Librarian of Fortune

Bing gets a brain!

Thanks to the inimitable Tara Calashain's ResearchBuzz, I just learned that Bing finally supports advanced search operators. This Advanced Operator Reference page provides a quick overview of the operators.

Granted, some of them have been hiding in the background for a long time -- the hasfeed: operator is one of my favorite hidden gems.  [Here's how it works -- to look for a page that has an RSS feed and that has the word apiculture, use the query  apiculture hasfeed:  ]

Some of the other operators offer some interesting possibilities... Take the norelax: operator, for example. Bing's default with a search query of five or more words is to "relax" the requirement that the fifth and later words appear in each search result. Norelax:search_term tells Bing that this search term, even if in a string of four or more other words, must be in each search result.

Then there's instreamset:, which lets you combine fields in which you want to limit your search words. If you want to limit your search to words in the title or anchor, you can use instreamset:(title anchor):search_term  You can include any combination of title, body, anchor and URL.

If you think Bing's only for casual use, check out these advanced search operators.

The $6 job search

This is a great video about someone who wanted to land a job in advertising. He spent $6 (yes, total cost $6) buying Google Adwords targeting agency executives who were googling their own name. His message:

He bought Adwords for 5 executives' names, landed 4 interviews and 2 job offers, and now works for Y&R.

Google becomes a reality search engine

I've been talking about "reality browsers" such as the Layar app for iPhones and Android phones. Google has done them one better with Google Goggles. As the New York Times described it:

Google unveiled a smartphone application called Goggles. It allows users to search the Web, not by typing or by speaking keywords, but by snapping an image with a cellphone and feeding it into Google’s search engine.

How tall is that mountain on the horizon? Snap and get the answer. Who is the artist behind this painting? Snap and find out. What about that stadium in front of you? Snap and see a schedule of future games there.

This is just too cool. One more step toward the day when I'll have magic glasses that remind me the name of the person walking toward me with a smile on her face and her hand extended in greeting, who I cannot remember from Adam's off ox.

Google does social searching

Google just rolled out Social Search, a new experiment in providing better or more relevant results. You join the experiment through google.com/experimental  In addition to the usual results, if you click the "show options" link at the top of the search results page, you'll see an option for Social. This separates out just the results from your circle of friends (that Google knows about).

Google identifies your friends through a few means:

• Your Google Contacts (did you know about this? - another place to house info on all your contacts
• Google Reader
• links in your Google profile to other social services (Twitter, Friendfeed, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.)
• your gmail chat contacts

Damn you, Google! Yet another reason to share all my personal links with you...

Jumping Jehosaphat! Google search results include "jump to"

Cool new feature in Google search results. According to the Official Google Blog, you'll now start seeing links in the search result snippets that link directly to the section of a page that is most relevant.
In this example, if you click the link labeled Jump to Your HDL (good) cholesterol level, you'll jump to that specific section of the page.

According to Google's Webmaster Central Blog, these links are identified primarily by the structure of the page. If the page includes a table of contents with well-labeled internal hyperlinks, it's more likely that search results will include Jump to links.Google has been doing a version of this for quite a while, with its section links for certain web results.

I haven't seen the Jump to link much in my search results. What's interesting is that, like Google Squared, we're seeing Google providing analysis of search results.

Google Squared

I just posted the August issue of my (more or less) monthly e-newsletter, Bates InfoTips. I cover Google Squared, one of the new additions to Google Labs. It's a demonstration of a search engine trying to provide answers instead of just sites, and at a higher level than the simple "smart answers" you see when you search for "time in Rome" or "area code 909". Rather, Google analyzes the retrieved pages, identifies common elements, and creates a table with the information it has compiled.

This is a fascinating tool that helps you compile facts into tables that Google builds on the fly. Hard to describe, easier to show. Go to Google.com/squared and type in a query that will retrieve a number of similar things -- organic farms in Colorado, for example, or women CEOs... [the rest is here]

Google's new search experiments

The official Google blog just announced Google's More Search Options feature that I blogged about back in March. Interestingly, it's no longer working reliably for me.

But it also rolled out Preferred Sites, where you can specify specific URLs that you want ranked more highly. Search results from those sites are flagged so you notice them.

Another victim of Wikipedia... Microsoft

Not particularly surprising, but Microsoft has just pulled the plug on Encarta. Who wants a static encyclopedia when there's Wikipedia?

And I wonder what kind of an impact this will have on other traditional resources that have been insufficiently "repurposed" their content. As I've said in my talks about Gen Y's impact on the workplace, the whole idea of authoritative sources just doesn't resonate the same way it did for us old-time librarians. When you've grown up with Wikipedia, who cares about an "encyclopedia".

Your own search clouds

Just learned about Search Cloudlet from Gary Price at Computers in Libraries. It's an extremely cool  Firefox-only add-on that displays a tag cloud of the results from a search in Google, Yahoo and Twitter. It delays the search results page a bit while it generates the cloud, but it's a cool way of seeing most frequent terms in the search results.

You can also display a cloud of the sites retrieved - a nice way of quickly finding a few key sites.

Yet another reason to switch from IE to Firefox.....

New stuff from Google

Google has rolled out several changes to its search results page - some more impressive than others (maybe I'm just getting jaded).  Among the notable improvements:

Larger snippet if you use >3 search terms. In the past, the search results would include a short "snippet" of text, usually no more than 2 or 3 lines, showing your search terms. However, when your query has more than 3 words, a 2-line snippet likely won't even contain all your search terms. So now, if your query is longer than that, the snippets are sometimes 4 lines long. I wish it were more consistent, but at least it's an improvement.

Initial stab at semantic search. To grossly oversimplify (my specialization), semantic search looks for occurrences not only of the words you provide but also words that are similar in meaning. In the past, Google has addressed this with a simple list of synonyms for common words. Put a ~ before a common noun, and Google will search for similar words. If you search for ~moon, you'll retrieve pages that mention the words lunar, Apollo (referencing the Apollo lunar space program), and rising. Nice theory but not so good in practice.

Google has gotten more ambitious, and now attempts a limited version of on-the-fly analysis of search results to suss out words that have similar meanings. The results are still a bit squirrely, but I love the fact that they're working on this. While Google doesn't automatically include results for other search terms, it does suggest alternate concepts at the bottom of the search page, and they're not bad. For a search on quantum physics, for example, the suggested terms included quantum theory and equations, as well as time travel, law of attraction, and what the bleep. A search for Barack Obama gave me suggestions such as Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and phrases such as barack obama muslim, barack obama middle name, and barack obama smoking.

Obviously, one of the biggest challenges with semantic searching is the computing power needed to data-mine the search results and calculate related terms, on the fly, in a matter of milliseconds. 

Search refinement tools. A hiding-in-plain-sight feature was introduced recently -- the "search tools" pull-down option. 

When Google is able to identify related concepts through its rudimentary semantic search, the search results page will include a pull-down link that easily enables you to filter your results in several different directions.

Most of the limit features are what you'd find from an advanced search, but I like having them all there in front of me. And a few of the features were initially rolled out in Google Labs -- the display of images from each search result, for example.

 

Three items near the bottom of the Search Tools list are the most interesting. Click the "More Text" link and you get..... you guessed it, more text in each snippet. You can switch the search results page display from the standard format to a timeline (also initially introduced in Google Labs).

And see that link labeled "Wonder wheel"? Click there and all the similar phrases, gleaned from Google's semantic search, are displayed in, well, kind of a wheel. In essence, it lets you explore the "trail" of related terms. While this is nothing new to anyone who uses a more visual, clustering search engine, but it's nice to see Google getting on the bandwagon. 

So, for example, with my quantum physics search, I clicked the Wonder wheel, and here's what I got:

  

When I clicked the link at the bottom for "quantum theory", a new Wonderwheel is displayed with the terms related to quantum theory. Click on any of the links in this wheel, and you'll see related terms for that word, and so on.