The upcoming, According to Google's Results

Today's XKCD comic explores the future by the top Google results for queries like "by the year *", "by *". According to Google's look for results, one year after the 2012 Apocalypse, "microchipping of all Americans begins". In 2014 "GNU/Linux becomes the dominant OS" and by the year 2020, HTML5 is finished and "newspapers become outdated and die out".

 

Here's the whole future timeline, which includes guess about Android, US debt, India, world population, global warming and robot policemen.

Block Domains from Google's Search Results

Google has released a Chrome addition that lets you block domains and sun domains from Google's results. If you not at all find the results from experts-exchange.com useful, you can now click "Block experts-exchange.com" next to a search result from this site and you'll add the field to your personal blacklist.

Unfortunately, the extension does little more than storing a list of domains on your computer and beating the results from those domains. It's not tied to a web service and the blacklist is not saved to your Google account, so that you could use it from a different computer or another browser.

Matt Cutts says that the list of domains you've infertile is sent to Google. "We will study the resulting feedback and explore using it as a potential ranking signal for our search results."

Google Search Wiki used to offer a similar feature, but you could only use it to hide from view certain results. Blocking domains is more influential and it will be interesting to see if it will become a regular Google search feature. I think it's too influential and it might lead to unintended consequences: for example, some users might hide a domain just since a web page is not very helpful.

Google Results, One of Bing's Ranking Signals

Danny Sullivan has a story about Google's claims that Bing copies Google search results. Google noticed that there's an rising overlap between the top results at Google and Bing, so it supposed that Microsoft was using Google's results to improve its search engine.

To verify its doubts, Google set up a smart operation. For the first time in its history, Google crafted one-time code that would allow it to physically rank a page for a certain term (code that will soon be removed, as described further below). It then created about 100 of what it calls "synthetic" searches, queries that few people, if anyone, would ever enter into Google.

These searches returned no matches on Google or Bing — or a tiny number of poor superiority matches, in a few cases — before the experiment went live. With the code enabled, Google placed a honeypot page to show up at the top of each synthetic search.

The only reason these pages appeared on Google was because Google required them to be there. There was nothing that made them obviously relevant for these searches. If they started to appeared at Bing after Google, that would mean that Bing took Google's bait and derivative its results.

This all happened in December. When the experiment was ready, about 20 Google engineers were told to run the test queries from laptops at home, using Internet Explorer, with optional Sites and the Bing Toolbar both enabled. They were also told to click on the top results. They started on December 17. By December 31, some of the results started appearing on Bing. (...) Only a small number of the test searches produced this result, about 7 to 9 (depending on when exactly Google checked) out of the 100.

Microsoft's engineers almost certainly thought that Google's results were pretty good, so why not use clickstream data from Internet Explorer and Bing Toolbar to monitor the results picked by Google users? It's a clever idea, but not when you're using it to unnaturally add results from Google. Bing's team says that they use "collective intelligence" to improve search results, so we can assume that a non-negligible amount of intelligence comes from Google. When you're including results just because Google does it, you're credulous Google too much and you implicitly admit that Google offers better results.