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By Bill Slawski, on January 12th, 2010
You may be familiar with the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button that appears under the search box on Google’s home page. Enter a search query into the search box, and click on the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button, and Google will deliver you to the top result for your query. That button has been on the front of Google since the very early days of the search engine.
A patent granted to Google this week would have added an “I’m Feeling Bored” button on Google Calendar. An image from the patent shows the button at the top of a page where you can perform an event search, specifying keywords, a geographical area, and a time period. If you click the button without entering any of that information, the event search might try to find events for you based upon your past query history.
Under the process described in the patent, when you search for an event, that event might be one that Google found when crawling the web, in a news article, through a syndicated feed, or from other sources. Events can cover a wide range of activities, including artistic performances, sporting events, lectures, and auctions.
Continue reading The Lost Google ‘I’m Feeling Bored’ Button
By Bill Slawski, on December 21st, 2009
Search engines have evolved tremendously since they first started appearing on the Web more than a decade ago.
I thought it might be fun to take a look back at some of popular search engines of yesterday, and spent a little time at the Internet Archive traveling back to the earlier days of search.
I remember visiting these pages when I put my first site up on the Web, and decided to share some screenshots. The dates after each search engines’ name are when the pages were captured by the Internet Archive.
AltaVista
October 22, 1996
The sister of a friend used to work at DEC, the company where AltaVista began, and one day she sent him an email with a link to the search engine they had launched the week before. He forwarded the email to me, and I found myself using Altavista for most of my searches for the next year or two.
Continue reading What Did Search Look Like a Decade Ago?
By Bill Slawski, on October 2nd, 2009
Imagine going to a restaurant, and having a great experience. Or going to a great movie and wanting to tell others about it. Or trying out a new gadget and having problems with it.
You might tweet about it, and that seems to be something a lot of people are doing, especially with new movies. Imagine that you could take a picture of a barcode on your receipt or upon a box or package, and have a form come up which allows you to rate your experience or a product from 1 to 5 (bad to good), or assign a letter grade, or write comments. You might also upload pictures or audio or even video to include with your review. Your audio message might be one that you call in with your mobile phone.
Google published a patent application this week that describes a convenient way of providing ratings like this. The patent filing is pretty long, but one of the images accompanying the filing captures one aspect of the process pretty well:
Continue reading Google Approach to Making Online Ratings Easier…
By Bill Slawski, on August 23rd, 2009
Can looking at how many times rare words appear in a search engines index give us an idea of the size of the database for that search engine?
About a week ago, I wrote about some of the most common English words in the indexes for Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask, and Google Caffeine. I took a look at 50 words that are amongst the most frequently appearing words in English, and estimates from those search engines about the number of times that those words showed up.
Comparing the number of results between the different search engines for those common words really didn’t tell us anything about the relative sizes of the indexes for those search engines for a number of reasons.
One is that the number of results shown are rough estimates only. It’s also possible that the way that estimates are calculated from one search engine to another are very different. Some of the pages listed among those results are likely duplicate pages at different URLs, or may have contained misspellings of the words. Some of the words may be abbreviations or acronyms, as well (such as “it” being an abbreviation for information technology).
Continue reading Using Rare Words to Estimate Search Engine Index Sizes
By Bill Slawski, on August 4th, 2009
You buy a new phone, and it doesn’t work as advertised, and customer service is even worse. Many people in your shoes would go online, and write a negative review somewhere.
You go on a vacation, and stay at an inexpensive and charming bed and breakfast. You have a wonderful time, in no small part to the thoughtfulness and suggestions of your hosts, and their incredible hospitality. Chances are, you write a glowing review about the experience on the Web.
The number of reviews and review sites on the Web has been growing over the past few years. Google’s recent “review” search option is one attempt to help people find both positive and negative reviews.
Google also presents reviews in Google Maps results. If you search for businesses and organizations in Google Maps, you’ll see under each listing a link to “write a review” for each business listed. If you click upon the “more info” link for a listed business, you’ll see a “review” tab in the box that appears in the middle of the map for that business. The results that show reviews are summaries, which often contain some level of sentiment about the businesses listed.
Continue reading Opinion Summaries in Google Maps Reviews
By Bill Slawski, on June 15th, 2009
In my last post, I wrote about how Google may be incorporating Sentiment Analysis into the snippets that they showed for some search results. Another new feature that was announced at Google’s Searchology was the display of user ratings for products on some pages. We were told that these reviews can be found in “rich snippets” which show up under the title to a page in a search result, and above the snippet, or description for a page.
A recent patent application from Google explores the topic of ratings, assigning quality scores to raters, and discounting or eliminating ratings for dishonest or malicious raters. It made sense to look a little more closely at the ratings that now appear in “rich snippets” and spend some time with the patent filing to see if it might impact how ratings might be shown in the future.
In a search for [new york seafood restaurants], I found one result from Yelp that showed an overall ranking, number of reviews, and an indication of how expensive the restaurant listed might be:
Continue reading How Google May Rate Raters
By Kimberly Saia, on June 4th, 2009
I’m Kimberly, Bills ball and chain.
Bill is letting me play on his SEO big people playground.
I am newly addicted to all things #bing, @bing, Bing related.
The more I use Bing, the more I gotta have Bing.
I call Bill Bing by mistake.
Continue reading Bada Bing!
By Bill Slawski, on June 2nd, 2009
Microsoft’s new search engine Bing has launched this week with some fanfare and excitement. One thing to watch for is how natural language search elements from Microsoft’s acquisition of Powerset will appear in this new version of Microsoft’s search.
Right now, you can get an idea of how Powerset works by itself in searching through Wikipedia articles, like this result for Albert Einstein.
Powerset’s blog was moved to a new address this week within the Bing community of blogs. A recent post on the blog hints at more information on how Powerset’s technology has used in Bing.
Chances are good that even more technology from Powerset will find its way into the search services from Microsoft. To get a flavor of what that technology has to offer, here are a number of the latest patent filings assigned to Powerset, with either some commentary from me on the applications or the abstracts or quotes from the documents:
Continue reading Microsoft Bing, with Powerset Inside
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