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There's a lot in there:
- Labs has a demo of personalized search. Tell us your interests, and then you can move a slider and see the search results change in real-time. This gives you a good look at how search can be improved by knowing what the user is interested in.
- Labs also has a new feature called Web Alerts. When the Google search results or new results change for a term that you enter, Google will drop you an email to let you know. Both webmasters and regular users can enjoy this. :)
- There's a brand new user interface. The UI team made tons of little changes make the UI cleaner and faster to get search results.
- Searching in Google News will now show thumbnail photos in the results.
Plus my personal favorite that I haven't seen mentioned yet: numrange search. For example, suppose you want to search for results about Mt. Everest, but you're actually interested in things like the base camp and events that have happened at a certain elevation. If you do the search
everest "21000..21500 feet"
A few nice things to notice about numrange searching: in the example above, you notice that it works with phrase quotes. And if you check out the search results, you'll see that we can match a number even if it looks like 21,300 instead of 21300. It also works correctly with dollar signs. I was at a book sale this weekend and I actually saw some dude scanning books with a bar-code scanner attached to his phone. I noticed that the phone was a Motorola and the scanner was a Symbol. I did a quick Google search when I got home and found out the the scanner was a PSM20i. Cool. Now suppose I want to find out how much they cost. I do the search
psm20i $100..$500
estate tax $750000..5000000
electron ratio 1800..1900
You get the idea--there's a bunch of new ways to find data that numrange searches unlock. So enjoy the new UI and things like thumbnails in news search results. And have fun playing with personalized search and web alerts and thinking about the future of search. I know we have. :)
now blue-widgets outputs only results with the exact phrase.
sorry in case i'm wrong and it was this way ever before!
Plus my personal favorite that I haven't seen mentioned yet: numrange search
I hope that similar things should work for webmasters too. For example, currently, instead of putting info like
1997-2003 toasters were found to be defective
for the fear that a query for 2001 toasters won't find this page, most webmasters are forced to write like
The following brandx toasters were found to be defective:
1997 toasters
1998 toasters
1999 toasters
2000 toasters
2001 toasters
2002 toasters
2003 toasters
I like the clean new look alot. I also like the ads not being colored... they are easily identifiable as ads. I also don't miss the directory tab, I never used it and would have gone straight there if I wanted that... I think Joe Surfer googles for regular google and not so much the extras, but good luck with the new features, they look interesting. <added> I also think the news is very good and I do use it alot. </added>
javascript:void(location=location+'&cat=gwd%2FTop');It adds '&cat=gwd/Top' to the URL, which should take you to the Google Directory and perform the same search there. (It only works from a Google SERP).
Let's all hope G. sees the light soon and returns the link or creates some additional personalization options... ;)
i believe before the redesign blue-widgets (with dash) was treated exactly the same way as blue widgets, so dash equaled space.
now blue-widgets outputs only results with the exact phrase.
one more: it used to be necessary to use site:.fr (note the dot) to reduce results to single TLDs. now site:fr works as well.
If you search for site:domain.com (even with filter=0; repeat the search with the omitted results included.
) you might get different pages than if you search for site:domain.com widgets. Having put site:domain.com online is missleading as it suggest you should get them all!
Concerning the directory links that have been dropped: Though I seldom clicked on them I am really missing them as it helped to see what a site is about if it showed in what category it is placed.
But when I went for a play with the "personalize" gadget ..the more you "personalize" the more irrelevant the results become to the search term ...
and I mean seriously irrelevant ..like personalize should be written "forget the subject and just throw out any old junk".......
And most weird of all ...
Once you touch the personalize slider ...it becomes "mouse cursor position locked" and zooms around all over the place evn if your cursor is nowhere near the area ....
I mean like you click "personalize" ( I use the word advisedly / ironically ) and then you decend your mouse to try a given link and its changing the serps all the time as you descend cos the thing is locked to your cursor movement!
What is this piece of cr*p!
1. By freeing up some the the real estate on the screen, it allows some of the long-suffering results placed just below the top fold to make a showing on the first screen. A few of my pages that were languishing at positions 6-7 have found new lives. [As a side note, displaying 15 or 16 results/page is something I support.]
2. Many of the amateur webmasters after looking at the directory link suddenly knew that there is a Google directory and some of them probably submitted their sites as a result. Now they almost don't have a way of knowing about the existence of it, thus giving somewhat unfair advantage to the professionals.
GG can I have one ( and later can you make them all like it ) which automatically removes all the spammy affiliate directory entries which have nothing to do with the searched for terms , terms or site urls from the returned serps ....
One like that I'd pay for ....
I wish I'd had that numrange function a week ago. I was looking for accommodation sleeping 10 to 15 people and I had to make a seperate search for each number!
I've heard conflicting stories about whether customers of certain "free hosting" companies are allowed/disallowed in the Google index and had an idea that would really be a GREAT move for Google:
"Filter Free Hosting Sites" and "Filter Affiliate Sites" options in the "Preferences" area where a user can optionally INCLUDE or EXCLUDE results from pages that are hosted at known free hosting sites like Geocities, Tripod, and all of the thousands of other free hosting companies out there. This could also apply to affiliate things like "affiliatename.thelatestmlm.com" or "www.thelatestmlm.com/johndoe/"
When I'm looking to buy a PRODUCT I find it annoying to have to sort through "free hosting" pages - even though they may be 100% relevant and carry the product I'm looking for, I would NEVER buy a product from one of those sites. And on top of that, free hosting pages are notorious for popups, redirects, ads that cover text until you click on them, and all of the other crap no one wants to see.
Alternatively, if I was looking for non-commercial material such as information on Alien abductions, how to build your own light saber, etc. I've found that the free pages can often be MORE useful than "yourname.com" sites because more often people hosting information like that on a real domain are selling something, not just giving out the information I'm looking for.
Google could easily differentiate between known "free hosting" sites, and regular sites, and give everyone the option to omit the freebies from search results. Obviously from a business standpoint, showing the free results would be ON by default so as not to change their current directory in any way. But for those of us who want to omit it, it would be nice to be able to go into preferences and exclude those results.
What do you guys think?
an option to set the number of results per page to 20, 30 ..What I meant was for the default listing to be 10 unique links no matter tabbed or not for better surfing experience, and us webmasters getting a kick up :)
If they weren't very popular I can understand trying to save space by leaving them off; but do you think there's any chance of their being re-added as an optional feature for the minority of us who did use and like them, GoogleGuy? It's evident you already have that data; doesn't seem like adding it in would be too hard a custom option...
Swamped?
Hey Visi, I believe that relatively few people clicked on those links.
however, the most useful use of the category links for me wasn't the link itself but the information the category carries for judging topic and importance of the search result. (so no click to be recorded.)
I was a little surprised that when searching Google for: internet + directory
[DMOZ.org...] was not in the results.
Neither was [directoy.google.com...]
[Yahoo.com...] was in the top 10 though. :)
