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Wednesday, February 06, 2008

A New Perspective on Search Results

Continued from page 1

By Kate Greene

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When a person signs up for the "alternate views" experiment on the Google Labs page, he essentially adds three search filters to his results page: "Info view," "Timeline view," and "Map view." (See below image). By default, a search for "Grateful Dead" serves up results in the "List view," which is essentially the standard results page. If a user selects Map view, he could see a map indicating where the group originated (San Francisco), and where it performed its last show (New York City). Clicking on Timeline view provides a bar graph of dates associated with the group--important concerts, for instance--over the years. And Info view lets the user filter the search by dates, measurements (in this case, Google offers units of years and, oddly, tons), locations, and images.


Crow says that when a person signs up for the experiment, Google collects the same information about his searches that the company would otherwise. This includes noting the search terms and result links that are selected, as well as logging the amount of time a user stays on the page of the selected link. Crow notes that all of the information collected is stripped of any identifying information. This data, in addition to market research collected from participants who visit Google's offices and participants who allow Google to come into their homes to track their search habits, will be used to determine the most helpful features of the experiment, and how best to sprinkle those features into search results without upsetting users, he says.

Improving the search interface isn't easy, but it's a crucial part of the technology, says Oren Etzioni, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington. There are billions of Web pages, and the results page only reveals 10 pages at a time. "Search is the process of drinking from the fire hose," Etzioni says. "This means that getting the user interface right ... is incredibly important." He doesn't see anything revolutionary about Google's experimental views in particular, but "throwing things out there and letting people react is very smart." He believes that in the next couple of years, search will evolve to provide more interface options for people, and not everyone will be using the same interface.

Search will change, but it will be a gradual process, since there's a fine line between providing helpful information and overwhelming the user with text and links. "One thing to remember is that it's still the early days," Google's Crow says. "People think that search is a solved problem. I think we're still in the early days of making search work on a universal global scale. We know we can do better."

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Comments

  • clustered search
    alexeysmirnov on 02/06/2008 at 3:23 AM
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    Avg Rating:
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    > And Clusty.com extracts words that are found on the search-results pages,
    > letting a user drill down to a more specific search.
    > For instance, a search for "MIT" can be specified to include references to "laboratory,"
    > "Massachusetts Institute of Technology," "project," and other words or word combinations.

    It looks like that was Yahoo introducing this feature. If you click on an arrow below the query string you will see categories associated with it.
    Rate this comment: 12345
  • Useful feature; when is the next step?
    keywitness on 02/06/2008 at 12:07 PM
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    Interesting review; although there has been a lot of experimenting with search results presentation in recent years (by alternative/small search engines mostly, ours notwithstanding), it always matters when Google or Yahoo take the cover off some of their lab work. Extracting dates, locations, names and the like is very useful, but to me is only the first level of analysis of the results. I wonder when will Google go deeper into the text mining of search results, understanding what the source pages are really about. That could increase the accuracy of results drastically, and connect the users to the answers faster.
    Rate this comment: 12345
  • Alternative Search Engines
    CSKnight on 02/11/2008 at 9:46 AM
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    "Google's experiment highlights the slow but steady push of engineers and designers to improve the Web search experience for the masses."

    Google has been changing their results slowly for a long time, just like Ford & GM made tiny changes to their cars each year, because people kept buying them - they had no real choices.  It was a "false dominance" and it crumbled as soon as they had real competition.  When Toyota and Honda made big and fast changes, everyone switched to the where-did-they-come-from imports.

    "But these slight alterations in search have been slow to catch on, as is evident from Google's dominance in the field."

    The features of the alternative search engines are hardly slight!!  They are very innovative.  Have you investigated the Top 100 on AltSearchEngines? There is a lot more out there than Ask.com and Clusty. (About 1,700)  They are slow to catch on because they are not grouped.  They insist on acting as individuals.

    Charles Knight, editor
    www.AltSearchEngines.com
    ReadWriteWeb Network
    Charles@ReadWriteWeb.com
    Rate this comment: 12345
    • Re: Alternative Search Engines
      cosus on 06/17/2008 at 4:34 PM
      Posts:
      1
      I think in analogy of ford vs. toyota is pretty inept. I mean, you have to consider the energy crisis that occurred that changed the entire game. Unless something changes the entire field, the sheer bulk of google will retain their dominance.

      At least they still try to innovate even if it's slow, which is better than what can be said of other companies.
      Rate this comment: 12345
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