InsideGoogle

Google Helps You Read Experts Exchange For Free

Experts Exchange is a website that answers questions on computer issues, and it ranks very well in Google search results. Problem is, it costs money to read the answer, $12.95 a month. Luckily, they expose the full answers to search engines (which is why they are able to rank so well), so you can easily read the whole answer without registering and paying for an account.

Any time you see Experts-exchange.com in Google search, just hit the cache link to read the page with the complete answer.

Don’t even bother trying to view it normally, because they expect you to pay for content. Hopefully they left this loophole open on purpose, because we all know paying for content is a loser of a business model. The Wall Street Journal has a back door for Digg users, and this is a type of back door as well. Sites can lock down their communities to paid users, but don’t expect search engine visitors to pay.

After all, why would I pay for a website if I can’t even see the quality of the “Expert” answers?
(via Techblog.BE)

November 29th, 2007 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | Search | 3 comments

Infinite Nanoseconds!

Google’s calculator has all sorts of stuff we mere mortals can’t understand, and here’s another one:

999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 999 millenium = inf nanoseconds

Well, I didn’t know that! So, Google is saying that “infinite” is actually 999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,000 years. Good to know that there’s a definite limit on infinite.
(via Digg)

November 29th, 2007 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | Search, Humor | no comments

Google Prioritizes Sales Over Content

Google has removed the Video link on its search results pages with one to Google Product Search, relegating the very useful Video link to the “More” menu. The Video link is fourteen items down the More menu, making it a lot of work to reach. Previously, on any Google search, you could hit Video to get results from dozens of popular and unpopular video sites, making it the easiest way to find video on the internet. Now? Not so much.

Google seems to be prioritizing Product Search, with its huge links to Google Checkout, over Video, which is actually a very popular and fast growing segment of the internet. It’s a decision that, unless backed up by traffic number saying no one used the Video link, makes no sense and implies Google ignored the needs of its users over its need to sell stuff. That’s dissapointing.

I’ve been trying to find a video card for my wife’s computer all week, and Google has been no help. Every search on a product name reveals site after site that is selling that product. Why Google can’t do powerful integration with Product Search, and then remove the product results from the web results, I have no idea. I could not find forums discussing my various technical issues, because Google listed site after site with the same useless sales information.

Google needs to do a non-commercial search engine. They’d be able to sell more ads, since the results would contain no stores, and users would finally have a way to get answers to their questions. I posted my questions to my two blogs because Google was a waste of my time. Three years ago, when I started doing this, Google was the place that indexed blogs and forums and ranked them high, now it’s the place that ranks every outdated deal and online store above actual information.

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information. When it comes to searching for anything anyone is selling, there isn’t any information to be found.

November 23rd, 2007 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | Search | 7 comments

Way On Top, Google Claims More Market Share For Itself

You’d think that at some point, Google would have so much market share that it couldn’t possibly grow any further, but despite having a lock on the top spot, Google continues to claim a larger slice of the pie month after month. This time, Hitwise is reporting that Google now has 64% of the search engine market, up from 61% market share a year ago and up a point from last month. Live Search and Yahoo declined both from last month and last year, while Ask.com was up slightly.

November 20th, 2007 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | Ask, Yahoo, Microsoft, Search | no comments

Google China Gets Special Homepage

Google China has launched an alternative home page, one more dense with information and links, including links to Google services and even to the competition. The page, available at google.cn/hp?sp=china, features very different search tabs (music, TV, games, software, sports and education), representing the search interests of Chinese users, links to popular Google China services and important informational websites (including train times and network speed tests), popular searches

The bottom of the page features a large listing of links to every popular website Google could think of, including Baidu, MSN China, Yahoo, Alibaba, Newegg, Hotmail. Maybe four out of over 90 links are to Google services, the rest being a very cool effort by Google to pay more attention to the needs of users than to self-interest.

Google wants users to be able to rely on them, even if they love the competition, so this alternative Google homepage lets users have a great portal to all of the internet, with a Google search box ready if they need it. Smart.

Check out Phillip’s English translation of the homepage to get an idea of how broad the links go.

November 6th, 2007 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | Search | one comment

Google and Opera Renew Default Search Deal

Google’s deal with Opera, making Google the default search engine in new downloads of the Opera browser in exchange for Opera getting a cut of Google ad revenue from those searches, just ran out after two years. Don’t worry about it, though, since they just went ahead and cut a new deal, so expect Opera to be free for a good time to come.

November 5th, 2007 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | Search, AdWords, Advertising | no comments

Google Purchases One Of The Shortest Domains In The World

That long headline lets you know Google has purchased a three-letter domain name, g.cn, which is as short as a domain name can possibly be. The reason Google purchased it was to make a short and memorable route for Chinese users to find their Chinese search site, available at google.cn. Google.cn still works, and is the real site, but if you’re Chinese and want a quick path to Google, g.cn is the way to go.
(via The Raw Feed > Digg)

November 2nd, 2007 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | Search | 4 comments

Web History Adds Blog Search

Google Web History, which tracks all your past searches so you can re-find something you already searched for, has now added Google Blogsearch, bringing the total number of services they cover to ten:

1. Web
2. Images
3. News
4. Products
5. Sponsored Links
6. Video
7. Maps
8. Blogs
9. Books

The history for Blog Search doesn’t go back far, if at all, since I have no indexed Blog queries among all my 18,000+ searches that Web History has saved.

I was looking at my personal search Trends in Web History, and take a look at the bar graphs:

Can you believe that? I’m working just as much at 2 am as I am the entire rest of the day! And half the time, I get four or five hours of sleep? And my only real break comes around 9pm, probably when me favorite shows are on?

Oy. I wonder what everyone else’s personal trends are like. If you want, link to screenshots of them in the comments or email them to me, and we can compare them here.

UPDATE: Two readers have sent in their Web Trends. Take a look:

Haochi:

Robert Stern:

Looks like Haochi does a huge amount of surfacing in the late afternoons and gets a healthy amount of sleep, and Robert gets less sleep then me most nights!

November 2nd, 2007 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | Blogsearch, History, Search, General | 2 comments

How Do You Rank In Hebrew?

I got a link today from a Hebrew-language blog, and I decided to search Google for my first name in Hebrew. Turns out I rank sixth for “נתן“, despite having never actually written those letters here, which just makes me happy. So, I wonder if people have checked how they rank on Google in Hebrew, and if you rank at all in that language. I’m not sure how you’d find the Hebrew equivalent of your name, but give it a shot and let me know the results.

November 1st, 2007 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | Search Optimization, Search | one comment

SearchMash In Flash Now

Google’s SearchMash site, where it runs experiments in search engine design, now has two versions: The regular one we’ve been using for months, and a new Flash-powered version that puts tabs along the top and a preview pane on the right. The pane shows site previews from Snap and a small bit of other information, but it is the approach of using Flash that is questionable.

Google is trying out what others have attempted before, but no Flash search engine has ever taken off, despite the obvious graphical and interface advantages. Flash presents too many difficulties to the user, especially the fact that it breaks the whole “click a result, read result, go back, click another result” habit most searchers use. Hopefully they’ll learn something valuable from this experiment, just not try to use a Flash search engine.

October 31st, 2007 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | Search | no comments

Google Search Results Makeover

Take a look at that screenshot above. It’s of the “Google Search Results Ultimate Makeover“, a feature rich redesign of the Google search results, complete with Snap Shots website previews, PageRank and favicon images, a quick sidebar for jumping pages in the search results, scanning of sites with McAfee’s SiteAdvisor and more. Check it out.
(via Digg)

October 30th, 2007 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | Search | no comments

Google Translate Now Using Home-Grown Software

Google has stopped using Systran for its translation services, switching over to an in-house translation system that it has been building for a long time. Google Translate, which translates words or phrases, whole web pages, and is used in the “Translate this page” link you’ll occasionally see by a foreign language search result, is now powered by Google’s own machine translation system.

Google first showed off a few languages of its system 18 months ago (which means it’s probably been in development for at least twice that long), explaining how they use statistical learning techniques to provide a better translation. At least now we know why Google never bothered upgrading to the newer version of Systran’s software that Windows Live uses. Should be exciting, comparing the differences now between the two systems and figuring out which does a better job.

October 25th, 2007 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | Search | no comments

Google News Creates Facebook Application

Amidst rumors that Google has pulled ahead of Microsoft in the race to buy a portion of Facebook, Google News now has its own Facebook application. You can select from five standard categories (Entertainment News, Sci/Tech News, World News, Sports News, Business News) or enter any number of keywords.

The app gives you a page featuring the top 3 stories in each of those categories (and you can select to see more, with a button to share them with your friends. You can also view stories sent and saved by yourself or by your friends who also have the application. Basically, you can use the application as a replacement for the regular Google News, as well as a means for socially sharing news with friends.

Since the application does not add a box to your profile or annoy you, you can install it and trust it will mostly remain out of the way while adding some nice functionality to Facebook. I like that Google has specifically avoided spamming your friends, selecting no one by default on the “Invite your friends” page. Hopefully Google will create a “Popular shared news” page, so you can see which news is the most popular among Facebook users.

If you haven’t already, now would be a good time to say hi on Facebook and add me as a friend.

Screenshot by Accuracast, who thinks the app will go unnoticed because it doesn’t annoy people like other Facebook apps. He’s right, in that spammy Facebook apps are more likely to succeed, but if a few users start heavily using it to share news stories, it will spread by being useful, not by taking up profile page space and messaging all your friends.

October 24th, 2007 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | Google News, Search | one comment

Google Supported Lights Out SF with Black Google

On Saturday, Google geotargetted users visiting Google.com from San Francisco and presented them with Black Google, a black background version of the Google homepage. The goal was to promote Lights Out San Francisco, a project by former Google communications manager Nate Tyler to have all San Franciscans turn off their lights for one hour. The dark Google linked to this page explaining the reason and the event.

As Google has explained before, a black Google does not save energy, due to the way LCD monitors work, but this black Google may have helped contribute to lower energy usage by inspiring people to participate in Lights Out SF. In fact, its inspired me to turn off my 300-watt living room incandescent light bulb for up to three minutes a day.

October 24th, 2007 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | Search | no comments

Google Search Share Dips Almost Imperceptibly In September

Hitwise’s search market share stats for September, released last week, reveal that Google’s share slipped just slightly last month, falling from 63.98% to 63.55%. Yahoo slipped just about the same, MSN slipped about half of that, but Ask.com gained over eight-tenths of a percentage point, an over 20% jump for them.

UPDATE: Check out the ComScore numbers at InsideMicrosoft.

October 23rd, 2007 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | Ask, Yahoo, Microsoft, Search | 2 comments

Google Experimental Lets You Make It The Default

Google Experimental, the Labs site where you can test Google search user interface prototypes, became a lot more useful when Google added the ability to “Join the experiment”. By clicking that button, the particular experiment will become part of your Google search experience whenever you search on the regular Google.com. Since the experiments conflict with each other, you can only join one at a time, but if there’s one that you really like, here’s how to make it a part of every day.
(via Philipp)

October 18th, 2007 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | Search | no comments

65% Of Google Searches End In A Click

Compete released a study on search quality, determining that Google users click on a search result 65% of the time, while Yahoo users click 75% of the time and Microsoft users click 59% of the time. Now, there are multiple reasons why a user will click, good and bad, so this doesn’t mean that Yahoo users get better results, but the stats do show siginificant differences between the engines.

Good reasons you don’t click a search result:

• Universal Search/Ask3D type results give you the information right there on the page, eliminating the need to click elsewhere to get the information. Smart Answers will also do that. Yahoo has the least amount of this useful info, which could explain their high score.
• Good search results and snippets - if an engine has the information right there in the snippet, again, users will not click a result, since they already have the answer.

Bad reason you don’t click:

• Irrelevant results - Users get pissed off and give up, stop searching, or try a different search engine.
• Secondary searches - Users refine their queries, or run second searches when the first one doesn’t have the specific information they’re looking for.

Got any other reasons?

October 10th, 2007 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | Yahoo, Microsoft, Search | 2 comments

Google Trends Goes Daily

Google has finally decided to make Google Trends a continuously updating service, giving Trends daily updates to its data on the popularity of Google search terms. Now you can go to Trends and see data that is almost accurate to the day (current charts reach up to 10/7, two days ago), and a new “Last 30 days” chart is perfect for embedding in any blog as a way of tracking a term’s recent popularity.

Let’s compare several presidential candidates:

giuliani | ron paul | mccain | hilary | obama

iphone | ipod | zune

ipod classic | ipod nano | ipod shuffle | ipod touch

xbox 360 | wii | ps3

Now if only Google would add a way to embed the chart with the search terms included, that would be perfect.

October 9th, 2007 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | Search | 3 comments