Tag Archives: Google

Google, Search Strategies

AROUND: Google proximity search operator

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Several people have already blogged about Google’s AROUND proximity operator: Digital Inspiration,  ResearchBuzz, SearchReSearch and Phil Bradley to name just four. According to SearchReSearch the command has been available for 5-6 years, which begs the question “Why has no-one picked up on it before now?” Could it possibly be because the operator does not do what it says on the tin? Perish the thought and wash my brain out with soap and water for even considering such a thing. 

The AROUND command allows you to specify the maximum number of words that separate your search terms. The syntax is firstword AROUND(n) secondword. For example oil AROUND(2) production.

The reason I have not commented on AROUND so far is because – how can I put this politely – I am finding it difficult to find a search in which it is of practical value. I shall illustrate with just one of my searches, macular degeneration, but my experiences with other test and “real” searches are similar. When testing search features the relevance of the documents that appear on the first few pages of the results is more important than the number of  hits, especially as the latter are often guesstimates from Google and can vary enormously depending on which version of Google you use. Nevertheless, the numbers are interesting even if they only serve to confuse us further and I have included them with the screen shots. All of the following searches were run in Google.co.uk

Let’s kick off with a very basic version of my test search: macular degeneration

Number of results: 7,340,000

Macular Degeneration simple search

The results are relevant and as usual Google appears to be listing first those pages where the terms appear next to one another. If we did want to be more precise and reduce the number we could search for the phrase: "macular degeneration".

Number of results: 1,690,000

Macular degeneration phrase search

Not surprisingly the number of results has been reduced significantly to 1,690,000.

Let us now say that my enquirer has come back with an amendment to the original request. They have been told that there are several forms of macular degeneration, for example macular disciform degeneration, and they want a selection of articles covering as many of them as possible. I have a biomedical background and can easily identify the relevant phrases and run separate searches on them, but what if I didn’t have a clue where to start? I could use Google’s asterisk (*) between my two terms to stand in for one or more words.

The strategy macular * degeneration gives us a massive 21,500,000 results, far more than our first basic search if the numbers are to be believed.

Macular degeneration asterisk search

In just the first 6 results we have picked up vitelliform and disciform degeneration, and more are picked up in the subsequent 20-30 results.

Google’s search tips say “If you include * within a query, it tells Google to try to treat the star as a placeholder for any unknown term(s) and then find the best matches.” It is not clear from this whether the asterisk stands in for one or more terms. Adding more asterisks to the search does not alter the number of results, which in any case are only an estimate. We do, though, see very different content and now variations on our terms (for example macula)  are appearing emboldened in the page summaries.

Comparison of asterisk searches

We could try and force an exact match search by placing a plus sign before macular in our strategy, but let’s try and keep this exercise simple.

Now for three searches using AROUND(n). Note that AROUND must be in capital letters, otherwise Google will treat it as just another search term. Specifying the number of separating words as 1, 2 and 3 gave me 1,710,000, 1,710,000 and 1,720,000 results respectively.

Google AROUND operator

The results are very different from the searches incorporating the asterisk and AROUND(2) and AROUND(3) were identical. Also, it seems that with the AROUND operator Google is giving priority to documents where the terms are a phrase and not separated by any other words. It was only when I reached around 650 that I started to see phrases where my two terms were separated by one other word.

Using just AROUND without any number gave me 1,610,000 results that looked very similar to those obtained with AROUND(1).

Logically, one might think that macular AROUND(0) degeneration would be the same as a search on the phrase "macular degeneration". It isn’t!

Phrase versus AROUND(0)

Not only are the number of results different (AROUND(0) comes back with 4, 250,000 compared with 1,690,000 from the phrase search) but so is the content.

Finally, I decided to follow Phil Bradley’s lead and see what happens when I try and exclude the phrase from the AROUND(0) search: macular AROUND(0) degeneration -"macular degeneration". I got 43,000 results in which the terms seemed to appear anywhere within the document, in any order and separated by any number of other words.

In conclusion, despite what I said earlier I think AROUND does work but it is difficult to test because Google always seems to give priority to pages in which your terms appear as a phrase and not separated by any other words. Its effect is probably more obvious if you are dealing with a topic that would otherwise return a very small number of results. The ranking and sorting of the results changes significantly, though, when you use AROUND so it might be worth trying if you are fed up with seeing the same documents and sites again and again. In all of the test searches I have carried out so far I still prefer the asterisk, especially if I want to be able to identify expanded phrases quickly and easily. But, as the saying goes, your mileage may vary. Feedback on your own experiences, please.

Google

Google adds estimated fuel cost to Maps

Google has added estimated fuel cost to driving directions in its Google Maps.I would never have picked this up had Techradar.com not covered it as we gave up having our own car years ago and Google does not appear to have advertised this feature in the obvious places.

If you want to go from A to B and are using Google maps, choose  the driving directions as usual and Google gives you the estimated fuel cost at the bottom of the directions.

Google Maps Fuel Costs

In this case Google tells me that it would cost someone 29 pence to drive from Reading railway station to where I live in Star Road. If you want to see how Google has calculated that then click on the Est. fuel cost link.

Google Fuel Costs

The default for vehicle type is standard. The other two options are Compact and High Consumption. Fuel type by default is petrol but you can change it to …erm.. just diesel. So no LPG, nor is there any differentiation between unleaded and super unleaded, diesel and premium diesel. Neither is it clear where the price has come from, and if you change the fuel type the fuel price does not change. You can, though, change the price manually.

To check the local prices of all types of fuel go to Petrolprices.com. (See my 2005 posting at http://www.rba.co.uk/wordpress/2005/11/18/see-cheapest-uk-petrol-prices-for-free/)

Petrol Prices UK

At best the trip from the railway station to my road in a compact car that uses LPG would cost 12 pence. At worst and using a high consumption care with the most expensive fuel the cost would be 55 pence.

Of course this is never going to be totally accurate, so it is useful only as a general indication of the likely cost of  your journey. As I no longer drive my own car I am not the best person to comment on this aspect. But it does seem to me that you have to fiddle around rather a lot with the settings before Google gives you anything that remotely resembles the true cost. I would be interested in comments from regular drivers on how helpful – or not – this addition to Google Maps is.

Google, UKeiG, workshops

Google workshop (Newcastle, March)

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I am running a workshop “All about  Google” for UKeiG in Newcastle on March 31st. Details and booking forms are available on the UKeiG web site at http://www.ukeig.org.uk/trainingevent/all-about-google-regain-control-search-karen-blakeman

I wrote the title and description a few months ago before Google really started going to town with messing up search results, so the subtitle “regain control of search” now seems a tad over-optimistic! Readers of this blog and Phil Bradley’s  (http://philbradley.typepad.com/phil_bradleys_weblog/) will know what I mean. Just search on Google in both for recent news and comments on what Google is currently up to.  Nevertheless, I will be going through the key search features, types of search, and recent developments in Google search – there will probably be even more changes by the end of March – and there will be plenty of time for you to try out ‘stuff’ for yourselves.

A reminder that I also run in-house workshops so if you have several members of staff you would like trained, let me know. I can come to you.

Google, Search Engines, Search Strategies

Oi! Google – you have seriously overstepped the mark

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Yes, I am talking to you Google and  this time you really have gone too far.

All I wanted to do was check up on the background of a photo I had taken of the wall surrounding the graveyard of a church in Reading. The church in question is St Laurence. We have all become accustomed to the “Did you mean….?” option at the top of our search results. I found it invaluable early in the morning or late at night when typos were inevitable in my search strategy: yes, thank you, I really did mean ‘widget manufacturers’ and not ‘wigdet manufacturers’. Recently, though, Google has abandoned the optional corrected search and now runs instead the corrected strategy as the default with yours as the extra option. Google has taken this a stage further and runs your search as it thinks fit.

So Google decided that I really meant to search for Saint Lawrence and has included that in the search. There is no option to search on just Saint Laurence:

Google St Laurence search

On this occasion there were some relevant pages in my results. But yes, Google, I really did want to search for Saint Laurence! Now, it seems, I have to prefix all of my search terms with a plus sign or enclose them in double quote marks to stop Google’s dictatorial behaviour.  But why should I have to do that?

In one of my presentations last year on Google vs. Bing/Yahoo I commented that Google would have to do something really stupid before users would switch to another search engine. For me, Google has done that really stupid thing. I am now seriously contemplating switching search engines for basic web searching. My final decision will be based on relevance of results and how quickly they are delivered. I have to spend too much time and click too many times to get them on Google

UPDATE: It has just got worse. I tried a search on the phrase “Saint Laurence” thinking Google would carry out an exact match search, but Google will have no truck with such obvious ploys. (Ignore the Twitter search at the top of the results screen – that is a Greasemonkey script add-on for FireFox).

Google search changes

I now have to click on the option for “Saint Laurence” to get results for the search I had originally requested. Putting a plus sign before my phrase in the search box does not change Google’s mind. “Excuse me, Google, but I do know what I am doing and when I tell you to carry out an exact match search I WANT AN EXACT MATCH SEARCH! Got it?”

Google, Search Strategies

x-Factor web pages are “advanced” says Google’s reading level

Google has rolled out a new search option that assigns a reading level to the pages in your results list. Don’t be surprised if you haven’t spotted it yet; it is hidden on the advanced search screen. Under the “Need more tools?” section you can choose from the drop down menu to see all of the results with reading level annotations, basic results, intermediate results or advanced results.

Google Reading Level

Google does not give much away as to how it calculates the reading level and it has nothing to do with the reading age that publishers assign to books. It could involve sentence structure, grammar, the length of sentences on a web page, the length of the document, the terminology used and doubtless many other criteria. But Google isn’t saying.

If you have opted to see the annotations, at the top of your results page you will see a graphic showing the percentages for each of the categories. Under the title of each entry in your results list is the reading level.

Google Reading Level Results

Click on the Basic, Intermediate or Advanced links next to the bar chart to see pages for that reading level. The eagle-eyed amongst you will have spotted that Google appears to be mathematically challenged because the numbers do not add up to 100%. In all of the searches I have done so far 1 or 2% are missing from the statistics. Looking through the lists of results some pages have no reading level assigned to them and they seem to be documents that contain very little information, have more numbers than text, and some are formatted files. Note, though, that most file formats do have a reading level so why some are not picked up remains a mystery to me. Some Daily Mail articles do not have a reading level either but many would argue that they fall into the ‘very little information’ category!

Once you have used the Reading Level in the advanced search screen you can change your search on the results page and it remains as part of your search strategy until you close down your browser or tab.

You can also check out an entire web by using the site command, for example site:rba.co.uk

Google Reading Level for RBA site

And this is where you can start to have some fun comparing sites (WARNING – this is addictive!). Phil Bradley has done some in his blog posting Google adds reading level
(http://philbradley.typepad.com/phil_bradleys_weblog/2010/12/google-adds-reading-level.html). He also highlights some potential problems with labelling pages in this way. For example ‘basic’ does not necessarily mean stupid, but some people may be deterred from selecting basic pages because of the tag.

Most of my pages are classed as intermediate and I am happy with that. Many of them are listings and analyses of business information sources. My husband’s blog on the other hand is 71% advanced and 27% intermediate. This comes as no surprise to me as he has a habit of littering his postings with complex calculations on topics such as wind turbine energy generation and the EROEI of tar sands oil production. (Just the sort of thing not to read before you have had your second cup of coffee of the day.) That plus the industry specific jargon that he uses makes an advanced tag inevitable.

Google Reading Level Energy Balance Blog

The evidence so far seems to be suggesting that using terms or jargon that are relatively uncommon in the whole of the Google database is a heavy factor in determining the reading level. Let’s look at what one might consider to be an intellectually challenging topic: the use of zeolites in environmental remediation.

Google Reading Level Zeolites search

That seems to confirm it.

As a final test and for a bit of fun let’s look at what Google makes of a search on the recent x Factor final.

Google Reading Level xFactor

Noooooo! Surely some mistake? The X factor home page is rated as basic but 93% of the results are advanced. There is indeed a mistake but it was my sloppy search strategy. Changing the x factor part of the search to a phrase gives what I would expect and a switch to 53% basic, 40% intermediate and 6% advanced.

ReadingLevelxFactor2.jpg

Out of curiosity, I looked at the content of the advanced pages and am now totally bemused. I cannot see how they could ever have been classified as such, but then this is Google we’re talking about. Perhaps Google cannot comprehend the scoring system, why so many people watch it or why the programme exists at all?

Google Reading Level xFactor

I have experimented with several other searches. Some came up with results as bizarre as those for the x Factor search but it is interesting how the breakdown can be changed by slightly modifying your search strategy, for example by using phrases when appropriate or a plus sign before a term to force an exact match search. Google’s Reading Level could be useful as a training tool to show how small alterations to a search strategy can radically change the results. But as with all things Google, we do not know how it works and the results can sometimes be very strange. Use with caution.

Google, privacy

Removing information about you from Google

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A question that I am often asked during my workshops is how can one persuade Google to remove a page or information from the web. Sometimes the person wants personal photos or videos to be removed or they are asking on behalf of a company who wants less than flattering comments and opinions deleted. In most cases Google does not control the content put up on web sites or social media, it merely indexes it. So the short answer is that you cannot make Google remove information you do not like except in very specific circumstances, for example copyrighted material on YouTube, images of you or your house on Street View.

“Removing Your Personal Information From Google”
http://searchengineland.com/removing-your-personal-information-from-google-55014 is an excellent overview from Search Engine Land of how you should go about having sensitive information removed (if possible) and dealing with negative publicity. Your first move is to contact the web site owner yourself but unless the information is libellous, breaches copyright or data protection laws you might not have much luck. Suing the web site owner is an option but you could end up generating even more bad publicity for you and your organisation. Swamping out the negative information with your own positive responses is by far the best approach and one that requires you to know how to use social media.

The oft cited example of  how not to tackle bad publicity is that of Nestle. (Just Google Nestle social media fail or Nestle social media disaster.) “Nestle fails at social media – Attempts to censor Facebook” from TechEye http://www.techeye.net/internet/nestle-fails-at-social-media is a neat summary of the events. There are also umpteen Slideshare presentations on how Nestle “did it wrong”. Many people have forgotten or never knew what the original argument was about, but after the social media debacle the perception of Nestle as corporate bad boys was reinforced.

The Search Engine Land posting has links to other articles offering sound advice on the topic including:

The Real Lesson In the Yelp User Review Lawsuit
http://www.ninebyblue.com/blog/social-media/the-real-lesson-in-the-yelp-user-review-lawsuit/

and

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Managing your reputation through search results
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/10/managing-your-reputation-through-search.html (I love the bit “.. don’t assume that just because your mom doesn’t read your blog, she’ll never see that post about the new tattoo you’re hiding from her.“)

Google

Google previews web pages in results

Google are offering previews of web pages in your results. People have been reporting this feature for many days now but today is the first time I’ve seen it in action. Run your search as normal and next to each result in your list you should see a magnifying glass. Click on it and Google gives you a preview of the page with the areas containing your text outlined and the text in boxes superimposed on top of the preview. Although it is a useful tool for assessing the relevance of a page I do find it irritating that Google then automatically previews every result as I move my mouse around the results page. You have to click on the magnifying glass again to switch it off.

Google Previews Search Results Pages

Google

Google thinks I’m male

I have always suspected that there was something different about me. Am I slightly eccentric, totally bonkers, or perhaps I am an alien from another planet? Google has the answer. After believing for the whole of my life that I am female Google tells me I am male!

I am giving a presentation this week in Edinburgh to the Scottish Financial Crime Group about what Google knows about us as individuals. For the purposes of accurate research I enabled Google’s web search history, suspended my usual advert and cookie management, and disabled my browsers’ ad blocking plugins. The ads drove me mad and my Google search results began to go all over the place. It was a ghastly experience. I was not, though, expecting my Google’s ad preferences page to tell me that based on the pages I had viewed it had deduced I was male (stop sniggering at the back). Here is the screen shot of my ads preferences:

Googles ads preferences

Google obviously thinks that we ladies are not interested in business, computers, internet or social media. So what would classify me as female? Viewing recipes perhaps? Shopping for clothes online? Or visiting  pages about embroidery?

Normality has now been restored to my computer and I have regained my sanity. I have disabled web history, opted out of targeted advertising, re-implemented my cookie management procedures and re-enabled my ad blocking plugins.

If you want to see what Google thinks about you, go to http://www.google.com/ads/preferences/

Google, Search Engines

Seriously irritating things about Google Instant

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Having had a few more hours to explore Google Instant there are four things that I find seriously annoying about it:

1. The way the suggestions and results are displayed is so messy and busy. AlltheWeb’s LiveSearch implementation was so much slicker and easier to follow. A pity that Yahoo did not follow through on that one but they never have taken really good experimental stuff further.

2. You only get 10 results per page regardless of what you have on your Settings page. This is a major problem for me because I have my display set to 100. I don’t trust the first  results in a Google search to be – er, how shall I put it – unbiased, and I want to be able to quickly scan through at least 30 or 40 to get an indication of whether or not I need to modify my strategy. Having to keep clicking for the next page is going to drive me up the wall. I can understand, though, that allowing everyone to have more than 10 results per page would probably slow down the processing and display of results.

3. The Wonderwheel has gone from Google Instant results. I don’t use this feature that often but it does sometimes help me narrow my search or to branch out in a completely different direction.

4. It messes up several of my Firefox add-ons, in particular OptimizeGoogle. Google SearchWiki (now defunct) did exactly the same.

I have now turned off Google Instant. It offers me no benefits that compensate for the loss of features and options.

Many people are also complaining that the ability to turn off query suggestions has now disappeared (thanks to Paul Chapman for bringing this to my attention – see his comment to my initial Google Instant  review  at http://www.rba.co.uk/wordpress/2010/09/09/google-instant-display-results-as-you-type/comment-page-1/#comment-8637). You can still do it if you use Google SSL at https://encrypted.google.com/ but that is no help whatsoever if you want to use a country version of Google as I often do. To be honest I rarely pay any attention to the suggested queries and most of the time I start my search from the Google Toolbar where I have suggestions turned off. But if you really do not want query suggestions or it causes technical problems, and Google does not reinstate the turn-off option, the main alternatives are Yahoo or Bing. Both still allow you to switch it off.

AlltheWeb, Google, Search Engines

Google Instant – display results as you type

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No, Google hasn’t branched out into groceries – yet. Google Instant is not a brand of coffee but a new search and display feature that shows changing results as you type your search. Google says that it is actually display before you type because it tries to predict your full strategy and delivers results for that search. As you add more terms the predictions and the results change:

“Google Instant is search-before-you-type. Instant takes what you have typed already, predicts the most likely completion and streams results in real-time for those predictions—yielding a smarter and faster search that is interactive, predictive and powerful.“

The list of predicted searches – they are the same as Google Suggest – appears below your search box. If you spot a better strategy you can scroll down the list to select it.

Google Instant

I found that Google does eventually run out of predictions. In some cases it was after only three terms: in others it took seven or eight before Google gave up but carried on changing the results as I typed in extra terms. If you are a more experienced and advanced searcher who uses search commands such as ‘filetype:’ or ‘site:’ you are suddenly presented with a blank page. This totally confused me at first and I thought that Google simply did not have any results for my search. In these situations Google reverts to ‘old style’ search, so just carry on as normal and press enter to view your results.

Note: You have to be signed in to your Google account to see Google Instant.

Not everyone will have Google Instant right now:

“Google Instant will become the core search experience on Google.com for Chrome, Firefox, Safari and IE 8. We’ll also be offering Google Instant to our users in France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Spain and the U.K. who are signed in and have Instant-capable browsers. Over the coming weeks and months, we’ll work to roll out Google Instant to all geographies and platforms.”

I am guessing that IE 6 is not included in the “all geographies and platforms” as Google has already withdrawn support for it in some of its other services, for example YouTube.

The idea is not new. AlltheWeb – owned by Yahoo – was trying out a similar approach with its Livesearch a few years ago. I found it extremely useful because you could quickly spot if you had a gone a search term too far. The progression might go: OK-ish results, relevant, even better, superb, total rubbish. It was then easy to remove the last term you had typed in to get back to your superb results list. When further development of AlltheWeb stopped Livesearch was discontinued.

Alltheweb Livesearch

Another good idea abandoned by Yahoo and later taken up by someone else. Some of you may also remember Yahoo Mindset which gave you a slider bar to change the emphasis of your results to find more shopping or research oriented pages. Google now has a fewer/more shopping sites option in the left hand menu on its web results pages.

My first impressions are mixed. Sometimes the predictions work, sometimes they don’t and I don’t find it as easy to take in the changing display as I did with AlltheWeb Livesearch. I think that is because Livesearch had the search box on the left hand side of the screen and I find it easier to glance across the page rather than down to monitor what is happening to my search.

Find Google Instant distracting and want to turn it off? Either sign out of your Google account or click on the Settings link in the top right hand corner of the screen. The option to turn it off is at the bottom of the Settings screen.

Further information is available on the Official Google Blog –  Search: now faster than the speed of type
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/search-now-faster-than-speed-of-type.html