Novice vs. Expert Google Users

Dare Obasanjo was at Google Scalability Conference in Seattle last week and took some notes from Marissa Mayer's keynote "Scaling Google for Every User".

The first part of the talk addressed the issue of users that don't know how to optimize their queries for Google.

One thing that does distinguish users is the difference between a novice search user and an expert user of search. Novice users typically type queries in natural language while expert users use keyword searches.

Example Novice and Expert Search User Queries

NOVICE QUERY: Why doesn't anyone carry an umbrella in Seattle?
EXPERT QUERY: weather seattle washington

NOVICE QUERY: Can I hike in the Seattle area?
EXPERT QUERY: hike seattle area

On average, it takes a new Google user 1 month to go from typing novice queries to being a search expert. This means that there is little payoff in optimizing the site to help novices since they become search experts in such a short time frame.

Google actually ignores or pays little attention to prepositions, conjunctions, articles, so people realize that it's faster and more efficient to only list the keywords. But there are already search engines like hakia that want you to use full sentences to take advantage of the relationships between words. Maybe users shouldn't adapt to search engines' limitations, but search engines should become smart enough to understand our requests.

Update: The video of Marissa Mayer's keynote:

Google Answers Returns, But Only in Russia

After closing Google Answers last year, Google launched a new version of the service, this time only in Russian (here's the English translation, powered by Google Translate). Unlike the original Google Answers, there are no hired experts and people don't have to pay to ask questions. Instead, you use your points to "pay" for a question and you earn points by posting answers or rating other people's answers. If your answer gets bad ratings, you lose points.

When you start to type a question, Google shows related questions in a sidebar to prevent the problem of duplication. You can set the number of points you are willing to offer for the right answer and the number of days the question remains active. Each question needs to have a list of labels, so it's easy to find related questions.

To find a question to answer, you can perform a search, browse the most recent questions or subscribe to the labels that match your interests. You can't add an answer after a question is closed.

The service has a pretty smart system for rewarding good answers. Each user can rate up to 20 answers a day. For answering a question you get 2 points, but if your answer gets 5 stars, you'll earn 10, 20 or 30 points depending on the number of people that rated your answer. You also get 5, 10 or 15 points for a 4-star answer, 1-3 points for a 3-star answer. For a bad rating, you lose between 3 and 15 points.

The blog of 3form, another free knowledge exchange service, reviews Google's new Q&A site:

"It is remarkable that Google had chosen Russia to test the new service, as Russia is the country where the concept of this kind of service originated. (...) After a quick look at the new Google Q&A service I can say that technologically it closely resembles Naver and Yahoo Answers. I found the main differences in reward structure, style, and user interface. Google seems to have a cleaner user interface, that would be a reason to prefer the Google service over others everything else being equal. The effectiveness of such social search services depends on the community of participants they attract and the efficiency of the technology supporting the exchange of knowledge. Among two technologically very similar services, like those provided by Yahoo and Google, the one that will be able to build a more diverse and motivated community of participants will be able to provide a better service to them."

If successful, Google Q&A could expand globally. For the moment, Yahoo Answers is the most visited Q&A site in the US, with 96% market share in December 2006, according to Hitwise. Yahoo heavily promoted its service and managed to create a strong community.



{ via Google Blogoscoped }

Google Dominates the Online Video Space

Hitwise reports that YouTube has 50% more traffic than the rest of the video sites combined: YouTube has around 60% market share and is followed by MySpace TV (16.08%) and Google Video (7.81%). This data is restricted to the US and doesn't include the traffic generated by the embedded players.

YouTube continues to grow and Google contributed to this growth by including the site in Google Video search and by adding inline previews and thumbnails to the main search results. "Search engines are responsible for about 20% of traffic to video sites, including YouTube. Users are increasingly finding links to video pages in search engine results - and going to them," says LeeAnn Prescott from Hitwise.

It will be interesting to see if YouTube maintains this impressive growth after Google starts to include video ads and if Google uses the data obtained from its video sites to develop a better video search engine.

Change Routes Faster in Google Maps

Google Maps lets you set intermediary points in your route and automatically adjusts the directions to the new conditions. You just have to drag the blue line to change its shape.

For example, after getting the directions from Mountain View to Palo Alto, I could change the route to pass through Stanford.

Another way to create complex routes is to add destinations in the sidebar and use drag and drop to change their order.




{ Thanks, Chris. }

Google Desktop for Linux

Google Desktop is now available for Linux. The tool includes only the desktop search engine, like the first version of Google Desktop for Windows or the recently released Google Desktop for Mac.

Google Desktop indexes OpenOffice documents, PDF and PostScript files, text and HTML files, manual pages, multimedia files, your web history and emails from Gmail and Thunderbird. The only browser fully supported is Firefox, but if you don't need to search your web history, any browser should work just fine.

The installer is much bigger than the Windows version (8 MB) and it should run on most popular distributions, including Debian 4.0+, Fedora Core 6+, Ubuntu 6.10+, SUSE 10.1+. One reason for the big size of the installer is the fact that it includes translations for the following languages: French, Italian, German, Spanish, Dutch, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Japanese, Korean, and Portuguese.

"With this release, Google Desktop joins the Picasa, Google Earth and Google Toolbar for Firefox applications among Google's offerings for Linux. In addition to creating products that run on Linux, Google supports the Linux community in a variety of ways, such as releasing open source code, running the Summer of Code and hosting tens of thousands of open source projects on Google Code," says Google in an announcement.

Linux users already have desktop search tools like Beagle, Tracker or Recoll, but the integration with Google services and the better performance might give Google Desktop an advantage. For now, Google's software supports very few file types (no archives, no chats, no Microsoft Office files), but this is only the first version. At least Google respected its promise of launching more Linux apps.

Stats for Google Gadgets

IGoogle's gadget directory shows the number of users and pageviews for each gadget that has at least 1000 users and 10,000 pageviews. There are many gadgets that have more than one million users, but most of them are included by default in the homepage:

* Weather (6,593,949 users / 321,210,021 pageviews)

* Date & Time (4,860,018 users / 157,754,150 pageviews)

* Google Calendar (4,193,468 users / 134,998,968 pageviews)

* Gmail (3,256,386 users / 147,062,862 pageviews),

* How to of the day (3,195,838 users / 85,462,789 pageviews)

* CNN (3,149,220 users / 90,741,669 pageviews)

The numbers seem to be an average for a week and are only approximations. But it's nice to see how popular is your gadget or feed and how many people use it.

Google Docs Has a Trash

If you deleted a document from Google Docs last week and you want it back, you're lucky. All the documents and spreadsheets that were previously deleted are now available in the Trash. You'll also discover a lot of blank documents and that secret report you thought it was gone forever.


Google is the same company that added a "delete" button in Gmail two years after the launch. Until then, the feature was buried in a combo box.

Update: Whoops! The trash was in the previous version as well, but it was pretty difficult to find it. At least for me. Maybe this post should go straight to the trash...

Picasa Web Becomes Location Aware

Google's photo sharing site lets you see photo albums on a map. For each photo that has latitude and longitude, Picasa Web shows a small map in the sidebar.

You can enter a single location for an entire album or place each photo from an album to a map using drag and drop. The desktop client can also geolocate photos using Google Earth.

The most impressive is the combination between a map and a slideshow. If you select a photo and click on "play", the photos will move on the map according to their locations.


Google has recently acquired Panoramio, a photo sharing site that let you link photos with the place they were taken. Hopefully Picasa Web will add a way to search for public photos by location and include Panoramio's main functionality.

Picasa Web should've launched a mobile version of the site, but, as usually, the feature is not available even after it was publicly announced. "With Picasa Web Albums for mobile devices, your favorite pictures are always with you. So next time you're at a loss for words when describing just how awesome, cute, or beautiful something really was, just grab your phone for visual backup. Of course, the mobile version of Picasa Web Albums lets you keep track of photo updates from friends and family, too. Just click 'My Favorites' from the main screen to see the latest photo albums that your contacts have posted to Picasa Web Albums -- you can even post a quick comment on their photos, using your phone. Thumbnails and photos are automatically re-sized for your device's screen, so pictures look good and download fast." The mobile site should be available at http://www.google.com/mobile/photos/.

Update: You can find the mobile Picasa Web Albums at http://picasaweb.google.com/m.

Better Document Management in Google Docs

Google Docs looks... smashing. The new start page has a sidebar that lets you filter the documents by tag (renamed to folder in the interface), by type or by collaborator. And you can now see all your files by default, not only the documents or spreadsheets active in the last 30 days.

The folders can now have descriptions and you can send a document to a folder by using drag and drop.

Google removed the option to sort the files by name or author, so the only available sort option is by date.

The search box includes an autocomplete feature for file names, folders, authors. To find the documents or spreadsheets that actually contain your text, you'll have to click on the search button.


The new interface is a huge step forward and makes room for more types of documents and better ways to share your files.

{ Thank you, Keith B. and Hans K. }

Reconstruct a Feed's History Using Google Reader

Google Reader is more than a feed reader: it's also a platform for feed caching and archiving. That means Google Reader stores all the posts from the subscribed feeds and they're available if you keep scrolling down in the interface.

A simple application for this feature is to retrieve the history of a feed for archiving purposes or to import it in a database. If you visit a blog or a news site, the feed will only contain the latest 10-20 posts, but Google Reader can show you more than that.

Just enter this URL in the address bar:
http://www.google.com/reader/atom/feed/FEED_URL?r=n&n=NUMBER_OF_ITEMS
and replace FEED_URL with the address of the feed and NUMBER_OF_ITEMS with the number of historical posts from the feed.

For example, http://www.google.com/reader/atom/
feed/http://feeds.feedburner.com/GoogleOperatingSystem?r=n&n=100 should return the latest 100 posts from this blog as an ATOM/XML file.

Google Docs to Integrate with Encyclopedia Britannica

Among the new features that are referenced by the Google Docs' code, the most important seems to be the integration with online knowledge bases. Google Docs will let you access Merriam-Webster's dictionary and thesaurus directly from a document. You'll also be able to read articles from Encyclopedia Britannica. It's rather curious that Google didn't opt for everyone's favorite encyclopedia, Wikipedia, and choose the oldest English-language encyclopedia still in print, but also an encyclopedia hard to access online for free. Britannica has an odd policy of allowing you to read an article for free only if you place a link to the article in a web page and click on that link.

The list of messages from Google Docs

Google Docs should make use of more online resources and let you integrate information from search results, translate text or use Google's statistical data about languages to correct grammatical errors or reformulate incomprehensible text.

Google News Launches Image Version

If you go to Google News and you want to see the most important news in images, select the new graphical view. If you hover over an image, you'll be able to read a snippet from the news in a nicely animated sidebar and see images from related news.

The new version is available for search results as well and it's easy to toggle between the standard view, the image view and a simplified version. Recently Google Image Search added an option to restrict the results to news sites or to images that contain faces.

Email Migration Tools Added to Google Apps

Google Apps added the option to migrate the messages from your existing email accounts if you use the business or the educational edition. "Administrators use a self-service wizard to easily and securely transfer existing email data from an IMAP server over to users' Gmail accounts on Google Apps. Gmail will put messages into conversation threads, display the original sender, recipient, and date of messages, and convert existing mail folders into labels. (...) This tool currently supports email servers with an IMAP interface."

When composing messages, you should be able to access Gmail's new address book by clicking on "choose from contacts" link. Unlike the old way of adding contacts to a new email, you can now browse through your entire address book, choose your frequently mailed contacts, or use the search feature to add more people at a time. The address book includes all the users from your domain. The feature has already been available for a while in Google Video and Google Docs.


Google promises a completely new layout for the document management interface of Google Docs, but it's unclear if this will be available for everyone. "Soon we'll complete a visual overhaul of Docs & Spreadsheets that will make it much easier for users with dozens or even hundreds of documents to search, locate, and organize their documents."

Among other updates, you'll be able to add more gadgets to your start page, including the Google Talk Gadget.

More info: The update for Google Docs will be launched on June 27 for everyone (not just for Google Apps users). "We're going to launch a new Docs list -- a wish fulfilled for those of us who've wanted an easier way to organize and manage our documents and spreadsheets."

Google to Buy GrandCentral

Techcrunch reports that Google is about to acquire GrandCentral, a service that links all your phone numbers and gives you a new number with additional features:

* Check your messages by phone, email, or online
* Keep all your messages online for eternity
* Record and store your phone calls (just like voicemail)
* Quickly (and secretly) block an annoying caller
* Click-to-dial from your address book
* Surprise your callers with a custom voicemail greeting
* Turn your MP3s into the ring tones your callers hear
* Forward, download, and add notes to your messages

"GrandCentral gives people one phone number for life. This number is not tied to a phone or a particular location; it's tied to you. GrandCentral is a unified communications service that integrates all your existing phones, numbers and voicemail boxes and bridges the gap between voicemail and email."

The service is available only for the US and Canada, but you can see a short demo: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rd5gHKU-qnQ">here</a>.


Google could integrate the service with Gmail, Google Talk and your list of contacts. Because all your conversations are recorded and available online for future reference, Google could make them searchable, just like Google Talk's chat messages.

Update (July 2): It's official. "Google acquired GrandCentral because its communications services fit into Google's mission to organize the world's information and to provide services and features that enhance the collaborative exchange of information between our users." The terms of the acquisition are confidential.

The Duel Between eBay and Google

Google launched last year a payment system called Google Checkout, but eBay refused to accept it as an alternative for its own PayPal because Google didn't have a "substantial historical track record of providing safe and reliable financial and/or banking related services".

Two weeks ago, Google Checkout team tried to make an appearance at the eBay Live event to celebrate user choice and to convince eBay to accept Google Checkout as a payment method. But eBay is a major AdWords advertiser, so it decided to use its biggest weapon and dropped all the US ads from Google. The move was pretty unexpected and Google quickly canceled the event: "eBay Live attendees have plenty of activities to keep them busy this week in Boston, and we did not want to detract from that activity. After speaking with officials at eBay, we at Google agreed that it was better for us not to feature this event during the eBay Live conference."

After 10 days, eBay resumed the ad campaign, but not without proclaiming the independence from Google. "I will tell you it will be in a much more limited way than it was before. What we found is that we were not as dependent on AdWords as some people thought," said an eBay spokesman. New York Times reports that eBay will buy more ads from Google's competitors, including Yahoo and Microsoft. Hopefully they won't advertise for dead people, murderers or nuns.

Google and Social Search

New York Times has an article about search engines that allow people to rate, review or even edit search results. Even if the major search engines take into account the links from sites and use them as votes, these social search engines use explicit user voting.

"A growing number of entrepreneurs are placing their bets, however, on a hybrid system that puts humans back into the search equation. They are grouped under a newly coined rubric, social search, and it is becoming a crowded field. Newcomers like Squidoo, Sproose and NosyJoe offer search results based on submissions or votes by users. Bessed also relies on users to suggest the best Web pages for a topic, but then has editors refine them."

The article also mentions Mahalo, a search engine hand-built by editors. "Mahalo is the world's first human-powered search engine powered by an enthusiastic and energetic group of Guides. Our Guides spend their days searching, filtering out spam, and hand-crafting the best search results possible," explains their FAQ. The site shows results mostly for popular queries like Paris Hilton or Google and their goal is to hand-write the most popular 10,000 search terms, although it's unclear who defines that list. Even if their links are very good and well organized, it's hard to beat Wikipedia's pages, which are much more content-rich and extremely up-to-date, at least for popular topics.

In fact, Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, plans to launch a search engine that allows people to edit the results. What's more, Mr. Wales says the search engine will be open source. "Essentially, if you consider one of the basic tasks of a search engine, it is to make a decision: 'this page is good, this page sucks'. Computers are notoriously bad at making such judgments, so algorithmic search has to go about it in a roundabout way. But we have a really great method for doing that ourselves. We just look at the page. It usually only takes a second to figure out if the page is good, so the key here is building a community of trust that can do that."

Google tried to add explicit feedback using Google Toolbar's voting buttons and a link that let you remove pages or entire sites from your search results, but the results weren't that good. In a recent talk, Peter Norvig said that people mostly used the voting buttons to express negative opinions about pages.

For the moment, the only ways to tell Google you don't think a page is relevant to the query is to click on "Dissatisfied? Help us improve" at the bottom of the page or to simply ignore the page (by clicking on the second search result first, Google records that the first results wasn't relevant to you).

Yahoo also experimented with social features added next to the search results, but they were removed. Maybe a Digg approach to search introduces more bias and makes it easier to promote spam pages. After all, people are less predictable than algorithms and more difficult to control.