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Google Launches “Search Plus Your World” (If Your World Is Google+)
Google announced yesterday a new initiative, Search Plus Your World. This from the announcement:
Search is pretty amazing at finding that one needle in a haystack of billions of webpages, images, videos, news and much more. But clearly, that isn’t enough. You should also be able to find your own stuff on the web, the people you know and things they’ve shared with you, as well as the people you don’t know but might want to… all from one search box.
“Wow,” I thought, “they’ve partnered with Facebook and Twitter! Social searching is finally going to suck less!” (I really missed it when Twitter stopped showing up in Google’s results.)
No. The “Your World” to which Google refers is the world of Google+. And I don’t know about you, but when I think of “My World” in relation to Google+, I think of one of those horrible cheap Star Trek sets with fake polystyrene rocks. Don’t get me wrong, I use Google+ — I just use other social networks a lot more.
Anyway, let’s get on with it. Google is announcing three new things, which you will see if you’re logged in to Google and doing a search.
Personal Results
Personal results take results from your Google+ circles and make them available from the Google search results page. For example, I just did a search for “polystyrene” to make sure I spelled it correctly (which I did, first try. Scary.) A regular search has 3.6 million results, while a “personal results” search has a dozen or so.
The results come from shared content on Google+ which in this case looked to be mostly articles, one going back to 2004. I used some of the search options on the left nav to try to narrow down my results and was able to narrow down by date and by content type (images, etc.) Google was smart enough to remove the 2004 article from the personalized results when I searched for content within the last year, even though it had been shared only a few months before.
Profiles in Search
Profiles in Search is just what it sounds like. Run a person search and if they have a Google profile it’ll pop up. The example on the screen shot shows Matt Cutts and his profile. You’ll notice a green bar next to his name; that’s the Google+ circle in which I have Matt (“Journalists and Cool People.”) In addition to the basic Google+ profile you’ll also get recent content from Google+, including a picture of Matt wearing a horse mask.
People and Pages
If you’re not searching for people but rather for a specific topic or community, Google might point you to people or circles on Google+. I did a search for WordPress and didn’t see anything in the personal results. However, in the regular results I got a right sidebar of people related to the topic of WordPress. You can click on the “see more” under that listing and get a listing of people and pages related to WordPress.
(Even when you’re not looking at personal results you’ll see a lot of personalized search mentions in your results. You can turn those off with a small icon that’s located at the extreme right of the results page. It lets you turn personalized results on and off.)
This is a skimming of the surface of this functionality, because in looking at it I was struck more by what isn’t here by what is. If you want a deep discussion of the new features along with discussion about privacy implications, Danny’s got a great post.
Search Plus Arrogance
“Google is assuming that all relevant content I want is on Google itself?” I thought after reading the announcement. “How very 2004 of it.”
“My World” is nothing like just Google+. But it isn’t just Facebook, either, which was my reflexive response. I got to thinking about the kind of content that I would find useful to be able to search on a personalized basis in the elegant but unfortunately very limited way that Google does offer.
My World is Facebook. And Twitter. And Quora. And LinkedIn Questions. And Pinterest. And Instagram. And I’m sure that list will increase over time. Right now the idea of being able to search Quora, Facebook, and Twitter content easily from one interface like Google has set up makes me ridiculously happy. But I’m equally sure that two years down the road there will be another social network or gathering place or aggregation tool that I just can’t do without. My point is that any framework which provides a limited amount of personalized content from a limited number of networks is going to be a disappointment and ultimately fail; a more open framework should be the goal.
The good news is that there is already a tool that can index information from several different Web sites and display it in one place — it’s called a SEARCH ENGINE. The bad news is that there are several roadblocks, some legitimate and understandable (privacy concerns, technical issues) and some messy (political slapfighting) that stand between us and a search that truly represents “Our World.”
Google Launches Web Site to Cover US Elections
Google Elections
I don’t know about you, but I’m already up to my elbows in election coverage. But there’s no avoiding it — there’s a presidential election in November and we’re going to be hearing about it until then. So to make it a little easier to keep up, Google has announced a new election hub at http://google.com/elections/ed/us. (There’s one for Egypt, too, at http://google.com/elections/ed/eg, but I’ll be covering the US version here.)
The site contains news about the elections in general in the middle, with the Democrat and Republican candidates on the left nav. And let me start my rant here.
I don’t care what your politics are. Truly. I strive to keep ResearchBuzz apolitical, because ideally, an interest in well-crafted information pools, organized data, and groovy pinball machines should cross all political boundaries. Right?
But it bothers me that in these times, when dissatistfaction with politics is so intense, that Google is sticking with providing information on only two political parties. It’s not like Google doesn’t have enough newsprint or space in its magazine. It’s not like there aren’t automated mechanisms for gathering information. Yes, there are eight gazillion political parties and maybe you don’t want to include the Tomato Donut Party that has only three members. But you could make a case for the Green and Libertarian parties, which have appeared regularly on many state ballots. You could make a case for the Constitution Party, which is the other “third party” with over 100,000 registered voters according to Wikipedia. And you could point at the many independent candidates in recent history which have managed to get on state ballots despite, um, interesting ballot access laws (that’s a whole ‘nother indignant post) as an indicator of voter interest in choices.
My point is that you could use standards to define political parties and candidates for inclusion that would reach beyond Democrat and Republican. Would you make everybody happy? Good grief, no, this is politics after all. On the other hand, Google could choose to do what mainstream media has often failed to do: let the American voter know they have other choices besides Democrat and Republican.
Okay, I’m done. It’s 3:30 am and I just finished a political rant. I feel all icky.
HOW ‘BOUT THEM WELL-CRAFTED INFORMATION POOLS?
Anyway, candidates on the left. Also on the left: political issues! Yes, you can choose from several issues, including Economy, Heathcare, and Social Issues. (That seems somewhat limited, but remember, you can always run your own search, as I did for “Pizza” above. THIN CRUST PARTY!) Choose one and you’ll get news in the middle. You can choose to look just at news, or just at video. Google puts only a few videos on the site put points you to an entire YouTube channel devoted to politics if you want more.
Google also has trends for the candidates, showing volume of search, news mentions, and YouTube video views. (You can break these down to the day, and theoretically look at individual candidate results, but every time I tried that I got an “unresponsive script” warning.) There’s an “On the Ground” section that maps not only news stories but also YouTube videos (including adorable local car dealership ads.) Iowa is the hot spot right now as you can imagine.
This is a good start, but considering the rise of Facebook and Twitter, it felt a little lacking. When reviewing candidate news I could start here, but I would rapidly branch off in other directions.
Google Launches Search Caption Challenge
Google Caption Challenge
In an effort to make sure you don’t burn up all your creativity on Star Wars snowflakes or Star Trek light display, Google has announced a search captioning challenge.
You can join the fun at http://www.googleinsidesearch.com/captions.html. Google will show you a series of cartoons depicting people and animals doing Google searches. Your job is to guess the search they’re doing and caption the cartoon.
There are already several captions here; you can scroll through the many cartoons and vote on captions already left. If you want to leave your own caption, you’ll need to log into a Google account and give Google Moderator permission to manage your submission.
I’m apparently not good at this game; I could think of smart remarks but nothing that translated well as a search. Finally I found a cartoon I could caption. A baseball umpire was searching Google while behind a plate. I tried to submit the caption “Lenscrafters coupon” (because he’s a ref and he can’t see, get it?! … I didn’t say it was a GOOD caption.) Google rejected it! I figured it might be because I used a brand name, and tried captions like “Eyeglasses,” “optometrist coupon,” etc. Google rejected them all with a warning box about appropriate content. Mmkay.
The cartoons were in a variety of styles and were on the whole pretty cute. I like the one that appears to be a pear that broke a chair. A little fun to get you into the holidays.
Google Special Syntax: The Around Operator
I thought I knew about all the Google special syntax, but you learn something new every day, huh? Last week I read about the AROUND operator at Amit Agarwal’s blog, but I see that the operator has actually been documented since October.
For years, the complaint I heard the most about Google was that there was no proximity search. You couldn’t specify that you wanted to find thisword within x words of thatwords. But it looks like Google actually does have that covered with the Around syntax. It works like this: AROUND(x), where x is the maximum distance between two search terms.
Let’s see it in action. Say I do the query chocolate AROUND(3) chips (make sure you put AROUND in all caps; I found it didn’t work properly unless it was in all caps.
Google highlights both search terms — and variants, you’ll see that both “chip” and “chips” are found by the search engine. The proximity is not always noted, but it’s clear that there’s something going on here — this search found about 2,250,000 results, while a search for just chocolate chips found about 3,600,000. To my great surprise chips AROUND(3) chocolate found almost eight million results.
Because I didn’t know about this, I’ve been using * for years. The asterisk has been usable as a full-word wildcard for ages; you could fake a proximity search by doing a phrase search like “chocolate * * * chips”. This doesn’t work nearly as well as the AROUND syntax, however — it finds over ten times as many results as the search chocolate AROUND(3) chips.
I’m not 100% sure how this works but I had plenty of fun playing with it — computer AROUND(3) chips AROUND(3) chocolate brought an interesting and limited number of results. And of course you can use this operator in conjunction with other Google syntax as well, for example Wikileaks AROUND(3) policy site:mil.
I may have a followup later as I work with this more…
Google Launches a Recommendation Engine
Recommend places in your area, get recommendations in turn. Google has recently announced a new recommendation engine for Google Places — Hotpot. Hotpot is live now at http://www.google.com/hotpot/onboard. You’ll need to be logged in to a Google account to make recommendations, and when you first get into Hotpot Google will ask you for a nickname which will appear with your reviews (which will be publicly-available.)
Google defaults to where it thinks you are (incorrect in my case, but I’m okay with that) but you can change where you’re looking with your search query. I did a search for seafood in Boston and got a grid-type layout of Google Places results. Clicking on one of them takes you to the Google Places page. You can also provide ratings right from the search results, from 1 to 5 stars. (There’s also a “best ever” ranking available, but apparently you only get ten of those.)
You can also save places for later; once you save places they’ll show up in your “Saved Places” area, but they don’t get special visible in subsequent search results. For example, if I do a search for seafood in Boston and star a few places, those same places do not get noted in a particular way if I do an additional search for lobster in Boston and they show up again.
Of course, there’s a social element to all this. You can invite friends, see what places they’re recommending, and compete to see who’s ranking the most places. To do that you’ll need to have a public Google Profile.
The grid layout is interesting, but I can’t see anything that will make me more eager to use this as opposed to just finding business listings from a regular Google Web search.
Google Adds Instant Previews (FINALLY)
Sorry for the snark in the headline, but while I’m glad to see this new feature, there have been site previews in Web search engines for years. Why did it take Google so long? It’s like RSS in the News results, it’s…
Okay, never mind, rant off — if I keep going I’m likely to start screaming for y’all to get off my lawn. Google announced a couple days ago a new “Instant Previews” feature. This will allow you to take a quick look at a page before you go to visit it.
Instead of a page preview or thumbnail appearing in the body of the page itself, the preview will appear off to one side, activated by a magnifying glass that appears in the search result. Once you’ve clicked that icon, you can hold your mouse over any search result to get a preview of what the page looks like.
Any text that appears in both the result snippet and on the page will appear on an orange callout box. Which is nice, because mostly these page previews aren’t readable. Clicking on the preview will take you directly to that Web site, while closing a preview will deactivate that feature until you reactivate it again.
Of course, not every Web site responds well to a page preview. Check out the screenshot for one example of what you might get when using the new feature.
I looked around a little for a site that was listed as “dangerous” in Google to see what its page preview would look like, but I couldn’t find one. (And frankly poking around looking for one made me nervous.)
If you’re interested in how page previews have been handled before, check out this article at ReadWriteWeb. Warning: this article is over three years old and most of the resources mentioned here are defunct.
Google Location: When You Want to Be Nowhere in Particular
Recently Google announced that it was making the location setting more prominent on its Web page. If you look on the left side of a search results page, you’ll see that Google is showing you where you are and giving you the option to change that setting. Google, as you probably remember, is now customizing its search results based on your geographic location.
Here’s the thing, though: you can’t say that you’re nowhere.
In other words, you can’t say that you want just the generic United States results (when you’re in the US). You have to specify that you’re somewhere in particular. My attempts to say I was on the Moon, at Squaresville, or in a pineapple under the sea were to no avail.
Which was annoying to me since many Google searches that I do have nothing to do with location. And being burdened with a location, I wonder what I’m missing, or how badly my search results are being skewed in a way I don’t want.
I did find a way to get around this, however. Metasearch engine Zuula, about which I wrote a couple of weeks ago, offers a Google search. A Zuula spokesman tells me that the results from its Google search are geared to come from “the United States.” He went on to say, “So, regardless where a user is — in the U.S. or elsewhere — the results they see are generic results relevant for all the U.S.”
He further noted: “The answer to your question would be somewhat if we were talking about the other major web search providers, Yahoo and Bing. There, the results are customized according to the country where the user is located. A Zuula user in France, for example, will see Yahoo and Bing results very close to what they would see at the Yahoo and Bing French websites. However, this would not be the case for the Google web search tab at Zuula, which still would return generic ‘U.S.’ results.”
I apologize to my international readers for the US-centricity of this article, but US readers, there is an option for searching Google which doesn’t involve slanting your search to a specific area.
Update: Chris schools me — see the comment below. The magic location to specify no location is “US.” I knew you guys were brilliant. Thanks Chris!
