Search Engines

Some people love Google. Others love to hate it. Regardless of where you sit, though, you can’t deny that Google represents one of the most influential companies around the world.

The folks from Geekpreneur, in fact, wrote an article titled Why We Need Google. Here is the first point that they mention:

1. They made the Web easier to use with Google Search. There were search engines before Google (I worked for one such), but Google seemed to achieve market share where others could not, and has since indexed a greater share of online content. (Now they’re trying to index offline content, too. E.g., through the controversial Google Books project, which of course irks many authors and publishers – all of whom have lost income since the spread of Internet use. Librarians, too, have expressed concern about the value of their own existence.)

Check out the full article for the other 9 points.

Originally posted on January 14, 2009 @ 3:45 pm

The tough news around Yahoo apart, the second most popular search engine is doing good on rolling out new features. Announced this week was the availability of Yahoo Glue. What Glue does is return a list of different media types for a search query based on the context such as Wikipedia links and excerpts for people and stock quotes for companies. The feature was first launched and tested in India. Google’s Universal search immediately comes to mind when looking at the interface. The glue pages are not available for all topics but the list of topics is growing.

Google also announced a new feature called SearchWiki. Its an approach made to factor in user preferences for search results, albeit in a scaled down manner. For a given list of results, users can now choose to move links up or down the rankings or even delete them. These changes will affect the ranking for the particular user only. There is also a feature to add custom notes to the results and also view notes added by other users. In the long run perhaps Google will mine all these user preferences to further enhance their search algorithms. Its interesting to see Google implement features for social input to search results.

Originally posted on November 25, 2008 @ 4:28 pm

In one of the most significant social moves from the Redmond giant, Windows Live Messenger, Hotmail and other Live services will include features that make it possible for users to maintain and share notifications across their network of online contacts. What is more interesting is that the services will support notifications from third party web applications too ( e.g. Twitter, Flickr, LinkedIn, iLike, Yelp, WordPress Blogs among others).

An excerpt from SearchEngineJournal:

The new Microsoft Live Service portal would bring together Windows Live Messenger which is by far one of Microsoft’s most popular web service and infused them with both new and refurbished old online services such as an upgraded Hotmail, Windows Live Group, photo gallery, toolbar, calendar and many more.

All companies with major web properties have been announcing social features to better service and retain their users. Google had announced its single profile for all services which is a step towards greater integration across its umbrella of services. Yahoo had announced its Y!OS initiative to make social data accessible across services.

But real integration means you can have access to your networks from any service. This is where the absence integration with FaceBook and MySpace for the Microsoft initiative matters. But it is hoped that those nitty gritties will be resolved in due course.

Originally posted on November 14, 2008 @ 3:15 pm

Google announced that its web crawlers are now capable of indexing textual data from images. Google’s interest in Optical Character Recognition had been evident in the past few years. Now, they are one more step closer to making all the information in the world searchable.

Google Blog aptly summarizes the new technology:

In the past, scanned documents were rarely included in search results as we couldn’t be sure of their content. We had occasional clues from references to the document– so you might get a search result with a title but no snippet highlighting your query. Today, that changes. We are now able to perform OCR on any scanned documents that we find stored in Adobe’s PDF format. This Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology lets us convert a picture (of a thousand words) into a thousand words — words that can be searched and indexed, so that these valuable documents are more easily found. This is a small but important step forward in our mission of making all the world’s information accessible and useful.

Early this year Google had made public details on a patent it had filed to read text from images and video. This also implied that text recognized from Google Map View and Street View could also eventually shop up on search results. The applications of this technology are immense. But the next progression is what will make all the difference.

Already technologies exist that index speech spoken in videos. With addition of capability to index the text in videos as well, product oriented search will become all more relevant. This might be great news for the business model driving search engines but raises several privacy issues as well.

Originally posted on November 5, 2008 @ 5:02 pm

How much of technology forms part of your daily routine ? Research at UCLA points to increased brain activity from technology – in this case using search engines.

An excerpt from TechNewsWorld:

Web search novices also showed increased activity, but to a lesser extent than their more technologically savvy counterparts.

“The other part of the study we are analyzing the data on now is that when we took the computer naive people and gave them a chance to practice searching the Internet, within a week their brains started looking like the people who had done it for years,” Small explained.

Locating the relevant piece of information from the barrage of results returned by a search engine can be an intensive mental activity. This is owing to the fact that results returned by search engines seldom the most desired and a lot more tweaking, query refining and browsing is required to locate the exact information.

It would take many more years before a conclusive research can be done on the effect of technology on mental development. But it would suffice to say that a small dose of technology could do a lot of good.

Originally posted on October 20, 2008 @ 1:54 pm

Everyone uses Google these days and often multiple times each day. We use it for work, for fun and for general interest. It has made our researching so much easier. Google makes looking up the most mundane detail simple. Need a phone number for the pizza place down the street? Google it. The possibilities are endless. However, did you know you can get more from your Google searches? It’s true and here are six tips to achieving more productive Google search results:

1. Don’t leave out synonyms. Suppose you want to perform a search but wish to broaden your search to include similar words to your initial keyword. To achieve optimum results, place the “~” symbol in front of the synonym. For example: “baseball” is your keyword and you want to include “pitchers” in your search. Type in: baseball ~ pitchers.

2. Find out who called you. If an unfamiliar number calls you on your cell phone you can use Google to find out who called you. For example: this number (555-555-5555) called you and you don’t have the number in your list of contacts. All you have to do is search this number in Google by typing: phonebook 555-555-5555. This is the Google phonebook feature.

3. Narrow down your search. Suppose you want to search movies but want to exclude horror movies from your search. When you type in “movies” in your search bar, add “-horror.” Your search will look like this: movies – horror. This will refine your search and eliminate searches yielding any reference to horror.

4. Zero in your search on a specific site. Suppose you want to find out what a particular site has to offer about baseball. Use the “site:whateversite.com” modifier. For example: “baseball” site:whateversite.com. This will search your specific site for references to baseball. This works even if the specific site doesn’t have a search option.

5. Search by file type. The file type modifier allows you to search for documents fitting a particular file type. Suppose you want to find files about baseball that are in PowerPoint. All you have to do is search: “baseball” filetype:ppt.

6. Search by numeric ranges. This feature is rarely utilized but can be very useful. This is perfect if you’re searching a range of years or prices or whatever you want to narrow your search by. For example: Massachusetts governors 1900..1990. This will yield a search of governors in Massachusetts from 1900 up to 1990.

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Originally posted on June 30, 2008 @ 7:15 pm