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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 wish Google would fix their searching of mailing lists. I would love to see duplicates filtered, messages ordered by date, and indexing by subject.
Obviously you haven't even seen the google personalized search thingie. It's as clean as the traditional google search, with a link that allows you to set your search options.
- These characters were randomly selected.
That would be cool. I set up my crawler to crawl stuff as frequently as I want - i.e. the PR pages of companies who'se stocks I own, every hour, others, who cares.
One step cooler is if my "own" serch engine could share search databases in a kazaa-like-manner with other people I select, so people with similar interests can share the load.
P2P would be awesome for special-interest search.
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!
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)
Really, this could turn into Google's answer to avoid "link spam" to unrelated sites. By asking the user in advance what categories their query is going to be about, it's a way of being able to declare all offtopic sites offtopic and therefore disqualified from the results.
The ideal web search shouldn't produce 30 million hits... it should do the work of determining the one hit you really wanted to see, with a small handful of few runner ups to confirm the info on the first site.
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?
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