http://labs.google.com New GoogleLabs Tools, Toys, and new support groups

Google Labs: http://labs.google.com

[WebRankInfo]

Google has just opened 3 new newsgroups (accessible only on their site ). One of them is dedicated to a project of Google aiming at making it possible to make research by telephone (by undoubtedly using systems of voice recognition?). Note: at the present time the site labs.google.com is not accessible and redirects to the home page of Google.

[jeremy goodrich]

Must say, that keyword set tool is very neat.

Imagine if they start (seems they probably will, right?) trying to group sites like that in the SERPs, along with the pagerank data.

Could get very interesting, and make them even more relevant...or it could throw everybod off, and make them think Google must have taken money.

Classification systems for sets of data...hm. Very cool.

[chiyo]

glossaries.. very useful stuff. tried "branding". Woz, looks like you have a competitor!

sets: A nice kinda thesaurus. Will help when i run out of ideas when writing copy. a very nice tool for helping with writing good copy. I might experiment with writing copy that includes lots of keywords in a given set and see what sort of ranking that page gets. :)

[GoogleGuy]

It really is amazing what you can do with a large set of queries to play with. :) There's always a lot of fun things happening at the plex, and our labs site is a great way to pull back the curtain a little bit.

While I'm at it, let me throw a question out here. Y'all are pretty familiar with Google--what other types of demos, experiments, or searches would you like to see?

Enjoy the laboratory, :)
GoogleGuy

[Woz]

>glossaries.. very useful stuff. <snip> Woz, looks like you have a competitor!

Nah!, not even close! But then, Hmmm ......

Onya
Woz

[mcguffin]

GoogleGuy,

If this exists already, I may be totally missing it. But I'd love to have a folder (perhaps on the toolbar) where I could save searches that I've done--either the keywords themselves or the SERPs.

The "search history" in the toolbar is useful, but sometimes I want to tuck a SERP page away and come back to it much later, at my convenience.

It'd make research a lot easier, when you're working with variants of the same keywords. :)

[digitalghost]

Searches I would like to see?

Etymology, world wide etymology that is. Etymology research is so time consuming and many searches have to be done in order to get decent results.

A search for mathematical expressions. Try typing the Riemann zeta function into the Google search box. :)

And since this is a wishlist, I'd really like to see the "similar pages" function return, well, similar pages. Right now the results are often humorous, but rarely similar to the page in question.

DG

[vitaplease]

Hey Googleguy, what a nice wake-up thread!

Took a little while, but we ask [webmasterworld.com] you deliver [labs1.google.com] ;). (although you missed Harrison Ford).

[labs1.google.com...] is the beginning of the long awaited categorisation/theming/topic grouping!

Just include the top "Related phrases" to the normal Google search tab (and remove those ugly top line adverts) and I am happy.

Also add the humour - humor (UK/US english) choice in the related threads.

Well what more to wish for?
Languages?
(try a foreign word and you are lead into the "Serendipity corner" - <<added>> I had to search for that word in the glossary to know what it means).

[Duckula]

The sets feature is painfully general.

(Ostara, Beltane, Samhain) works fine, lots of pagan holidays.

(Nissan, Adar) returns car models :); (Nissan, Adar, Elul) returns jewish months.

(ni, san, shi, go) returns numbers. Cool.

But (Bergman, Wenders, Kieslowski) returns nothing... Go figure.

[Duckula]

I second digitalghost's vote for etymologies. I'd just love to see that.

[Lisa]

GoogleGuy,
A good feature I would like to see is Google Spy. Let us see what people are searching for. Just like your lobby at the plex, safe search on/off.

Another thing I want to see is the top new searches. Call it Google Radar. Like you have your standard 1000 top searches you typically see each day. Those are all the regular searches people normally do. But when big news happens. If something penetrates the top 1000 searches it would be nice to displayed in the Google Radar area. So if something happens like 9/11, then people searching for WTC would show up because they are not typical queries in the top 1000.

Another feature that would be cool is ratings. Alexa used to provide a top 1000 websites. Well, they are not that good at that anymore. I am sure you could publish a list of the top 1000 websites that beat their list. You have the data from toolbars and you occasional monitor click-through. So let us know the top 1000 websites on the web.

You guys have so much data, I would love to play with it. Like what percentage of searches come from each country? What hours are they coming in on? People searching for "blah blah" also search for "la la".

Oh, I would stop using Dictionary.com, They launch all those popups at me. You guys sure have helped them. But they have commercialized off all the traffic you have given them. Can't you use another dictionary site that doesn't launch all those popups at me. m-w.com is a better site. But perhaps use Google Dictionary. I am sure you guys know all the words by now.

[chiyo]

Lisa, I think some, though certainly not all of that is available on the google zeitgeist pages. I agree with you. It would be great to have that data and things that are on the zeit whatever updated more often.

Daypop has a small box which dispays the most popular search terms of the day and most popular new queiries of the day. Both dont work that well. I would see that as a great thing for google to provide. I can see myself clicking on those hard coded searches quite a bit, especially the news items, and especially if it was on a google page i use a lot, - Would it take a lot of extra code to include a top 5 link for both searches and news? on the (OK shout at me!) home page.

[chris_f]

GoogleGuy,

I think a nice function to add to the toolbar would be a search microsoft/msdn function. I know you have the microsoft search but it's not on the toolbar _{(although the fancysearch does have Unix, Linux and Mac searches)}.

[mfagan]

This is an idea for a new field in the web search.

Determine the TYPE of each page. Most of this could be done by urls, such as:

educational: .edu, .ac.uk, etc
organisation: .org, etc
international: .int
other country:...
weblog: .blogspace.com, .blogspot.com, etc
personal page: geocities.com, tripod.com, etc

Others would be determined by looking at the code:

-forum
-image gallery
-link list/directory

Some pages could of course be of more than one type. Anyways, the advanced search could have a selection box to limit to only a certain type.

[olias]

Glad to see Google have taken the time to get definitions like SEO and cloaking into the glossary ;)

[Brett_Tabke]

I noticed that too Olias.

The voice search is intriquing, but unless it can be done over the web, I don't see the utility.

[Travoli]

Googleguy: I would like to see a real graphical representation of the web.

[NotNervous]

Since only one result per domain is listed on labs1.google.com (keyboard shortcuts), my site appears to rank much higher than usual. Nice!

[GoogleGuy]

Very interesting stuff, you've clearly been deep-thinking since the last time I asked. Keep it coming! :)

Off to look up how to type a Riemann zeta function into a search box, and learn what Kieslowski did... ;)

[Andrew_G]

I don't know if it's alrady been said 'cos I can't be bothered to read all 48 posts, but the sets thing is useful if you are looking to optimise your terms for a pay per click system - put in your main search terms and see what else comes back.

[Winooski]

Google Sets [labs1.google.com] is interesting and uneven. I tried the five related adverbs (cunningly, deviously, sneakily, discreetly, stealthily), and the resulting Predicted Items was 0. I tried five related past-tense verbs (ran, walked, leaped, skipped, jumped), and it returned the same words; however, when I tried the same verbs in the present tense (run, walk, leap, skip, jump), I got a mother-lode of related terms ("Horizontal Jump"..."Overhand Throw"..."Underhand Strike"...).

[4crests]

I would like a button on the toolbar I could press that showed the serps in order of most visited. It would be great to see who is getting the most google traffic for a certain keyword.

[EliteWeb]

Google ushers Web surfers into its labs [news.com.com]

The News.com has hit!

[prowsej]

Feature I'd like to see: FAQ search. I'd like an easy (and preferably natural language) method of searching sites like [faqs.org...]

I want a search engine that gives me the information that I'm looking for rather than just handing me off to a list of pages that likely include it.

[Robert Charlton]

>>I tried the five related adverbs<<

I assume that Google is pulling associations from its database... either a kind of lateral search (terms found on the same sites), or 'people who searched for a also searched for b,' or a combination of these.

I can't imagine that adverbs would relate this way. On search engines, people usually search for nouns and adjectives. Ditto with past tense verbs... I wouldn't think that many people search for them.

>>run, walk, leap, skip, jump<<

These present tense verbs could all be seen as nouns... most probably as related athletic events.

I'd like to know more about this tool... I find it extremely interesting.

[bodine]

One search I have always wanted to do was to search for my keywords within one domain. Say, as an example, if I am building a home, and I want to buy various, but specific, products for it. And, to save on shipping, I would also want to buy them all at one place.

So, I would do a search for "Specific Dishwasher"; "Foreverlast Siding"; "Great-Brand Carpet." The likelihood of having all of these terms within one page is slim. But, it is likely that one DOMAIN would have all of the terms listed-- www.homestore1.com and www.homestore2.com would have everything I need, but probably not listed on one page, so they would not show in the results.

(Is there a way to do this now? If so, please tell me how!)

[Oh, one more thing...GoogeGuy, where are you from? Only folks in or from the South (U.S.) are allowed to use the word "Y'all."] ;)

[rcjordan]

I haven't checked out the lab, but I expect voice search would allow a big push into the WAP market.

[goldbull]

bodine - include site:whatever.com in your search query. One thing it's good for is finding tutorials etc by doing site:.edu or similar. You can also do inurl:something to return results with something in the url - handy. For AV replace site: with host:

[bodine]

goldbull: I don't think doing the "site:" search will do what I want. That will still find the terms on one page, within a site that has ".com" in it. I do not want to search within a particular page-- I want to search the entire site for the terms.

As far as the URL search, it is handy, but still would only find terms that appear in the URL.

I'm not sure if GoogleGuy is still reading this Discussion...I know he is still reading the "What searches does Google fall down on?" he created...

I'm not sure how else to say what I am trying to say. Anybody else understand?

[goldbull]

I think I see what you mean... but still, if you did a search for

site:www.homestore1.com "Specific Dishwasher" "Foreverlast Siding" "Great-Brand Carpet"

then it would send back pages from the site with any or all of these search terms...

I think what you want is to see if homestore1.com has any of the search words anywhere in the domain.. right? Don't think it can be done just now (with any search engine). You could maybe use perl WWW::SEARCH to get some results from google and fiddle around with them yourself.

[mack]

I took a quick look at sets in google... I typed in the names of 2 UK based Power companies. The results it provided was a total list of all competing companies... very impressive tool.