Knowledge Discovery Using Google's Info View

I previously reported about Google's search experiments, but I intentionally left out a very interesting addition: the info view, a part of the search visualization experiments. This new option replaces the traditional snippets with other information that could be more interesting to you. The data is extracted from the web pages and it's displayed consistently for all the results.

Tip: To see this new view, just add view:info to your Google query.

Let's view the images from the top results for [Googleplex]. This helps you understand visually if the page is relevant to you and see what it's all about.


If you research information about religious wars, it's useful to know the dates for the events described in Google's search results. Google highlights them in the snippets.


The measurement view could be useful to highlight the specs of a gadget, while the location view shows you the places mentioned in a web page and it's helpful to discover the relation between your query and some locations. The time view and the location view have alternate interfaces, but they only show a small number of web pages.

Google has already improved the snippets using Plus Boxes and these new views could generate other Plus Boxes or different ways to view the search results, depending on your queries ([places to visit in Paris] could show a map, while [Muse concert dates in Europe] would show an automatically-generated timeline).

Join a Google Search Experiment

If you liked the experimental search features launched by Google in May, you can choose one and make it a part of your standard Google interface. You just have to go to Google Experimental and select one of the four features that are currently tested:

* new ways to view search results: using specialized snippets, on a timeline or on a map. You can also access this feature without joining the experiment, using the view operator: just add view:info, view:timeline or view:map to your query. Example: [tory amos view:timeline]. This is the most innovative experiment, but it should be better integrated in the user interface and offered as an option only for some of the queries. (Update: This view has a new feature described in a future post.)

* keyboard shortcuts: select a search result or move to the next result without using your mouse. You'll like it if you use shortcuts in Gmail or Google Reader, but it's hard to understand why Google thinks that the ads placed at the top of the page are search results.


* two similar experiments: put the search navigation at the left/right of the page. This is somehow similar with Ask.com's new interface and Yahoo's search assistant because it makes it easy to explore a domain and provide better queries.


You can only choose one experiment at a time, it's easy to switch between them or deactivate them and there's an option to send your feedback. I'm still undecided between the keyboard shortcuts and the left-hand search navigation, so it would be nice to choose two or more non-conflicting experiments.

Google Desktop Gadgets on Your iGoogle Page

Google Desktop and iGoogle are two sides of the same story. Google Desktop started as a search engine for files from your computer, then transformed into a personal agent that shows tiny bits of information from your computer or from the web: news, weather, notes, system stats, email alerts. iGoogle expanded the classic Google homepage with news from your favorite web sites and little applications that gather interesting information from the web. While most iGoogle gadgets can be run inside Google Desktop, it's not possible to add Google Desktop gadgets to your personalized homepage because a web application cannot interact with a software, or at least not without a plug-in.

Google Desktop 5.5 (Windows-only, beta) makes it possible to add gadgets written for the desktop to your iGoogle page. You can choose Desktop gadgets from the directory, install a plug-in that connects your browser with Google Desktop and have gadgets that interact with your computer on your iGoogle page. For example, the music player lets you search for music on your computer and plays it for you. The system stats gadget shows interesting statistics about your computer usage, like battery, RAM or CPU.

The screenshot below shows an iGoogle page with four Desktop gadgets and a Google Desktop sidebar that includes the same gadgets. While it may seem redundant to have the same gadgets in two places, this allows you to disable the sidebar and still see some of the gadgets in your browser. For now, the performance is not very good and your iGoogle page will load more slowly.


Another interesting update in Google Desktop 5.5 is that the desktop search engine is deactivated by default and Google Desktop only indexes filenames. This seems a pretty big departure from the initial purpose of the application: a desktop search engine. You still have the option to enable the "enhanced search" in the setup, but this reminds me of the way Microsoft treated the indexing service in Windows XP.


Google also removed the specialized search engines from the Quick Search Box, improved the Outlook search, changed the setup and added a way to repair a broken installation.

Find Wallpapers Using Google

If you've ever wanted to use Google Image Search to find a wallpaper for your computer, you noticed that Google doesn't provide the option to restrict your search to 1600 x 1200 images, for example. The only way to restrict images by size was to choose one of these imprecise categories from a dropdown:
* small images (< 51 x 51, according to Google)
* medium images
* large images (>= 1024 x 768)

Even if you chose "large images", you still found many images that weren't appropriate for a resolution like 1600 x 1200. Now Google offers a new option: "extra large images" that only includes images for which the product between the width and the height is bigger than a certain number. Google didn't reveal the inferior limit, but it could be around 2,000,000 pixels, so you'll find images that have sizes like: 6016 x 416, 1024 x 2202, 1100 x 3700.

This new option is useful if you're trying to find high-resolution images, but it's still not very good if you're looking for wallpapers that have a certain size in pixels. So how to find a sunset wallpaper for your computer?

* add "wallpaper" to your query. This helps to filter some "noise", but it could also eliminate good results. Example: [sunset wallpaper].

* add "[width] [height]" or "[width] x [height]" to your query. This works because many wallpapers include information about size in the filenames or in a caption. Example: [sunset wallpaper 1600 1200] or [sunset wallpaper "1600 x 1200"].

* restrict the search to JPG images by adding "filetype:jpg" to your query.


You could also try Yahoo Image Search that has a special restriction for wallpaper-sized images, Live Search that lets you find images that have the same size as your screen's resolution or Exalead, the search engine with the most advanced options, including a way to define restrictions for width and height. Flickr also has a group for wallpapers that includes more than 20,000 images: don't forget to sort the images by interestingness.

And if everything else fails, using a Google Search or a custom search engine for wallpapers could be the best way to find a wallpaper.

{ Thank you, Cody. }

Business Google Apps Adds Postini and 25 GB Gmail

The Register reports that Google integrated Postini, acquired in July, into the business edition of Google Apps. "We're pleased to announce that policy management and message recovery by Postini are now available at no additional charge within Premier Edition," says Google.

Policy management lets administrators implement rules for how messages are handled based on the sender, recipient, attachments or content of the message:

* Messages can be selectively tracked, routed for review or blocked according to company or regulatory compliance guidelines. For example, emails with specific keywords can be prevented from being sent to external recipients, or groups of users can be entirely prevented from sending external email.
* Configurable spam and virus filtering lets organizations add custom filtering rules, complementing the spam and virus protection already included in Gmail.

Message recovery allows you to search for mail across your whole domain and recover deleted emails on a 90-day rolling basis, adding peace of mind that important information is safe with Google Apps, even in the case of accidental deletion by your users.

Another good news for Google Apps Premier Edition's users is that the email storage was increased from 10 GB to 25 GB. While the size doesn't impress too many people anymore, it's interesting to see Google offering more for the same price.

Gmail remains the principal attraction of Google Apps, but the addition of other services like wikis (JotSpot) and online storage (GDrive) could counterbalance its importance. Meanwhile, Zoho tests a business edition for its online office suite and Microsoft tries to extend Office's dominance online.

Comparing the Top Three Search Engines

With the latest updates from Yahoo and Windows Live, Google's competition is getting better. Instead of asking you which one is the best, I wrote a small script that displays the top results from the most popular three search engines for a query. You should only say which result is more relevant.

Think of a complicated query from a domain you're familiar with, because you can only vote once. Select more than one option if the best result is displayed more than once. Search results will open in a new tab or in a new window. If you read this in a feed reader, go to the original page to see the poll.

Note: the order of the search engines is fixed, so the third result always comes from the same search engine. Even if the order can be easily guessed by doing some searches or looking at the code, please don't post it in the comments.

Update: The poll is now closed. Check the results.

Yahoo Adds a Search Assistant

After last week's major update for Live Search (which is now live for everyone), Yahoo updated its search engine. Like Microsoft, "Yahoo said the upgrade was the most significant yet since it dumped Google's search technology in February 2004 in favor of its own," according to LA Times.

Yahoo's search engine has less new things to show than Live Search. Yahoo introduced its own version of "universal search" by adding video previews and images from Flickr inside search results and by updating its impressive list of smart answers. Yahoo shows embedded video players for results from YouTube, Metacafe, Yahoo Video.


The new search assistant is somewhat similar to Google Suggest: it auto-completes your query. But unlike Google Suggest, it's supposed to show up only when you want to or when you need it. If you type some letters from a word and then stop for a couple of seconds, a new box opens and shows some suggestions. In the left side you'll see some popular ways to finish your query, while in the right side Yahoo expands your current query. You can select one of the suggestions or continue to type, while the list of suggestions updates. So this a combination between auto-complete and related searches, introduced for the first time by Ask.com. The only improvement made by Yahoo is that the assistant is not visible all the time.


The search assistant can be deactivate by clicking on the small "Off" link and manually triggered by clicking on the arrow located underneath the search box. Unfortunately, by trying to be useful, the search assistant is also annoying for some users. Here's one negative feedback from Yahoo's discussion board:

"Get rid of any of the so-called assistants. They take up space on the screen, slow down processes and insult everyone's [intelligence]."

Yahoo explains their new philosophy (my emphasis):

"The whole point is we want to get you from "to do" to "done." Whatever it is you want to do: research a topic, find a website, plan a vacation, research a medical condition, view a funny video, or any of the other billions of queries we get from users -- their intents expressed via a few keywords in a search box. One thing we've learned since launching our own algorithmic search engine back in 2004 is that at the end of the day, people really don't want to search; they want to get things done."

Obviously, searching is just a mean and not an aim in itself. But sometimes the search, the path to your aim is more interesting than the end-result. That's why, search engines should make this process more intuitive and more appealing.

All in all, it's clear that the most innovative search interface for this year was Ask 3D as it inspired many updates in Yahoo Search and Windows Live, while paving the way to mixing heterogeneous search results.

Finding Answers Without Clicking on Search Results

Compete informed us last week that, when it comes to search fulfillment, "Yahoo is the best of breed". Even though Google has two thirds from all the queries in the US and Yahoo only 20%, Yahoo users click on a search result in 75% of the cases, compared to Google's 65%.

I don't think you can conclude that a user is happy with the results provided by a search engine just because it clicks on one of the results. Maybe he can't decide which web page is better and clicks on the first result to realize five seconds later that it's not relevant.

Here are some of the things I can find using Google without clicking on any result:

* facts automatically extracted from web pages (even if they're sometimes inaccurate, as you can see in the screenshot below - García Márquez was born in 1928):


* simple calculations and unit conversions

* dynamically updated information about: weather, stocks, currency conversions

* get information from snippets, maybe using advanced operators

* check if a spelling is correct. If Google doesn't provide a correction, you can still compare the number of results for different alternatives

* look up definitions by clicking on the underlined words and expressions from the blue bar

* compare the popularity of two products, companies, authors

* play videos from YouTube or Google Video without going to the sites

* view the cached version of a result, view a version optimized for mobile phones or translate the page in a different language. For Office documents and PDFs, you can view the HTML version

* disambiguate your query, click on search refinements

* find the ranking of a web page

As you can see, I can learn a lot of interesting things without clicking on a search result. While some of these features are also offered by Yahoo, Google users could know more about them and use them better.

Contrary to what many webmasters and SEOs think, Google's main purpose is not to send users to a web page, but to deliver relevant information. That's why it makes sense to mix web pages with books, images and maps. That's why Google offers direct answers or links to specialized search engines for some queries. As search engines become smarter, their indexes could be used to automatically generate content by quoting relevant fragments from web pages or by drawing conclusions from the data available online. The lists of search results are just a temporary solution and not the ultimate purpose of a search engine.

Keep Track of Your Friends' Shared Items

I mentioned about Google's intentions to integrate its social applications, to private a feed for all your public activities and an API for accessing your data from external applications.

The problem is that you use all kinds of web applications to share different things: you share your favorite blog posts using Google Reader, you use YouTube to upload and rate videos, you post photos on Flickr or Picasa Web Albums, you bookmark web sites using del.icio.us. For each activity, there's a different site that captures your data and does something useful with it. But when it comes to sharing what's important to you with a friend, you need to send a bunch of different URLs and feeds that could change in a year or two when you switch to other services.

FriendFeed is a start-up that wants to solve this issue by letting you enter your usernames from different sites and combining all the data in a single feed that could be easily shared with someone. You can also invite your friends and subscribe to their data. The service makes a lot of sense if you use it from a social network like Facebook, so FriendFeed has a Facebook application.

FriendFeed was built by four ex-Googlers: Bret Taylor, Jim Norris (who built Google Maps), Paul Buchheit (Gmail's creator and the man behind Google's motto: "Don't be evil") and Sanjeev Singh. The service launched today in private beta, but you can request an invitation.

"This gives you a snapshot of what people you know think is interesting. It's kind of a blog that writes itself," told Bret Taylor to New York Times. And it's really easy to setup the service and collect your shared stuff from different parts of the web.


It's interesting to see that Google's former employees continue to do interesting things even after they quit Google. For example, Evan Williams, who co-founded Blogger, works with other former Googlers at Twitter, an innovative micro-blogging tool. David Friedberg, a former business product manager at Google, launched WeatherBill, a site that lets you manage weather risk.

Different Themes for Each iGoogle Tab

iGoogle's themes were an instant hit. More than 30 percent of the users changed the default theme in the first weeks after the launch.

Now you can have different themes for each of your iGoogle tabs. If you select a new theme, you'll notice that only the current tab has a new look. All the other tabs have the old theme. This is also works when you share a tab: the theme is saved and is part of you tab's identity.

Google promised to release an interface that lets you create your own theme, but for the moment a good way to add custom themes is this third-party gadget. Note that you need to add the gadget for each tab you want to have a custom theme and you shouldn't expect to find themes that change depending on weather or time of the day.


{ spotted by Colin Colehour }

Google's Secret Sauce

While there are many start-ups called by the media "Google killers", becoming more popular than Google is increasingly difficult. Even if Google started with an algorithm for search, it built an infrastructure that prepared its later expansion and became more important than the initial innovation. From New York Times:

Consider the question of Google's greatest business secret. Is it the algorithms behind its search tools? Or is it the way it organizes vast clusters of computers around the globe to answer queries so quickly? Perhaps predictably, Google won't disclose the number of computers deployed in its vast information network (though outsiders speculate that the network has at least 450,000 computers).

I believe that the physical network is Google's "secret sauce," its premier competitive advantage. While a brilliant lone wolf can conceive of a dazzling algorithm, only a superwealthy and well-managed organization can run what is arguably the most valuable computer network on the planet. Without the computer network, Google is nothing.

Eric E. Schmidt, Google's chief executive, appears to agree. Last year he declared, "We believe we get tremendous competitive advantage by essentially building our own infrastructures."

Process innovations like Google's computer network are often invisible to the public, and impossible to duplicate by rivals. Yet successful companies realize that maintaining competitive advantage depends heavily on sustaining process innovations. Great process innovators often support basic research in relevant fields, maintain complete control over the creation of every aspect of a product and refuse to rely on outside suppliers for important components.

Google built a file system "for large distributed data-intensive applications", a programming model and a distributed storage system called BigTable that works on top of Google's file system. Hadoop, an open source project supported by Yahoo, wants to replicate Google's distributed systems.

{ Image from Eric Schmidt's presentation at the Stanford Graduate School of Business in April 2004. }