Phil Bradley's weblog

Google removes more search functionality

In Google's apparently lemming like attempt to throw as much search functionality away as they can, they have now revamped their advanced search page. Regular readers will recall that I wrote about Google making it harder to find, and now they're reducing the available options. The screen is now following the usual grey/white/read design, but to refresh your memory, this is what it used to look like:

And this is what the new version looks like:

It takes up a lot more space - the country/region listing is much more spaced out - previously I could just scroll straight to the bottom to pick the UK option, but now I have to scroll to the bottom and then back up a little bit. However, it's a personal choice - you like it or you don't.

The important point is that Google has removed two options that relate to page specific tools, and these were to allow searchers to find similar pages and to find pages that link to a particular page. Now, you can still do these searches, if you know the syntax, which is related:www.philb.com and link:philb.com. However if you don't know it, you can't do it, and no doubt Google will at some point remove the functionality on the grounds that no-one uses it any more.

Both of these options were useful tools to enable searchers the check the validity and authority of pages. There is a well known site about Martin Luther King which is particularly biased and the tools were useful to show people how to evaluate websites. Now, it can be argued that since neither tool was particularly accurate it makes sense to remove them. I don't think it is good sense to reduce search functionality, rather to improve the search functionality you have, and if the tools were not accurate, make them accurate! However, if we're looking at this from the opinion of Google, they're following a consistent line - reduce options, don't let searchers search, accept what Google gives us and be happy with it. Google continually uses the line that they know what is best for searchers, when it's perfectly clear that Google has less of an understanding of search as every day goes by.

Unfortunately Bing does not offer any useful alternatives, but don't worry, since there are plenty of places that you can visit in order to check out websites. SimilarPages is an excellent resource - just type in the URL that interests you and see what it comes up with - I find it very valuable and it seldom fails me. Exalead has a link: option in their advanced search dialogue box, and you can try SimilarSiteSearch too. Then you have Whoislike.it as well. Overall however, we're entering a worrying phase with search engine functionality, which seems to be imploding, leading to less choice, less accuracy and a greater reliance on algorithms that we have no knowledge of, and no control over. The one good thing about this sad and sorry situation is that it increases the need for expert searchers!

Google Verbatim tool

Want Google to search for exactly what you're after? As you know, Google has this strange idea that it knows best, and if you search for one thing, it'll quite often search for something else, or vary the spelling, or drop words from the search, and all this without telling you. It's then necessary to go back to your search and tell Google to search for just what you want. In 'the old days' you could use the + symbol, but Google has stolen that for the GooglePlus pages application, replacing it with the double quote symbol, which isn't quite the same deal at all. However, they've now produced a Verbatim tool. This is how it works. Let's try a search for the word 'libraries' because that's what I want. I start with a screen full of location data:

I then move into a bunch of results, some of which include libraries, but there's also a lot of results coming up on the word library:

(There's actually a lot more than you see in this screen shot). Now, I could use the doublequote system, but if I click on the search tools option on the left hand side of the screen to expand it:

I've now got the 'Verbatim' option. Google describes this thus: "But, for the occasions when you want to search for very specific words, you can use the Verbatim tool so that Google searches using the exact words you entered." Now, ideally I'd prefer it if Google just did what I told it to, or failing that gave me an option to have Verbatim turned on all the time, but it doesn't. My results now look like this:

Page after page of results, all about libraries.

Verbatim should be a tool that Google should not need to have created, but in their constant quest to know better than the searcher I think they've gone down a blind alley, and Verbatim is their way of trying to reverse back out of it. Obviously the more terms in the search, the more effective this new tool will be, but a toggle to turn it on and off would be appreciated.

 

Related articles

• Google Literally Replaces + Operator With Verbatim Tool (seroundtable.com)
• Google Now Lets You Search for Exact Terms Using Verbatim (techie-buzz.com)
• Responding To Complaints, Google Adds Verbatim Search Results (searchengineland.com)

Entireweb

The web, images and realtime search engine Perfectly ok search engine - does a nice sideline in Tweets, but the main reason for mentioning this one is that you can run a search based on geographic region, such as Latin America, and that's quite unusual. Otherwise, it's fairly average.

Bye bye to the CD

There's quite a lot of noise around at the moment about the possible end of the CD, as record companies (love the irony of using that description) are set to abandon the format by the end of 2012. Quite frankly, it wouldn't surprise me if they did. Every time I go into an HMV shop to get myself a DVD (and that's going to be next on the list) I get the feeling that I'm walking into a museum. I can't honestly remember the last time that I bought a CD, and the only time that I ever play them is when I'm driving.

Most of the time it's on the iPod, iPhone or if I'm at my desk, Spotify. I honestly can't see a reason to buy a CD now, since I get just about all of the music that I want for a tenner a month, and I don't have to worry about scratches, putting them back in their cases, the whole nine yards. 'Ah, but what if Spotify goes bankrupt or puts their charges up?' I hear you ask. It's unlikely that Spotify will go bankrupt, although given that countries see it as all the rage at the moment I can't be sure - but I'd be surprised. I also don't see that much sign that they'll put their price up, though to be honest if they did I'd still be getting a good deal, given that I used to spend a lot of money buying music. But if that happened, and people got ticked off with them, the model they use is sound, so someone else will come along and do the same thing - and indeed there's already companies making similar offerings. It's not the tool that's important, it's the activity.

Now, where does this leave libraries? If I worked in a public library I'd certainly be eyeing up the racks of CDs and wondering what to put in their place. I'd also be tempted to offer advice and information on how to get music in other formats to my members. I'd be thinking also about what to put in place of that collection of racks.

The Gwigle Game

This is apparently a game that helps you learn how to use Google more effectively. Not sure how you pronounce Gwigle - is it Gw-eye-gle, Gwiggle or 'Crap'. I think it's the latter. It's a great idea, but the problem is that  - well, you take a look. Here's a screenshot:

The idea is that you work out what the ??? represents, type it into the box on the top right hand side, get the answer right and move on. You can't save anything, so you have to go back to the start every time, which is tedious. If it's not immediately obvious from your own general knowledge, all you need to go and do is highlight from one of the answers, cut/paste into Google, do a search and get the answer that way. The one that you can't do that for, which is a maths question, there are 2 answers that are correct, but it only lets you choose one.

Total pants. Nice idea, but rubbish implementation.

Google+ Pages for Libraries

You have probably already heard that Google+ has now opened for business pages, rather than just personal pages, so I wanted to take a quick look to see what was going on. The process is actually very simple.

You have to have a personal Google+ account - Google wants to link the page to a specific person. This doesn't make a lot of sense to me, because it's linking an invididual to an organisation - what happens when they leave? I suppose you could create a 'fake' account which could be looked after by various individuals in the library, but there's always the slight possibility that Big G might find this out and get rather annoyed, so horses for courses.

Next, you go to https://plus.google.com/u/0/pages/create which looks like this:

Choose a category for your library page, fill in the name and URL, select a category and you're done. A very simple process from the look of it. However, you don't want to stop at that point - that's like creating a Twitter account but not putting in a photograph or biographical details, and no-one is that silly are they? (Cue Tumbleweeds...) Get some photographs, logo, create some circles (maybe staffers, members, experts in subject areas), add links to your other social media accounts, and send out some status messages welcoming people! There's nothing worse that going to a page and seeing that nothing has been shared - which is all too common at the moment.

So, what do you do with it next? No good twiddling your thumbs, since you want to attract people to the page. Post content - as much as you can do. Remember - you may well be attracting people who don't know much about your library, so you need to entice them in. Interact with people - add them, put them in circles, check out your local community, see if anyone else has a G+ page and add them.

Think about the activities that you could associate with your account - reading groups for example. Create a reading circle and link to videos, discussions, author home pages and so on. Create hangouts in order to talk to members - have homework club evenings for example, and share links to school resources, webpages and so on.

I suspect that a lot of people are muttering and saying that they don't have time. I get that, really I do, but the point is that if you don't do it, you're going to miss the boat entirely. You want to get in right at the start, so that you can leverage that position, encourage people to join you on G+, have somewhere ready and waiting for them. Be a familiar face for when they do join, as they will at some point. Maybe you want to wait until some other libraries have taken the plunge? Well guess what - they already have, and not just American ones either. Here's a list which is I'm sure not complete, so if you know of more, please let me know:

Cambridge University Library

John Rylands University Library

Orkney Library and Archive

University of Sussex Library

Waterford City Council Library Services

Those are just the UK/Ireland ones that I've found - there's another forty or so American libraries that have created pages as well. I've shared the entire list on my Google+ update status, so if you're following me you'll see it. If you're not and want to, you can find me at http://gplus.to/philbradley

Formulists for Twitter # analysis

I've written about Formulists before, but they've kindly introduced me to a new aspect of their service which is worth a look. Basically Formulists allows you to create lists of people on Twitter, but not the usual offering that Twitter natively gives you. You can create lists for 'People like me', 'Sort my following', 'Who I recently followed' and more. They provide dozens of pre-set lists based on your own account, and these lists can constantly update themselves.

What's interesting though is that their Formulytics option really does give some interesting data on the particular lists that you have created - and since it's also possible to create lists based around a hashtag it's worth playing with.

First of all, create an account. I've already done this, so a snippet from my home page looks like this:

Click to add more lists and you have the options:

Under the 'Expand your network' option you can choose to "See Who Uses a Hashtag or Search Term Most". This gives you a variety of options:

Choose your options, hashtag and then Formulists will go away and create a list. The default is for 40 people, but you can increase this to a total of 500. The more people you choose, the longer it takes to create the list - I set mine up and came back the next day and it was all done, but don't necessarily expect it to take a few seconds.

I created a list for people who tweet with the hashtag #savelibraries. This gave me a total of 383 accounts to follow, and I can check such options as to see who is particularly engaged with the hashtag, key influencers, 'social hubs' - the small number of people who really drive the use of the hashtag forward, most re-tweeted tweets using the hashtag, timings - an analysis of the last week, with days and times for tweets and retweets, popular content, top locations and top keywords in biographies. Here's a few screenshots:

Times to engage, tweet or retweet.

Some of the key social hubs for #savelibraries

And lastly, some of the influencers. Not surprising to see some familiar faces in that collection!

You can see the list by visiting the public page that's created for it, though you don't get all the analytical data that I've mentioned above. Formulists is a commercial product, but you can create a free subscription which has 2 lists, daily updates, and you have to visit every couple of months. Plan details for Pro and Supreme accounts are available.

I enjoy using Formulists - it's a really good way to keep on top of what's happening with Twitter, and if you've got a few minutes, it's worth trying out.

(Under full disclosure: Formulists let me have a supreme account to play around with but they didn't ask me to blog about the service unless I wished to, and they made no restrictions on what I could say. So my words as usual are my own, and I think you all know me well enough to know that if I thought something was rubbish I'd say so!)

More Google search insanities

Since I tend to use rather better search engines than Google I was vaguely aware that they'd been messing around with advanced search, but today was the first time that I went there intending to do an Advanced search and the option wasn't where it should have been. A slight panic - had Google actually got rid of it entirely? Given their attitude towards search recently, and the wholesale destruction of things like the Wonderwheel and dropping the use of the '+' symbol it wouldn't have surprised me that much to be honest.

However no, they've just made it more difficult to find. In the normal, sane world, this is utter madness - why make a set of useful functions harder to get to? In Googleworld though, this makes perfect sense. Google doesn't want users to search and work out things for themselves - they want people to take their pre-packaged, sanitized, we-know-what's-best set of results, tied into their adverts. If people start to think heaven only knows where that will end, and we can't have that. Anyway, I'll stop the rant there. To find advanced search you have two options - scroll to the bottom of the page and it's there:

Alternatively, click on the cogwheel top right hand corner, and there's access at that point:

Neither of these options are intuitive or sensible. Just to make things interesting, it would, in the sane world be logical to roll out the same thing through all the products wouldn't it. However, Googleworld is not like that. Take a look at Google News. The Advanced Search option has disappeared from there as well. To be fair, run a search and the Advanced Search option is at the bottom of the screen. But, if you like the idea of using the cogwheel, you're out of luck:

But wait! Run a search and THEN click on the cog. What do you get this time:

It's magically reappeared again. Now, that's pretty nuts, but we haven't even started yet. Take a look at the News search box - if you haven't searched, there's a half diamond - run your cursor over it, and this is what you get:

Click on it, and you'll get a dialogue box popping up:

However, if you click on the bottom of the page option, OR the cogwheel, you get taken to a new page entirely - so Google thinks it's a good idea to have two totally different ways of getting access to the same search options. But wait - there's more! Once you have run your search, the little half diamond disappears, so you can't do another advanced search in the same way. You have to use the bottom of the page or cog wheel option, OR go back manually to the News home page.

What about other offerings? You can't have advanced search with Images, as everything is done using the left hand menu choices. However, in video search, you have the cogwheel option and the bottom of the page advanced search function, but you don't get the half diamond in the search box. I could continue, but you get the idea. What's really amusing though, is if you take a look at the Offical Google blog post for June 28th 2011 you get this gem: "The way people use and experience the web is evolving, and our goal is to give you a more seamless and consistent online experience—one that works no matter which Google product you’re using or what device you’re using it on." Seriously?

Now, just before I finish, one more thing to note - Google now considers guessing is a good idea. I'll confess that this is one which passed me by until I actually saw it with my own eyes, but Google is inserting best guesses at the top of some results pages. It looks like this:

This doesn't only work for films and television, you can try it with software release dates:

You can also try it with searches such as Steve Jobs sister, Microsoft's CEO, and I love the fact that you can also do this for Google's CEO - which leads to the surreal situation that Google is taking guesses as to who is in charge! This feature doesn't work for all searches, mainly those with one or two word answers, and the examples that work change all the time - a search on the height of the Eiffel Tower used to trigger a best guess, but no longer.

Are we going to see best guesses for train times, flight arrivals, election results and so on in the future? Futhermore, we all know that people don't check facts - if someone reports something other newspapers copy it, and then we're going to end up with a best guess that's totally wrong. I suppose however it does lead to a nice line: 'Google guesses, Librarians check'.

 

Google Blog: Giving you fresher, more recent search results

The news from the Official Google blog is that they've been playing around with their algorithms to ensure that we get news that's as fresh as can be. They make the point that if you're interested in the Olympics, you're probably interested in 2012, and not some other one. They also are at pains to talk about what news means - if you're interested in a tv show, new news might be up to a week old, while if you're interested in the current economic situation in Greece, old news might only be an hour ago, so Google has to work out what is what. That's fine, and I understand it.

Searchengineland make the point that this could impact 35% of all searches, and that's an absolutely huge number. While Google is focussing on the 'news' angle, I wonder to what extent they're focussing on the subject angle. For example, if there's some sort of event going on around a celebrity for example, a whole bunch of people are going to be talking about them, so Google will, I assume, rank that news really highly. However, I come along, don't know who the celebrity is, and want to find out the basics. Does this mean that their site gets pushed down the rankings? That doesn't make my search easier, with better results, it actually makes it a lot worse. And what if I do want to know about the Olympics that took place in 1936? This change doesn't actually help at all - at best it will have no effect, but at worst it will make it much harder for me to find the information that I need.

Time will tell, and I'm happy to be proved wrong, but if SearchEngineLand is right, and this does impact in 1/3rd of our searches, that's a huge change and not one to be taken lightly.

Google working more on location

Google appears to be playing around with location options a little bit more. If you do certain searches, you're prompted to pop in a location:

Sometimes it's just coming up with a city, while at other times it seems to imply that it has to be a US location - I'm using the .com version here.

However, I put in my local post code and it was perfectly happy to accept that. Now, when I run searches, Google is automatically taking my location into account.

And...

Previously I would have had to have done a search for movie: <location>. Interestingly, I did set a location, logged out of my Google account, but it remembered the location details that I'd put in. This might be a problem with public access machines if a user personalises their results, they log out of their account and Google still links location to machine for the next user. I suspect there may possibly be a 'WTF?' thing going on.

There is a level of inconsistency going on however (which, since it's Big G that's about par for the course) in that sometimes I was able to other local data - Firefox was happy to provide me with location related data for library, Argos, supermarket and bookshop, but I was getting generic results from my Google searches over in IE. Another issue is that the approach really screws up the results page. Take a look at this:

We have a bunch of results at the top of the page, map to the right, adverts pushed down the page (no bad thing), then a section for 'Places for bookshop near' location, and then more results. It's messy and confusing, and we're swiftly returning to the days of complicated search results pages which are so bitty it's difficult to get what you want.