search no longer needs to be combined with another word. Previous, to search Google for all pages at whatever.com required using a search like whatever site:whatever.com since the site:whatever.com search would give an error result. Now site:whatever.com will work....
Books and Libraries in Google
In keeping with a sudden frenzy of new initiatives, Google is now starting to include records and extracts from published books along with a few connections into library holdings information. These two initiatives are currently separate from each other, and since they are both experimental, they may change or stop appearing at any time. Neither one tends to show up in search results very often, but here are a few links to see what they look like. First, the Google Print inside the book content, which is not as useful as the Amazon Search Inside the Book since it only...
Froogle Featured More Prominently
Google is now featuring its shopping search engine more prominently, just in time for the end of the Christmas shopping season. It is not only advertising Froogle directly on the main Google page, but at the top of some search results (only for specific query words), Google will list "Product Search" results. They have been experimenting with this since earlier this month, but these results are now live. As with other recent Google initiatives, it is a bit of a guessing game when the Product results will show. A search on wooden spoons had no Product links while tea kettles...
Google Number Shortcuts and a Potential New Look
Google has added a few more shortcuts for specific number searches and for airport travel conditions. Basically, five databases will have shortcuts: U.S. Patents, UPS Tracking Numbers, FedEx Tracking Numbers, FCC Equipment IDs, and FAA Airplane Registration Numbers. Note that some require a prefix like patent, fedex, or fcc while others do not and the airport weather needs the suffix of airport. Not all of the examples given work, or they only work at some data centers, but since it is a new feature, those bugs should be worked out soon. Also, Google is trying out a new design and...
Google Starts Auto Stemming Searches
Since the most recent Google Dance started around Nov. 15, this update of the Google database nicknamed Florida has created quite a stir in the ecommerce Webmaster community. The major complaint has been the significant change in the ranking of results and many pages no longer show up in the top of the search engine results. For those with time, read the thousands of postings about it in the Update Florida discussions at WebmasterWorld. Certainly, the ranking changes will also have an impact on searchers, but even more significant to me is the experimentation that Google is now doing with...
Google Does a Deskbar
Expanding on its success with its toolbar, Google launched a new Google Labs experiment today: the Google Deskbar. Rather than a browser add-on, like the HotBot deskbar, it appears in the Windows taskbar and can function independent of the browser. It can be used for many Google functions, including the calculator, definitions, Web searches, news, groups, Froogle, and more. Unfortunately, it still only works for those with Windows 98 or higher and requires Internet Explorer 5.5 or higher. It displays the results in a mini-viewer instead of the full browser, and because of that can be faster than opening up...
Searching Books at Google?
With Amazon's launch of a searchable databases of the full-text of over 120,000 books, it comes as no surprise that Google is also in talks with publishers to do something similar. Publishers Weekly reports that Google has been in talks with publishers and that Google "has reached agreements that allow it to enter as many as 60,000 titles in its database and also presented extensive mock-ups to publishers of how book-relevant searches will look." On top of talking to publishers, Google is also working with OCLC to include a subset of OCLC's WorldCat database of library holdings in regular Google...
Google Ads to Show at About, Buys Sprinks
About.com's owner PRIMEDIA announces that it has entered into a four year agreement with Google to place Google AdWords ads on the About.com meta sites. In addition, part of the deal is that Google is buying About's Sprinks (the current pay per click ad network running ads on the About.com sites). The Google ads are not yet appearing on About, but if it cuts down on the pop-up ads and the very heavy advertising that currently appears on About.com sites, it will be a welcome relief for anyone that tries to view the quality text content on those sites. This...
New Google Command: Define
Google has moved one of its Google Labs projects into the mainstream. The Google Glossary function is now available directly from Google in two ways using "define." Enter a search that starts with "define" and the first Google glossary results shows at the top. For example, define environmental protection agency. To see all the definitions, use "define:" as in define:environmental protection agency. For phrases, it makes no difference whether quotations are used or not. This can work well for acronyms, too. Note that the definitions found come from an automatic pattern recognition program that tries to identify definitions on Web...
New Features at Google Alert
Google Alert announces new delivery options. "Results can now be delivered as email, HTML, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 or TrackBack feeds." It also now includes direct links to Google's cache....
AOL to Stick with Google
Google announces that AOL has agreed to continue using both the Google Web database and Google's ads. Called a "multi-year alliance," this renews the AOL deal that started in May 2002 when AOL announced a switch from Overture ads and an Inktomi Web database to Google for both. The Google Web database did not go live on AOL until July 31, 2002, so it has only been a bit over a year since AOL switched to Google. With the renewal comes several changes to AOL Search: Addition of the Google Images database (with "strict" filtering on) and as a separate...
Punctuation at Google and Minor Site Updates
Usually, search engines will replace all punctuation marks with a space when they index Web pages. And if you use a punctuation mark between words in a query, the search becomes a phrase search. In other words, a search on import-export is the same as "import export". However, Google has a couple exceptions to this rule for two characters: the ampersand & and the underscore _. Both can be searched by themselves or as part of a character string. In other words, a search on adv_search gets different results than "adv search" and &tc differs from tc. And for programmers,...
Personalization in Google's Future?
Today, Google announced its acquisition of Kaltix Corporation. Formed just this past summer in June, Kaltix has been working on developing search technologies related to personalization and context-sensitive searching. What Google will actually do with this technology remains to be seen and will likely take awhile before it is implemented for the public. And given Google's number of products, if the technology is used, it might be for their ads, news, or their shopping database rather than for their general Web search engine....
GeoSearch at Google
Google is new experimenting with a new Search by Location in Google Labs. They are finally catching up with a feature that the old Northern Light had years ago. Google has added a map of locations for the hits from MapQuest. It highlights matching addresses in the keyword in context (KWIC) display, but there is no cache link. At this point, it seems to be limited to U.S. addresses. Searches must include some address information. Full state names and ZIP codes appear to be normalized to a city, state abbreviation search. In other words, the address can be entered in...
Two More Google Experiments: Related Searches and Spectrum
The ever-experimenting Google has added two more experiments that a very small portion of their users may see. First, they are finally experimenting with giving suggestions for "related searches." This is one feature that they could have added long ago and that many other search engines have offered for years. But the few early experiment reports have not been very impressive and seem to have poorly related suggestions. Presumably this will be much improved before it is released, if they ever release it at all. Then there is Google's Spectrum, which is a Google search counter. Users can see how...
Google Tweaks Its Number to 3.3 Billion and Adds "Supplemental Results"
Well, it looks like it took AlltheWeb announcing a larger size than Google to get Google to finally update its claim to 3.3 billion. Since last November, the Google home page has claimed to be "Searching 3,083,324,652 Web pages," even though the size has gone up and down many times since then. After last week's announcement from AlltheWeb of a nearly 3.2 billion record database, I wondered how long it would take before Google would change the number on their home page. As of today, Google now says 3,307,998,701. With daily changes at each of these large search engines, do...
Google's intitle: and inurl: Working Again
Back in May, Google's intitle: and inurl: were not working properly, as I posted earlier. Well, they now seem to be working again. A search that combines a general query term with these field searches, like "market research" intitle:tourism, now work. I've updated my Google Inconsistencies page to note that problem has been fixed, but I added another report of a strange result for the simple query of 'cameras.'...
Google Toolbar & Calculator
Google today announced that the latest version of the popular Google Toolbar (now 2.0) is out of beta and available for download. Following in the footsteps of AlltheWeb, Google now has a built-in a calculator function. It lets you use numbers or the word for the number for mathematical equations, unit conversions, and physical constants. Only a bit of a description of all the functions are available on the calculator section of the help page. One "Easter Egg" in the calculator comes up when searching answer to life the universe and everything where it displays '42,' the answer from Douglas...
Google News Alerts
Google has added an alert service for its news databases. The Google News Alerts is in beta and is also listed on the Google Labs page. With the demise of other free alert services, especially Northern Light's current news alerts, this is a great addition for anyone who wants to keep up with the latest news. Just be careful not to choose search terms that will return too many hits. The default "once a day" option should help if you do, but be careful with the "as it happens" choice....
Synonym Operator at Google
Google has introduced a new operator, the tilde ~, for searching for synonyms. It should be placed immediately before a search term, with no space, for which you want Google to look for synonyms. For example, a search on query ~analysis finds matches with query statistics and query analyzer. A brief entry about ~ is available on their help page. Using some of the technology behind the Google Sets, the ~ seems to include plural and singular forms as well as synonyms. Use the - operator to get a sense of what synonyms have been searched, as in ~hiking -hiking....
Advanced News Search at Google
Google has finally added an advanced search page for its news database. It includes options for sorting by date, specifying the news source, a location limit, a date limit, and field searches for headline, body, and URL....
Google Field Search Problems
For more than a month now, the intitle: and inurl: field searches have been broken. I first heard of this on May 27, 2003. The advantage of intitle: and inurl: over the advanced search page Occurrences section or the allintitle: and allinurl: field searches was that they applied to only a single term and could be combined with other search terms that would look through the record. So now, searchers can not do a search that looks for one word in the title and another in the body. A search that tries like "market research" intitle:tourism retrieves many results that...
Indexing Robots.txt Files
It appears that Google's spider is not only checking robots.txt files, it is also indexing and even caching some of them. Try a search on allinurl:robots.txt to see some examples, or see the cached copy of the Salon.com file. It would be interesting to know why they are doing this. Other search engines, like AlltheWeb will index robots.txt files that do not follow the protocol as in the search for disallow user-agent url.all:robots.txt. (The results either have the robots.txt file not located in the root directory or the filename is not all lower case.) But with Google not only indexing...
And Now . . . Google Toolbar 2.0
Following up on Hotbot's announcement yesterday and Infospace's the day before, here comes Google with a beta of version 2.0 of the Google Toolbar. The new version has several new features including a pop-up blocker (which counts how many it has blocked, something I really do not want to know), the ability to automatically fill out forms, and a BlogThis! button to instantly comment in your blog on the page you are viewing. Of course BlogThis! only works if you have a blog on Google-owned Blogger. The toolbar only works with Internet Explorer and on Windows....
Google AdSense
Google the advertising company is now moving beyond search-related ads into content-based sites with an affiliate program called AdSense. The self-service program makes it easy for Web masters and Web publishers to put Google ads on their site and share the ad dollars. What ads get put on the participating sites? Google uses its link analysis techniques to try and match appropriate advertisers with the right publishers. How well that will work and how profitable it may turn out to be for both Google and the publishers remains to be seen....
FindWhat To Buy Espotting
FindWhat, another ad bidding engine like Overture and Google AdWords, is buying up Espotting, an ad bidding engine that has focused on Europe, for about 8.1 million shares of FindWhat.com stock and about $27 million in cash for a comb