Better Music Video Results in Google Search

Google rationalized the group of video search results sometimes intermingled with usual results, but only for queries bands and music artists.

"People frequently come to Google to find music videos, and this week we enhanced our results so now when you're searching for your favorite band or album, you'll find popular clips prepared in a new way. For example, search for [michael jackson] and you'll find some of the King of Pop's most famous videos, counting clear text indicating the length of the video, the album and the year it was published. The feature scans the entire web for video content and algorithmically ranks the best sources for each song. Rather than return recurring links, we group results for the same song together, making it easier to scan and choose the song you're looking for."

The results aren't always the best music videos and Google should give options to sort them by year, album, genre. Another issue is that, even while Google shows results from different video sites, the main link typically sends you to YouTube and that's not fair.

Google Shows Reading Levels for Search Results

Google's advanced search page has a new characteristic that lets you to limit results to a certain reading level. You can decide from showing basic results, intermediate results, higher results or annotating the results with reading levels.

"Sometimes you may want to limit your search results to a exact reading level. For instance, a junior high school teacher looking for satisfied for her students or a second-language learner might want web pages written at a basic analysis level. A scientist probing for the latest findings from the experts may want to limit results to those at higher reading levels," suggests Google.

Right now, this feature is only accessible for English web pages, but Google doesn't talk about if it uses the Flesch–Kincaid readability tests.

Right now, this feature is only available for English web pages, but Google doesn't mention if it uses the Flesch–Kincaid readability tests.

According to Google, less than half of the indexed pages are written at a essential reading level, half of the pages are written at an in-between reading level and about 2% of the pages are printed at an advanced reading level.

Google's Shift From Search Results to Answers

Google's post about the European Commission antitrust study reveals two important things about the Google search engine: the goal is to answer the user queries and "the only steady is change".

"Sometimes the best, most relevant answer to a query is our customary 'ten blue links', and sometimes it is a news article, sports score, stock quote, video, or a map. Today, when you type in 'weather in London' or '15 grams in ounces' you get the answers straight (often before you even hit Enter). In the future, we will need to answer much more compound questions just as fast and as clearly."

Universal Search and the incorporated search experience that combines results from different search engines will make it even more hard to understand Google's algorithms and to find untouched web search results. Instant Search will force Google to provide more immediate answers and to treat web pages as sources of information. It's the subtle difference between an answer:

... and a potentially helpful search result:

The dissimilarity between showing links to reviews and showing a clever summary based on sentiment analysis:

Google's conclusion is that the "ten blue links" will soon be a thing of the past and search results will become more dynamic:

"Our results are ongoing to evolve from a list of websites to something far more dynamic. Today there's real-time content, routinely translated content, local content (especially important for mobile devices), images, videos, books, and a whole lot more. Users can search by voice - and in a diversity of languages. And we've developed new ad formats such as product listing ads and new pricing models such as cost-per-action. We cannot predict where search and online publicity will be headed, but we know for sure that they won't stay the same. By staying focused on novelty we can continue to make search even better - for the benefit of users everywhere."

Google's Thanksgiving Doodle

Google's doodles were special because they linked to search results pages, instead of linking to handpicked pages. Some doodles promoted Google services, so they sent users to special landing pages, but all the other doodles linked to regular results pages. That's nhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifot the case for Google's Thanksgiving doodle, which promotes a Google page with Thanksgiving recipes from Ina Garten.

"This Thanksgiving holiday, we are grateful for many things: family, friends, and of course, food. Just in time for the big day, beloved cookbook author and TV chef Ina Garten offers everyone six simple yet delicious recipes to make one of the year's biggest dinner parties as easy as, well, pumpkin pie. Happy Thanksgiving, and Happy Cooking!"

Barry Schwartz notes that "it is uncommon for Google to offer pre-holiday logos" and that "the logo promotes a person without that person celebrating a birthday or anniversary".

Improvements to Product Search for this holiday season

Every year retailers start the holiday shopping season earlier and earlier—and still I procrastinate until late December before getting started. This year I've already made my list and I’m ready to go.

I usually get my holiday shopping done in two ways: online (e-commerce) and offline (“brick and mortar” stores). I’ve found that shopping online is best when you know what you're looking for—you can search for specific items, research multiple brands or compare reviews. On the other hand, shopping offline makes it easier to explore products in person and sometimes discover things that you didn’t know existed. Plus, it’s usually the only way to take your purchase home the same day.

The line between online and offline shopping is starting to blur: According to a study by Forrester while 93 percent of retail purchases today happen in a store, more than 46 percent of those in-store purchases are influenced by online research. Not to mention that shoppers can access the web from anywhere at anytime—including from their mobile phones when browsing the aisles of a local store.

All of this got our team thinking about how we could help further bridge the gap between online and offline shopping. This week, we’re introducing several new features to Product Search that start doing just that.

Local availability on Google Product Search: We’ve partnered with more than 70 retail brands—including national retailers like Best Buy and Williams-Sonoma, as well as software manufacturers like JDA, Epicor and Oracle—to connect shoppers searching online with local stores that have the items they’re are looking for in-stock. For example, if you’re looking online to get your son that new Wii video game he’s been wanting, you can click on the “nearby stores” link to see where it’s in stock nearby. (If you’re a retailer who’s interested in taking part, you can learn more on the Google Retail Blog.)

Google Shopper 1.3: Our mobile shopping app helps shoppers on the go research items and find the best place to buy them either online or in a nearby store—and it already has more than 2.5 million downloads. This version includes new search filters like “price” and “brand” to help refine your search. And, you’ll still get features like Local Availability, voice search and rapid continuous barcode scanning (so you can point your phone at a product and get information from the web).

“Popular products” and “aisles”: We’ve borrowed an idea from successful brick and mortar stores and in the coming weeks, we'll roll-out two features called “popular products” and “aisles” to help people learn about and discover new products. When you search for a category of products such as “camera lenses,” our new popular products feature helps you get started by showing you the lenses other people are viewing online. “Aisles” helps you browse and discover products by organizing results into sub-categories that others have found helpful. For example, if you’re looking for a new TV, you can choose between display types like LCD and plasma. If you’re interested in camera lenses for that brand new SLR, you can shop by the aperture of the lens.


We hope these features make it easier for you to get your shopping done this holiday season—whether it’s online, offline or in the new space in between.

Happy shopping!

Google Removes 3 Advanced Search Options

Google has recently removed three useful options from the advanced search sidebar. You can longer restrict the results to shopping-related pages or remove shopping sites from the results.

Another option that has been removed is page previews, which displayed a longer snippet and a thumbnail for each search result. This feature has been replaced by Instant Preview, but you can no longer see all the thumbnails next to the search results.

When Google launched the sidebar, back in May 2009, it was the first time when powerful features like restricting the results to recent pages didn't require to visit the advanced search page. "We think of the Search Options panel as a tool belt that gives you new ways to interact with Google Search, and we plan to fill it with more innovative and useful features in the future."

Keyboard Shortcuts for Google Instant Previews

You don't need to use your mouse to enable Google's visual previews for search results. Just press the right arrow key to show a small screen shot for the currently selected search result. You can navigate using the up/down arrow keys to highlight a different result and use the left arrow key to hide the previews.

Google Instant Previews can't be disabled from the settings page and, despite having a similar name, it's not related to Google Instant. If you disable Google Instant, you'll still see the magnifying glasses next to the search results, but the keyboard shortcuts are no longer available.

This feature is not yet available to everyone, but you can try it using this special page or by adding &esrch=instantpreviews to the URL of a search results page.

Google Instant Promotional Message

Google shows a large promotional message below the list of the search suggestions: "Love Google Instant? Make Google your Homepage." Since this feature is not yet available in your browser's search box or in Google Toolbar, it's a good opportunity for Google to promote its homepage.

Gary Price from ResourceShelf wonders if this is one of the larger promo ads ever seen in a drop down. I remember that Google displayed a similar message when Google Instant was launched: "Welcome to Google Instant. Feelings of euphoria and weightlessness are normal. Do not be alarmed."

I wouldn't be surprised to see that Google starts to show AdWords ads below the suggestions, a feature that has already been tested in Google Suggest.

Try Google Instant Search

Google will soon release a new interface that shows the results as you type a query. If you want to try the new feature before it's officially released, use this URL: http://www.google.com/webhp?sclient=psy.

My first impression: you can now get useful results after typing a few characters. Google has never been so fast.

To watch a webcast of Google's search event where streaming search will be launched, visit youtube.com/google.

Update: The feature is called Google Instant. "Feelings of euphoria and weightlessness are normal. Do not be alarmed."

"Google Instant is a new search enhancement that shows results as you type. We are pushing the limits of our technology and infrastructure to help you get better search results, faster. The most obvious change is that you get to the right content much faster than before because you don’t have to finish typing your full search term, or even press 'search.' Another shift is that seeing results as you type helps you formulate a better search term by providing instant feedback. You can now adapt your search on the fly until the results match exactly what you want. In time, we may wonder how search ever worked in any other way."

Google Instant Shortcuts

Google Instant Search, the feature that shows search results as you type, is now publicly available. According to a press site, "Google Instant is starting to roll-out to users on Google domains in the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Russia who use the latest browsers (Chrome versions 5 and later, Firefox version 3 and later, Safari version 5 for Mac and Internet Explorer version 8). Please note, users on domains other than Google.com and Google.ru can only access Google Instant if they are signed in to a Google Account."

If you don't see the new feature, go to Google's homepage, click on "Google.com in English" and log in to a Google account. If you still don't see it, try this URL: http://www.google.com/webhp?sclient=psy.

When you start to type a query, Google moves the search box to the top of the page and shows a list of 4 suggestions, followed by the search results for the first suggestion. That means you can just type "ny" and get the search results for [ny times] almost instantly. Google shows the predicted query in the search box, but the characters automatically added by Google are grayed out.

If you intend to type [ny times crossword], you can press Tab or use the right arrow to add "times" to your query and continue typing "crossword". Use the up/down arrows to pick a different suggestion and you'll notice that the results are displayed without having to press Enter.

The nice thing about the new interface is that you can use the "I'm feeling lucky" much more easily. For example, to visit the top search result for [ny times crossword], select the suggestion using the down arrow and perform "I'm feeling lucky" using the right arrow.

How to visit New York Times homepage using 4 keystrokes? ny Down Right. How to go to Yelp using 4 keystrokes? ye Down Right.

Another great thing about the new interface is that the search box always has focus. You never have to click on the search box to add a new word to your query.

If you don't like Google's suggestions, you can always ignore them and press Enter to find the results for the query that you've typed.

To sum up:
Tab/Right arrow = pick the first suggestion
Up/Down arrow = select another suggestion from the list
Right arrow while selecting a suggestion = I'm feeling lucky
Enter or Esc = ignore the suggestions and find the results for your query

Google Features No Longer Available in Instant Search

Google Instant Search is a very interesting experiment that could change the way you find the information on the Web, but the new interface comes with a lot of unpleasant side effects.

1. Google Suggest can no longer be disabled. Even if you disable Google Instant, suggestions will still be displayed.

2. You can no longer change the number of results. The interface would be less fluid if Google had to fetch 50 or 100 results every time you change your query.

3. Google Suggest no longer shows previously typed searches from the Google Web History. This was a great feature for the repeated queries. Marissa Mayer said last year that "40% of searches on any given day are repeat searches for a user".

4. Google Suggest no longer shows 10 suggestions. Because of the space constraints, Google only displays 4 suggestions, followed by your original query.

5. The fade-in animation has been removed. This feature used to hide the navigation bar and all the links from the homepage until you moved your mouse.

6. "Search within results" is no longer available. This feature has never been useful because it didn't actually search within results. It only allowed you to add new keywords to an existing query.

7. Google's search box is not displayed at the bottom of the page. As Amit Agarwal points out, you have to scroll to the top of the page to change the query.

Yahoo Developed an Instant Search Interface in 2005

Stephen Hood, a former Yahoo employee, says that Yahoo developed an interface similar to the Google Instant 5 years ago. It was called LiveSearch and it was launched as an experimental interface for the AllTheWeb.com.

Yahoo would not let us ship LiveSearch on yahoo.com or as a part of the Yahoo's search engine. Instead we were only allowed to launch it on AllTheWeb, a smaller, lower-traffic search engine that Yahoo had acquired years earlier and largely left to atrophy. (...)

You have to remember that, at the time, Yahoo's search business was doing just well enough that there was very little institutional appetite for the product risk. As a result, "big" or disruptive ideas were too often left to whither on the vine. By focusing on the local maximum, Yahoo unwittingly traded innovation for the incremental optimization.

LiveSearch was thus relegated to a tiny test bucket of the users who didn't actually use Yahoo's search product (or any modern search engine). Usage data from this flawed test was used to internally evaluate its success in comparison to the model it was actually trying to disrupt. Lacking high-level support for its larger vision and starved for the resources, LiveSearch was understandably put out to pasture.

Here's an excerpt from Yahoo's blog post that announced LiveSearch:

"Livesearch has that uncanny knack of figuring out exactly what is on my mind. As soon as I start to type a query, Livesearch suggests the right query and shows me the results page before I even press a search button. For example, I wanted to look for 'mission impossible 3'. Just as I finished typing 'mission', Livesearch is already recommending 'mission impossible 3' as the search, and then instantaneously shows me the results page."

Stephen thinks that Google "still has the organizational courage to challenge its own preconceptions" and that's the reason why it can launch features like Google Instant, which change "a user interaction model that's been largely unchallenged for the years".

When Google changes the interface of a product, many people say: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!". Fortunately for the Google, the company has never followed this principle. As Colin Powell said, "'If it ain't broke, don't fix it' is the slogan of the complacent, the arrogant or the scared. It's an excuse for the inaction, a call to non-arms."

Next Week's Google Search Event

Did you know that Google has an Experimental Happiness team? One of the engineers that are part of this team is Othar Hansson, who is a tech lead for the rich snippets and a member of the Google's Search UI Group.

Did you know that Google has a search czar? His name is Ben Gomes. "I think of Ben as our diplomat," said Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of the search products and user experience. "It's Google; it's search. There's a lot of big personalities; there's a lot of opinions, and Ben is the reasonable one that can help build the bridges. When we look back, there was a point where Larry and Sergey really felt like we needed to name a search czar. And there was only one natural choice -- this was back in 2002 -- and that was Ben." According to Mercury News, "Gomes is responsible for shaping the automatic suggestions users get as they begin typing a query, and the few lines of text and links they get back, which Google calls [snippets]".

Did you know that Google still has more engineers working on the search than any other product? Johanna Wright says that "other initiatives, such as Google TV and Android, help move search beyond the desktop and laptop paradigm on to other hardware." Johanna Wright is the "Director of Product Management responsible for the Web Search. She oversees the development of the Google's search user interface and features and was the initial product lead on Universal Search."

Did you know that Google's first female engineer was Marissa Mayer? She's now Vice President for the Search Products and User Experience.

Marissa Mayer, Johanna Wright, Ben Gomes and Othar Hansson will speak next Wednesday at a special event about the evolution of the Google search. Most likely, Google will also launch some new features and a new interface.

Google has recently started to test an interface that shows the results as you type the query. The new interface could be launched next week. Shark SEO says that the new UI is especially useful for the long-tail searches. "From finding out the best way to deal with MySQL/PHP queries and finding the right Excel formulas, it was just astonishingly, brilliantly useful – it saved me time and led to me finding the right results much faster."

Google Tests a New Navigation Bar

Google tests a tweaked user interface for the navigation bar. The experiment removes the link underlining, changes the background color when you mouse over a link from the navigation bar and adds an icon for the settings menu.

Google Tests Centered Layout

Some users report that Google started to test a centered layout for the search results pages. It looks almost like the Yahoo Search, except that the navigation bar isn't properly aligned.

The experiment could be related to the "live search" interface that adjusts the results as you type a query. Google's search results could become an extension of the homepage, which already has a centered layout.

Google's Implicit Site Searches

Malcolm Coles spotted an interesting change in the Google's ranking algorithms. If your query includes the name of a company, an organization or any name associated with a website, many of the top search results are pages from that site. For example, a search for [apple ipod] returns 7 pages from the apple.com on the first page of the results.

Google confirmed this change: "We periodically reassess our ranking and UI choices, and today we made a change to allow a larger number of the pages from the same site to appear for a given query. This happens for searches that indicate a strong user interest in a particular domain."

Search engines limit the number of search results from a domain to 2 or 3 pages that are usually grouped. The goal is to show diverse results and to prevent the websites from dominating the first page of the results. Showing too many results from the Apple's official site when searching for [apple ipod] is not a good thing because some people might want to read reviews, historical information from Wikipedia, news articles.

Sergey Brin said in an interview from 2004 that it's important to diversify search results:

"I agree that diversity of sources is a desirable goal, and in fact the results naturally tend to be diverse. We do some simple things to increase the diversity. If you check almost any topic, you will get diverging viewpoints. Everyone on any side of an issue will typically complain, though. Environmentalists will say,'Why aren't you showing our results first?' An industrial group will say, 'Why aren't you showing our results first?' They all want to be number one. We think it's good for us to encourage diverse viewpoints, and the search engine presents them. It happens naturally as a response to queries."

Eric Schmidt On the Future of Search

In an interesting interview for the Wall Street Journal, Google's CEO talks about the future of the search. Eric Schmidt says that there are more and more implicit searches and that Google could have become a virtual assistant that offers suggestions and solves problems without having to define them.

"We're still happy to be in the search, believe me. But one idea is that more and more searches are done on your behalf without you needing to type. I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing the next."

As Google knows "roughly who you are, roughly what you care about, roughly who your friends are", it could suggest the interesting things. For example, if you're using a smartphone, Google could inform you that there are interesting things around you (maybe a bookstore that sells a book you've added to a wishlist).

"The thing that makes newspapers so fundamentally fascinating — that serendipity — can be calculated now. We can actually produce it electronically. The power of individual targeting — the technology will be so good it will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them," says Eric Schmidt. "As you go from the search box [to the next phase of Google], you really want to go from syntax to semantics, from what you typed to what you meant. And that's basically the role of [Artificial Intelligence]. I think we will be the world leader in that for a long time."

To better understand queries and to answer questions that were never asked explicitly, Google has to learn more about users and that's one of the reasons why Google struggles to build a successful social services.

Three years ago, Eric Schmidt said that "the goal [of search personalization] is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as 'What shall I do tomorrow?' and 'What job shall I take?' We cannot even answer the most basic questions because we don't know enough about you. That is the most important aspect of Google's expansion."

I don't think users "want Google to tell them what they should be doing next", but they probably want a tool that helps them solve problems, even when those problems can't be easily transformed into search queries. A real-word query can be a document, a spreadsheet, a list of words, an image, a sound, a short video, a location and it's really difficult to provide the relevant results without targeting and personalization.

Google Suggest as a Context-Sensitive Spell Checker

This is one of the most useful features that are released by Google this year. Google Suggest, which usually auto-completes your query as you type, is now also a spell-checker. Even if the Google can't find popular queries that start with the words you've typed, it will still show a "did you mean" entry that corrects your spelling mistakes.

The most impressive thing about this feature is that the spell checker is in context-sensitive, so the suggestions are actually relevant. It's likely that Google uses the smart spell checker from the Google Wave.

If you type [this is a rlly], Google suggests that [this is a rally] and is more appropriate. Most browsers offer the same suggestion. If you type the another word and your query is [this is a rlly beautiful], Google shows with a different suggestion: [this is a really beautiful].

Type [Why its so important too eat hole grains] in a text field from a web page and that your browser won't find any spelling mistakes. Not even Gmail's will spell checker can find the mistakes. That's because most of the applications use dictionaries to find the words that are spelled incorrectly. Google Suggest is now smarter because it tries to find if the words make sense in the context of your query.

Google's Anagram Easter Egg

Search for [anagram] using Google and you'll notice with a weird suggestion: "Did you mean: nag a ram". Obviously, "nag a ram" is an anagram of the word "anagram".

"An anagram is a type of word play, the result of rearranging the letters of a word or the phrase to produce a new word or phrase, using all the original letters exactly once," according to Wikipedia.

Google can't find the anagrams of a word, but you can use WolframAlpha to find them.

This is not the first Google Easter egg that helps you understand a query: [ASCII art] and [recursion] are two other examples.

Google Shows Related Videos

Google started to add links to the related videos for search results from sites like eHow, Howcast, GameTrailers or Hulu. Google shows the two additional videos from the same site below the main search result.



It's not the first time when Google tries to make the content of a site more discoverable. Google already shows sitelinks that highlight popular pages are from a site, search boxes for site search, navigation breadcrumbs, related topics from discussion boards.