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Google Offers Personalized Search
Ryan Barrett writes " Google is just overflowing with
news today. Along with the recently announced UI redesign, they've
launched a personalized search
engine on Google Labs. It's still beta, but it looks pretty cool. (Note
that it probably uses technology acquired when they bought Kaltix
last year.) Other announcements include Web Alerts, a 'numrange' command, and
image search built into Google News."
I think I'll stick with traditional Google. I like the non-cluttered look of the main page and the lack of Yahoo-ism (read: 50,000 things under the search box). But hey, to each his own and options are great things, as long as you stick with resonable defaults and you can always turn them off.
Google Labs come out with some awsome other things as well like the Google Deskbar and my personal favorite Google Voice Search (Also noteworty is Google Sets, however I can't find many uses for it yet).
-Adam C. Greenfield
I wish Google would fix their searching of mailing lists. I would love to see duplicates filtered, messages ordered by date, and indexing by subject.
Feature bloat?
I am not certain this is a good thing. Obviously, setting up filters in a search by search manner is helpful. But pre-filtering all web searches based on a menu of categories seems to me to be a great way to skewer, not filter, your results.
One of the coolest things about Google, IMO is the amount of customization they can offer storing content locally using cookies without needing any kind of registration. Nothing more annoying than having to fill out a huge form on every other website you visit, especially given that most of them ask for WAY more information than is really needed.
Google groups, where they do need registration has a form that asks for:
E-mail
Password
Password confirmation
Google rocks!
If you can use numrange to search for a certain price range in Froogle, that would make Froogle much more useful, which presently does not even have the ability to sort by price.
Hmm. Uncool, for me at least. I get more than enough personalized coverage from other sources - I already know where to go. What I rely on Google News for is a good snapshot of stuff that I haven't already heard about before. Now, if they would integrate it so that one of the boxes on the standard news site was "Personal" and one was "Local" (to balance out, L-R), that would be cool... but I think that the focus on just showing the viewer what they want to see is out of place for a news portal. Just my two cents, of course.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
inspite of adding so many features over the years, is that none of these features clutter the front page. Google.com is still just as simple as it was when they first came out - yes, they do have different categories such as images/newsgroups etc, but the interface is still almost the same and the extra stuff never cries for attention.
Even the local search feature and other features like the Google calculator etc kick in only when you make a search by making intelligent (almost) guesses - so it will be interesting to see how Google implements the personalized search when it finally goes out of beta.
More power to you Google!
"When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail." - Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
Chill dude. Google is in a tough position to fight page rank spammers since they are the only search engine worth optimizing for these days. And personalized is still in pretty early beta so it prolly will support safari when it goes gold.
There's only one feature missing from Google that I would really like: use of the HTML tag with relations of "prev" and "next" for the search results page. That would enable easy navigation via the Mozilla or Opera site navigation bar.
Maybe next time.
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
I think this is a great idea, although I'd like to be able to check boxes of stuff I don't like to see. Imagine being able to tick off commercial sites as a negative. Then, when I'm searching for info on my new digital camera I won't have to wade through dozens of commercial sites offering it for sale.
Interestingly it is working perfectly well with Konqueror. I wonder what Konqueror has, that safari is lacking, that has forced them not to support Safari right now. Google Personalized seems to be using heavy use of JavaScript, and as far as I know, Konqueror and Safari both use KJS for as a JavaScript interpreter. So...
On a side note, I think I actualy like the idea of this personalized search. Someone up here mentioned that s/he prefers the traditional search engine, cause it is uncluttered. Well, I can't see how google's personalized pages are any more cluttered than the traditional search page. They look completely the same, just in the personalized page a scroll bar is added to the search result page.
I think this actually opens a new horizon in google. You can have the traditional original search, by just moving the scroll bar to the left, or you can get a specific seacrh on a specific topic that interests you.
They might seem totaly unrelated, but given the current technologies that are comming out of Google Labs, am I the only one who is being reminded of the golden ages of Bell Labs? If the Google guys really continue to push their innovation engine with this speed, I don't see how even a monopoly should be able to crush them.
I know, I sound like a fanboy, but who isn't a fan of google? really...
--
Am I the only one that seems to have seen a rather disturbing trend of late with Google searches? Seems like every time I do a search nowadays, I end up with the first few pages (sometimes every page) of websites that are only interested in selling me the Item I was trying to find more information about, to me this is annoying as hell, as all I wanted was some specs on the product, I don't need to be shown 50 different websites that sell the damn thing and have the same Stupid General Info sheet.
Maybe its the way I am doing my searches, but I seem to recall last year about this time doing some similar Research on New items and Was getting Manufacturers, Forums about, Tech info Sites about, Reviews, etc. Not anymore though, now I get Buy it here, or we have lower prices, or Best price on the Net, etc. I have just about given up using Google for any kind of serious research searching. I shall give this Personalized Search engine a Try, and maybe I could stop getting tons of sites trying to Sell me some product that I am only interested in trying to figure out if it will work for me.
Signed, One Pissed Off Searcher.
If firefighters fight fire and crime fighters fight crime, what do Freedom fighters fight?
Search engines currently use one highly optimized relevance rank for all users. The relevance rank functions have improved tremendously, but it is increasingly difficult to make further gains with a single relevance rank function because not everyone agrees on how relevant a particular page is to a particular search.
To get further improvements, you will need many relevance ranks. With enough different relevance ranks, search results effectively will be customized to each person's definition of what is relevant. At that point, you have personalized search.
That's right, blame the companies actually innovating new technology and leave the scum that take advantage out of it. That'll teach them to come up with new things. Any search engine will have tweaking problems once it reaches sufficient popularity as Google has.
Qualitas edurus commercium, nullus penitus net rimor, nullus deus beneficium
Mmm, I am a bit surprised that everbody is so enthusiastic about Google and all what the company does.
/. moderatio points, internet user will often overlook interesting links or think that if Google can't find it, it does not exist.
1) The de facto monopoly in the search market makes us all very vulnerable. Just like
2) Google already knows a lot about what each IP address is interested in. With personalized items, it is going to be even more knowledgeable.
Could mean less diversity in the eco-internet advertising and information world.
Personally, I like to be surprised by some search results I did not anticipate (where are the they days of internet *surfing*?)
Tip from me, disable cookies on domain google.com For a bit of assureance...
I just tried the same. I tried User agent: Windows MSIE 6.0 and Mac MSIE 5.22
Drag the slider (above) to the right to personalize results. Personalized results are marked by (symbol)
What I found was that the slider thing doesn't work perfectly: it seems that there is a misalignment on the position of the slider.
If I however use the Mozilla user agent, it works perfectly.
Funny that. They are probably compensating for a poop in the MSIE code.
Debug info: Mac OS 10.2.8, Safari 1.0.2 (v85.7)
there is no spoon
I like Google precisely because it doesn't have creeping featuritis like Yahoo or portal sites. I go to google.com, I type something into the box there, bam, I find what I'm looking for. I don't need a personalized search! I don't need to search for images within Google news; I don't need five billion options on the main page telling me I can "personalize" Google. I just want simplicity.
You could try looking for "Re:" in the subject?
(Note that it probably uses technology acquired when they bought Kaltix last year)
The google image name is google_kaltix_results.gif so thats a good hint that it is from the Kaltix technology
For many people, the point of reading the news is to broaden their perspectives. There would be no point reading it if it only showed news for a small subject area. You may as well read a specialised new aggregator like Slashdot or Arstechnica.
I have no interest in sport, but I have been interested to read about the cricket matches between India and Pakistan. If Google News disregarded all sport stories, I would have missed this. Also, I like to have a cursory skim through the headlines for entertainment on Google news, even though I usually don't read the articles.
The whole point of Google news for me (and I assume for the original poster) is to see what the important stories are, not to see special interest stories that only I care about.