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View Your Friends on a Map in orkut

Darnell Clayton found a new feature in Google's social network, orkut.

"The friends map on orkut.com is a feature offering powerful, user-friendly mapping technology to see where all of your friends are located around the world. By clicking on any of your friends' pictures on the right-hand side of the map, you'll be taken to their locations on the map."

To see your friends on a map, go to this page (you need to have an orkut account). This Google Maps mashup uses the location information you put in your orkut profile.

Talk to MSN Messenger Users from Google Talk

GTalk2VoIP is a site that promises to transform Google Talk into a full VoIP application, so you can call from Google Talk to a phone number or from a phone number to Google Talk. Another interesting thing you can do is to talk to a MSN Messenger user and even create a voice conference with users from Google Talk and MSN Messenger (Windows Live Messenger).

You don't need to install a software, you just have to add a contact (service@gtalk2voip.com) and use it as a gateway.

The creator of this service seems to have a lot of interesting ideas, but I hope it won't take too long before Google starts to offer similar features.

Google Bookmarks in Firefox

If you use Google Bookmarks to save your favorite sites, Google Toolbar for Firefox won't help you manage your bookmarks. Fortunately, there are two extensions with different approaches:

Google Bookmarks Menu creates a standard menu similar to the Bookmarks menu from Firefox. If you are already logged in, you don't have to enter your Google username and password. You can import the local bookmarks. The major drawback of this extension is that you can't edit bookmarks, change labels or delete some of the bookmarks from the menu. You have to go to Google Bookmarks page to do that.

GMarks uses the sidebar to display the bookmarks. The extensions offers a search feature, but you can search only in title, labels and notes. Unlike Google Bookmarks Menu, this extensions lets you edit the bookmarks and delete them. When you add bookmarks, you can also write a small description. An innovative idea is creating filters, that can be set to work on bookmarks that contain certain words in their title, URL, or notes.

While Google Bookmarks Menu is simpler and works well if you have a small number of bookmarks, GMarks is a better option if you want more control and an easier way to manage your bookmarks.

Related:
Ten rules for bookmarking solutions

Google Public Search, Vulnerable to Phishing

Google has a special search service for universities that allows them to create a customized page at google.com/u/name. Eric Farraro managed to use this service to create a Gmail-like login page, by using some simple JavaScript code. Although the page wasn't actually used for phishing (the credentials weren't stored), it was enough for Google to remove the page and temporarily close the registrations for the service.

The page was available at http://google.com/u/gplus and fooled many people that didn't realize the page isn't secured (Google's login uses https) and thought it's a new service from Google.

"Similar 'phishing' sites could be set up at ANY URL. What makes this type of exploit so insidious is that most people would consider the URL to be safe: http://www.google.com/u/gplus. While Google has suffered from similar attacks in the past, most of them have had suspicious URLs, at least to the advanced user. Using the exploit in this service, a malicious attacker could launch phishing sites that even advanced users could fall for," explains the "attacker".

So next time you enter your password on a site, make sure you check the address bar. It's also a good idea to use only secure logins.

Yahoo Mail Shows Captchas

This is just brilliant. The new Yahoo Mail shows captchas when sending email.

"Why do I have to do this?
This step helps Yahoo! prevent spammers from using Yahoo! Mail, and helps to ensure that your email will be delivered."

So now I'm a spammer...

Download Compressed Attachments in Gmail

If you get a message in Gmail that contains more than one attachment, it's a good idea to click on "Download all attachments" because you'll get an archive with all your documents. If you receive PDF files, DOC or XLS files and other types of documents, you'll have to wait less until the download finishes, as the archive will be compressed.

But there's a way to download individual attachments as ZIP archives: right-click on the "Download" link, copy the location, paste it in the address bar and replace "disp=attd" with "disp=indzip". This also works well if you receive a single attachment.

Note (June 26, 2008): I replaced "disp=zip" with "disp=indzip" thanks to a paranoid thread.

Remove Google's Top Ads

Here's a cool Google experiment found via Search Engine Roundtable. You know the ads that appear on top of the search results for competitive queries? Well, Google decided that they should remove them if users don't click on the ads.

So here's what you should do to move those ads in the right column: search for something that triggers the blue ads (for example loan) and refresh the page until they disappear. That's it.

"The rationale is that the user does not want to see the ads anyway and it lessens the chance of a poor prospect clicking on an ad. If you clear your cookies, the results will go back to normal."

SEO Tips From Google

SEO Egghead compiled 21 tips from Google's Matt Cutts and Vanessa Fox. Some of the most interesting:

* Hiding text using similar colors and background colors can actually be worse than using the same colors.

* If you sell links, Matt says you should use link condoms [rel="nofollow"]. Otherwise your reputation may fall. I assume this means they will devalue your outbound links.

* Assign unique, descriptive title tag and headings to every page.

* Use user-friendly URLs like "african-elephants.html," and not "343432ffsdfsdfdfasffgddddd.html." Don't overdo it either — african-elephants-and-their-habitats-etc-etc-etc-etc.html.

* Minimize the number of URL parameters — 1-2 parameters if possible.

If you think a little, it makes sense: all these tips improve the user experience. Hidden text is not visible to the user, so the page would not be relevant to the search result. The title and the URL are also an indication of the page content. Redirections slow down loading of a page. So if you don't know what to choose in a situation, think what your visitors would choose.

* SEO = optimizing a web page to rank well in search engines

Google Personalized Homepage Has Tabs

After adding minimize buttons for modules, Google lets you organize the personalized homepage using tabs. If you don't see the tabs yet, in a few hours you'll be able to use them.

You can add at most six tabs, edit their names, drag and drop modules to a tab. Each tab has a different color and you can't change it. Unfortunately, the tabs don't work very well. Douglas, a reader of this blog, says:

"My tabs are crazy right now. I added stuff to one and it added it to all of the tabs.. and they happen to disappear every few refreshes."

If you drag and drop a module, it will keep its position. You'll also notice that changing tabs can take a while. One warning: if you delete a tab, make sure to move the modules in other tabs, otherwise you'll delete them too.

If you have this new feature, tell us what you think about it. Will you use Google's personalized homepage more?

The New Yahoo Mail, Slowly Released

Yahoo has finally decided to release the new Yahoo Mail Beta to the public in the US and other 18 countries. Although Richard MacManus reports that Yahoo launched the new mail yesterday, there's no official announcement from Yahoo and it's likely that they'll slowly invite people to use the new version.

Since my review from January, there aren't too many changes: Yahoo Mail still has 1GB of space; it loads faster, but it still reacts slowly when using the interface; there are many graphical ads and huge animations that distract you from reading your mail; the spam filter has been improved, but it's still inferior to Gmail's spam protection.

The new Yahoo Mail wants to look like a desktop application, an online version of Outlook. It has tabs, so you can compose mail, search and read mail in the same window. Every view shows the entire list of mail, so you don't have to click "Next" multiple times until you find a message. The window has a preview pane so you don't have to open each mail. The contact list is slick, it has an instant search feature, but you don't have use it when composing messages because Yahoo autocompletes email addresses. The feed reader doesn't have an import option yet, but it looks nice: you can customize the font and text size, forward posts, so reading feeds is more pleasant than reading mail.

Because Yahoo's users are more conservative, the new Yahoo Mail doesn't include mail threading, so you can read conversations in context and it still uses folders instead of labels. Search is almost inexistent: there's no advanced search so you can't search for that important mail sent to you in June, there's no word matching so if you search for "cop" you'll find "copy", "copyright", "Copenhagen". There's no preview for attached documents and the settings section looks the same as last year (ugly and cluttered).

Ethan Diamond, director of product management for Yahoo Mail, talks about the product and he's very excited that Yahoo Mail is the most used webmail service with 255 million users, while Gmail comes in fourth place with only 49 million users. Well, in this case, the most popular service is not the best.

There's More Than One Gmail

Although everyone knows Google's mail service as Gmail, Google lost the right to use this name in Germany and UK last year.

Daniel Giersch has a service called G-mail and he owns the trademark in Germany. His mail system works in a very strange way: "A sender's document is scanned into Giersch's system at its origin, transmitted electronically to a G-mail office in the destination city, printed out at the other end and hand-delivered to its recipient. Giersch also offers users a "secure" gmail.de address, which they can obtain only by verifying their identities with a passport or other official ID card," reports CNet. Giersch plans to sue Google and defend the registrations of the trademark in Switzerland, Norway and Monaco.

In the UK, Gmail is the private mail service for the customers of the Contensis Content Management System. G-mail has also been used by a research firm Independent International Investment Research (IIIR) for its Web-based e-mail product since May 2002. Google ended the trademark dispute with IIIR in October last year and since then every user from UK has a @googlemail.com mail address.

Gmail was also the name of a "sql based vfolder email system", now defunct. Some of its features included:

* Uses a Mysql database as the datastore. This makes gmail very fast for large volumes of email (eg: more than 20,000 messages).

* Up to 255 vfolder views of the mail store. This is the main feature, the idea is that you keep all your mail in one big folder and approach it from different views (querys). It is a powerful way of approaching email management.

* The vfolder filtering is done via SQL filtering. There is sufficient online help to make writing vfolders easy.

* 'matching' facility where messages that don't get caught by your custom vfolders are put into an 'Inbox' vfolder. A caching mechanism based on this 'matched index' also gives fast speeds. Gmail is very fast for super huge mailing lists. You can now subscribe to linux-kernel and not have your mail client slow down!

Picasa 2.5 Out Of Beta

The new version of Picasa, that includes the ability to create web albums and geotag your photos is out of beta. Although Picasa's homepage doesn't mention anything about that, their release notes talk about Picasa 2.5 Build 32.91, September 12, 2006. The last beta version was Beta 3, Build 32.71.

So if you have Picasa 2 and the auto-update feature enabled, you'll have a nice surprise soon. For those who already have Picasa 2.5 Beta, it will be just a minor update.

In addition to the features already mentioned, here are the rest of the new features in Picasa 2.5:

* Nested Folder View. Now you can choose how to display folders in Picasa, whether they're nested or sorted by date.

* Larger thumbnails. The thumbnails are slightly larger, so images are clearer.

* New RAW features. Picasa supports more cameras and RAW formats (including the Canon 30D, Nikon D200, and DNG).

* Save edits to disk. When you edit photos in Picasa, you can choose to save those edits as you go, replacing the original photos with your newly edited versions.

* Screensaver. Show starred photos in a collage, or pan and zoom your Web Album photos. Choose between four presentation options to display your best shots.

{ Via Zmarties. }

Update: Download Picasa 2.5 Build 32.91.

Google Delivers Marketing Tools for QuickBooks

Google and Intuit have announced that the next version of QuickBooks, an accounting software for small businesses developed by Intuit, will include links to many Google services:

* Google Adwords - QuickBooks customers receive $50 AdWords credits so they can advertise their business without any risk of losing money.

* Google Maps - Google lists businesses for free, but many people don't know about that. "The mapping capability allows customers to find a business, see a satellite image of it and get driving directions."

* Google Base - if the business doesn't have a web page, the products can be listed in Google Base.

* Google Desktop - this productivity software helps users "find customer, vendor or financial information anywhere within QuickBooks or on their desktop"

Google wants to improve its local search engine, by listing more businesses. If these businesses want special placements and become Google customers, that's even better (for Google).

Related:
New local search front-end
Coupons for local businesses
Corporate package for domains

Dynamically Generated Pages, a Bad Idea for Blogger?

The most important feature of the new Blogger Beta is dynamic pages. "In the new version, adding a new post simply updates your information in our database. Then, when someone wants to see any of the pages on your blog, those pages are created for them dynamically, on the fly."

When I heard about this change, I was unsure if it's a good thing. I know it's very hard to edit the template and wait until Blogger updates all the blog posts, but the dynamic pages could lead to serious problems.

A reader of the blog, whose digital alias is geekWithA.45, sent me this:

The nature of blogger pages is that they are infrequently published pages of (generally) low complexity, and they are frequently demanded.

"Produce content on demand" is completely the wrong policy for this, it is the wrong tool for the job.

I predict massive problems that scale directly with load, which may or may not be revealed during beta.

When that happens, blogger will go through a familiar sequence of attempted remediation steps.

First, the database connect cache settings will be played with. Then whatever the underlying system's object caching hoojie is will be turned on, and messed with extensively.

After that, they'll start messing with cluster settings for the server farm, and scratch their heads trying to scale out and cluster the back-end data servers. During this phase, the overall size and configuration of the server farm may or may not be altered dramatically.

Somewhere along the line, someone smart will say, "AHA! Edge Caching for relatively static components!" and Akamai sales reps will get in on the game.

Finally, the development team, who hasn't been home in weeks, will be taken out back of the barn and shot, but they won't mind too much, death is preferable to the hell they live in. Perhaps whoever decided to go dynamic, based on someone's grad school project white paper will be shot with them, but more likely, he or she will be promoted to a position where he can do more damage.

His arguments are interesting, but the future will tell if Blogger's decision was correct. Blogger had a lot of problems in the past, but even if their server was down and you couldn't post anything, the blog was still available. If the problems continue, when Blogger will be down, blogs will be down too.

Consistent Browsing Experience

So you work on more than one computer, you like your Firefox browser, but there's a problem: it doesn't have a memory across multiple computers. You visit a page on your home computer, but when you need to remember that page a day after, to fix your friend's computer there's no one to help you.

Fortunately, there's a simple idea that could solve problems like this one. Google Browser Sync is an extension developed by Google that saves all your settings to Google's servers in an encrypted format.

"Google Browser Sync for Firefox is an extension that continuously synchronizes your browser settings – including bookmarks, history, persistent cookies, and saved passwords – across your computers. It also allows you to restore open tabs and windows across different machines and browser sessions."

All you have to do is to buy an USB drive and copy Firefox Portable along with Google Browser Sync, and you have access to all the settings anywhere you go (if there's an Internet connection). Don't forget to install Google Browser Sync on your home computer too.

The Best Way to Read Books in Google Book Search

If you go to Google Book Search, and find a book you'll notice it's hard to read it online. Some of the books don't show any content, other books have a limited preview, and some of them are available in entirety. But the biggest problem is that Google shows a very big image from the scanned book and the image doesn't fit well on most computer screens.

Thanks to some interesting features available in Opera, it's easy to read books. Here's how to do that in Opera:

1. Go to Google Book Search and search for a book. Or find a book in this great gallery of banned books.

2. Look for a search result that shows either a "limited preview" or "full view".

3. If there's a link that says "first page" next to your favorite result, click on this link. Otherwise, click on the search result link.

4. Press F11 to enter in full-screen mode.

5. Press - (minus) multiple times until the book page fits your monitor completely. When you want to restore the original view, press 0.

6. Now you can read the book. To go to the next page either click on the page or press Shift-X. To go the previous page, press Backspace.

This should also work with the new zoom feature from IE7 and in Firefox with an extension like Page Zoom, but they're not as good as Opera's zoom.

Related:
Download public domain books
Google's digital library
Other great features from Opera

Secret Feeds in Google Video

Here's a little Google Video secret. If you add "&output=rss" to the URL of a search results page in Google Video, you get a RSS feed for that results.

For example, if you search for "apple", the address of the search results page is http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=apple. Now append the output parameter and you'll get http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=apple&output=rss, a feed you can add to your favorite feed reader, so you can track the best videos about Apple. If your feed reader supports enclosures (like Google Reader, for example), you'll be able to play the video from the reader. Otherwise, you'll see a thumbnail and you can click on it to see the video.

You can also search for labels (tags) like this "label:matt cutts" and add the results to your feed reader, in case there's a new video created by Matt Cutts. As anyone can label videos, there's always the danger of spam labels, so not all the results will be accurate.

Labels can also be used to create rudimentary playlists: invent a long string like "videos from my favorite pop artists" and label your favorite videos. Then do a search for "label:videos from my favorite pop artists", add the output parameter and use the feed the way you want it.

Google Video shows on the homepage only the feeds for some sections (popular videos, music videos and others), but you should know that every search means a new feed.

New Google Patent: Append Data in a Distributed Environment

Google was granted a new patent: "Systems and methods for performing record append operations". The abstract of the patent:

"A system facilitates the performance of a record append operation. The system may include a primary replica and one or more secondary replicas that store copies of data. The primary and secondary replicas may receive a record to be appended to the data and a record append request that identifies the record to be appended to the data. The primary and secondary replicas may append the record to the data, possibly at the same offset. If multiple record append requests are concurrently received, the requests may be serialized to establish an order for the requests."

This patent is used for Google's distributed file system, "that delivers good scalable aggregate performance and continued operation in the event of failures". The idea here is that more than one computer can append data to a file in an easy way. Google uses more than one backup for their data, so that a disk failure doesn't make some files inaccessible. Appending data to a file concurrently means replicating the file changes in a consistent way.

Related:
Google File System patent

Windows Live Search - Pretty, but Slow

Live Search Blog announces that Windows Live Search (formerly known as MSN Search) is now out of beta. It's interesting to see that they don't talk too much about the improvements in the relevancy of results, although their results seem better than last time I've tried MSN Search.

"Our goal was to give you search the way you want it, with more features you can customize, better relevance in your search results, and better vertical search experiences."

Most of the changes are in the interface: web search shows related queries like Ask.com, image search shows more results and you can change the size of the thumbnails in real-time. There's also an interesting scratchpad in the right side of the results where you can save your favorite images; the idea is similar to Google Notebook, but you don't need a plug-in for that. Microsoft says that "Local Search is getting more robust every day and this release provides new or updated imagery for 25 U.S. cities, meaning we are covering about 30% of the U.S. population now".

An interesting idea that could be implemented by Google is their navigation bar, where you can select other search services, like: video search, product search and your selection is saved.

My biggest problem with Windows Live Search is that it's terribly slow, most of the times the results are displayed 3-4 times slower than in Google Search or Yahoo Search and that means they have problems with scalability. There are still a lot of spam / irrelevant results, but I think Microsoft is on the right track.

Google Ad Creation Marketplace

Google has a program called Google In Your Language, that lets you translate the messages from different Google services into other languages. While looking at the list of messages for Google Accounts section, I've noticed an interesting string: "Ad Creation Marketplace". This is not a Google service (at least not yet), but I think it might be linked to the new varieties of ads launched by Google: video ads, radio ads and even TV ads if we take into account that Google has registered Googleadsensetvsite.com.

These new ads are much more difficult to create than text ads and image ads. As many small publishers don't have enough money to use professional agencies, Google Ad Creation Marketplace might be the perfect place for them.

"Google AdSense Audio would enable people with a $200 budget to break into radio advertising, making targeted and area advertising via radio, IPTV and podcast more effective and viable for smaller businesses," said Zachary Applegate after talking to some Googlers. If you spend money on radio ads, you must have a good copy and an effective message. But you can't spend too much money on ad creation, so you have to find a small agency that we'll help you. Where? In Google Ad Creation Marketplace.

Google's 3D Gallery Imitates Google Video

Google 3D Warehouse, the place where you can upload Sketchup 3D models for buildings, houses, stadiums and objects, has been redesigned and looks exactly like Google Video. The homepage features popular and recently uploaded models. If you click on one of the models, Google will locate the object on the map, you'll be able to download it in Sketchup or view it in Google Earth. There's also a description, a rating for the complexity of the model and an easy way to embed the model into a site.

You can also search for models and even build your own model and upload it to the 3D Warehouse. To build a model, you need to use Google Sketchup, a free software available for Windows and Mac. If you want, you can even build a virtual town with buildings, people, trees and vehicles.

{ Via Blogoscoped. }

Google Video Shows the Number of Views

Google Video has finally opened up: for each video, you can see the total number of views and the number of views from the day before.

One of the most popular video from Google Video ("Hips don't lie spoof") has 8,762,847 total views and 133,890 are from yesterday. The most popular video from YouTube ("Evolution of dance") has 32,426,948 total views, while on Google Video it only has 1,290,703 views. The problem with these stats is that there are lots of duplicate videos, and neither Google nor YouTube do something about that.

Related:
10 Google Video tips
Why is YouTube more popular than Google Video

9/11

I remember that 5 years ago I was watching TV and the program was interrupted by a breaking news. A news that seemed hard to believe back then, but changed a lot of things in the following years. I was scared when I realized it was true and I think after 9/11 fear sneaked into our lives more often.

[ The film is called "7 Days in September" and shows the stories of 28 people affected by 9/11. Director Steven Rosenbaum led the effort that the New York Times described as "Reconstruct(ing) the emotional geography of New York." The film is a rare human look at the emotions, passions, and pain that followed the attacks on the World Trade Center. ]

How Much Data Does Google Store?

In case you were wondering how much information Google stores, the paper about BigTable I was talking about last week gives some interesting insights.

Google search crawler uses 850 TB of information (1 TB = 1024 GB), so that's the amount of raw data from the web. Google Analytics uses 220 TB stored in two tables: 200 TB for the raw data and 20 TB for the summaries.

Google Earth uses 70.5 TB: 70 TB for the raw imagery and 500 GB for the index data. The second table "is relatively small (˜500 GB), but it must serve tens of thousands of queries per second per datacenter with low latency".

Personalized Search doesn't need too much data: only 4 TB. "Personalized Search stores each user's data in Bigtable. Each user has a unique userid and is assigned a row named by that userid. All user actions are stored in a table."

Google Base uses 2 TB and Orkut only 9 TB of data.

If we take into account that all this information is compressed (for example, the crawled data has compression rate of 11%, so 800 TB become 88 TB), Google uses for all the services mentioned before 220 TB. It's also interesting to note that the size of the raw imagery from Google Earth is almost equal to the size of the compressed web pages crawled by Google.

Evaluating Google Search Results

Google uses many testers to evaluate the quality of search results. This post gives some details about their work and speculates that Google will allow everyone to be a tester.

{ Information from this post is based on Henk van Ess' Search Bistro. }

Google has great search results because it has good algorithms, great data centers and (secret) evaluation tests. There are many people that are paid (some say they are paid with $20 per hour) just to test the relevance of the search results. Google doesn't manually adjust search results, they try to find the problem that generated the low-quality results and tweak their algorithms.

So what conditions should be met by a tester? Here's a job ad from 2005:

"You would work at your own pace, and the time and length of any particular work session would be up to you. Candidates will evaluate search results and rate their relevance. Thus, all candidates must be web-savvy and analytical, have excellent web research skills and a broad range of interests. Specific areas of expertise are highly desirable. We are looking for smart people who read voraciously and have a wide variety of interests.

Raters should have all the following qualifications:

* Native-level fluency in Dutch, Italian, Spanish, or French

* In-depth, up-to-date familiarity with the web culture of at least one predominantly Dutch, Italian, Spanish, or French-speaking country.

* Excellent web research skills and analytical abilities.

* A high-speed internet connection.

* Perfect English is not necessary; however, you must be able to read and write English well enough to use software with an English interface, understand fairly complicated instructions written in English, and make yourself understood in informal written communication.

* The job involves frequent written communication with fellow Quality Raters."

SearchBistro found more about this evaluation. Google selects a number of random queries and sends the list to a group of quality raters. The raters evaluate the results in a CommQuest Evaluation Interface.

"During random-query evaluation, each result URL for every randomly selected query is rated independently by a group of raters using the options given in a pull-down menu on the Quest interface. The rating results are subsequently analyzed. That’s where CommQuest comes in. When you – the raters – disagree with each other by a wide margin, the result URL will be presented to you again in the uniquely interactive CommQuest interface until a certain level of agreement among you is reached. CommQuest allows you to share your comments on queries and/or URLs with each other, explain the reasoning behind your initial ratings, and revise the ratings based on what you’re learning from each other."

It's hard to define relevant results, but Google evaluates results "based on relevance not to a specific person who actually posed the query, but to an imaginary rational mind behind the query. Oftentimes, a query may have more than one meaning, or interpretation. In such cases we will have to look at the hypothetical set of rational search engine users behind an ambiguous query, and deduce, or roughly estimate, the make-up of that set; for instance, we will consider the relative presence of zoology enthusiasts and car shoppers in a hypothetical representative sample of the users who could have queried [jaguar]."

Google thinks there are three types of queries:

* navigational queries, that have one result (like "BMW" or "MSN")

* informational queries, with more than one possible result (like "renaissance paintings", "what is a shark")

* transactional queries, where the user wants to make an acquisition ("download text editor", "buy blackberry")

There are also nine ratings for each result: Vital, Useful, Relevant, Off Topic, Offensive, Erroneous, Didn’t Load, Foreign Language, Unrated.

Here are the tasks that should be performed by each tester:

* Understanding the meaning of the query and its type – is it navigational, informational, transactional, or a mixture of two or three?

* If you come to the realization that the query could have been posted by different users with different intentions, crudely assigning possibilities for each interpretation and/or intent

* Researching the query coverage on the web using search engines other than Google, directories, specialized databases, and other sites, or offline resources

* Examining each result for attributes that would call for assigning an applicable special category rather than a merit-based assessment, and, in the absence of those attributes

* Determining the merit rating in light of the query coverage and considering various utility dimensions, as well as taking into account evidence of deceitful web design where appropriate.

So, as you can see, it's not an easy task to evaluate search results and this work influences a lot of what you see in Google search today.

You may be wondering what's the point of this post. Gary Price from Resource Shelf found that Google has registered some interesting domain names recently:

* indexbench.com (and .org, .info, .net) and similar domains
* Google-testing.com (and .net, .org) and similar domains

After the experience with Google Image Labeler, I think Google will try to have more quality testers, but this time for free. If there's a lot of fun in the process and the system is good enough to deal with spam and low-quality raters, the whole world could rate search results. This is just a speculation, but it wouldn't be the first time when users actively modify the order of search results (if you click directly on the third result of a search, Google will know the first two weren't relevant).