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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 use the Google toolbar and never really go to the Google webpage. Will the Google toolbar be able to access the personalized profiles for personalized searches? I haven't spotted the answer yet. I'll try the personalized searches, but don't plan on using anything but the Google toolbar for 95% of my searches.
Google is of course known for its simple interface and accurate results. Now they're expanding into becoming more of a portal by providing more services. It's nice to see they don't make their pages clunky and overloaded.
Also, interestingly enough, Google has released their new web API. It will be interesting to see how this develops.
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.
what they need is a new section 'google mailing lists', which functions similarly to google groups, you can search newsgroup items, view the whole thread in a nested format, etc
although they would probably need to archive the mailing lists from various sources, could take quite a bit of work
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
(Please ignore (or mod down) the same post further down, this is where it was meant to be)
in the regoin category: > Africa > Asia > Caribbean > Central America > Europe > Middle East > Oceania > Polar Regions > South America > United States so where's Canada?
Google seems to registered has registered 466453.com for Google Number Service on cell phones. The idea is that users just send the numbers on a phone keypad for their serarch query, with Google doing the magic of figuring out what you meant. The number 466453 was selected because it's the number you get if you type out "Google" that way.
So, I ran two side-by-side tabs, one which contains the "normal" Google search and the other contains the "personalized" search, with the slider set at "max". It seems to do a fairly good job. I set a couple of preferences, and now it seems to rank stuff which mentions Linux higher.
Or move the slider around and watch the search results rearrange themselves on the page!
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
If people think this'd be a cool open-source project I wouldn't mind throwing out the sources (just ugly nests of perl scripts with a postgresql backend) and seeing what people do with them. Not documented yet. If people are interested, feel free to email me at srchengine-interest@cheapcomplexdevices.com , and if more than a few people ask, I'll put something up and let people know when I wrote enough of a doc to use it.
not safe for work
Under Regions:
Africa
Asia
Caribbean
Central America
Europe
Middle East
Oceania
Polar Regions
South America
United States - (Points to individual States)
OK. So how do I choose Canada?
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
I wish that google would add an ability to limit their usenet archive searches by # of messages in a thread.
Many times, I only find one solitary question (1 message) posted, without any answers. :(
Google has changed its looks drastically. Methinks this is due to the following reason:
1. Every search engine copies the original google look - i.e., tabbed sections for images/groups etc
2. Every search engine also copies the sponsored results look, i.e, Adwords in blue/green boxes on the right and ad results on the top.
So Google has gone ahead and implemented a distinct look by removing the tabbed sections (dunno if this is good or bad) and removing the boxes from the Adword results, and instead just separating them by a thin blue line (looks good in my opinion).
"When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail." - Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
They don't need a registration, they know who you are already. Probably more about you than you would feel comfortable with. One question. Is there any way for me the user to erase my user trails on google?
what they need is a new section 'google mailing lists'
You mean like The Mail Archive or MARC?
Or if you like a newsgroup view of mailing lists there is always Gmane
Who said Freedom was Fair?
My first impressions are pretty good. The links that im not interested in on the first page drop pretty fast when i use the slider. But i hope the extra time its taking to do the searches are just a beta thing.
WWJD? JWRTFM.
Search for 'Naked', search for 'sex' -- even with preferences set to minimum, porn doesn't turn up. That's actually an excellent feature.. but a little surprising. Actually, the first 10 results have a very "yahoo" hand reviewed look to them.
This is going to be a real killer app for me, as soon as they add more languages besides english.
Lot of my searches are in my own language, that is Finnish. Naturally, they cannot really guess what pages are related to computers or astronomy (my interests) when they are not in english.
For example, when I search for "Austin" I get (depending on the slider) either the city page for Austin, TX or the local astronomy society. For my hometown of Tampere, Finland I get either the town page or Tampere University of Technology (because it has pages in english). My local club is not listed.
Hope that they will add more languages soon.
OK, this may not be a terribly practical use, but it's interesting: I just put in my first name and the first names of my two sisters, wondering if (against all odds) it would complete the set with my parents' names. Instead Google returned a set of four items: the three names I'd given it, plus a fourth name... which happens to be a name my parents considered giving to my little sister, and would have been on the short list if they'd had another child. It's probably just picking up on name preferences of the 1960's in my parents' culture, but in a sense it "predicted" what my baby sister would have been named.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
As for finding results you didn't anticipate, are you saying that you'd rather have less accurate results?
I'm reposting this here because it's important:
:-/)
Dmoz is dead. I myself was rejected about 5 times in the last 4 years. But the really important point is
- quality went down, way down
- the way dmoz works is against changing stuff quickly
- there is no peer review. Once you're an editor, you can pretty much do what you like. There is a master-subordinate system at work though so your category's parent's editor can control you, but this is wrong on so many levels:
a) those people are often lazy
b) those people can't look after everything
c) the system makes people eager to climb the ladder as fast as possible instead of working on things
d) leads to building of factions that work for each other.
In short, the basic rules of dmoz automatically lead to the mess we've got now.
But the biggest problem is: there is nothing better at hand, so Google and dozens of other website use its still the best thing around yet really bad.
I'd suggest to build something new along these lines:
- wiki-style editing to ensure fast updates
- slashdot-style modding to ensure good + fair quality
- meta-discussion forums to argue wheter any entry/mod/move/category-creation is correct with polls to decide otherwise
- Various anti-spammer/anti-troll methods, like relying on metamod-karma to ensure a safe and fair operation
- A final editorial team that gets out of the way in 99,99% of all cases, but tries hard to keep stop spammer from taking over the platform by constantly reworking the platform (like Slashdot, too).
Sounds interesting? Any work in this direction already on track? Somebody interested in starting it?
(old message here, posted earlier today 3 hours after topic went live and nobody commented on it - but we all know that on slashdot 3-hours-old topics old are old news
I'm suprised nobody posted about some of googles other new features, like package tracking, which has been a godsend. With hotmail (i only use it for shopping online) screwing up links like it does, the tracking links in the confirmation almost never work, but i can just c&p the tracking number into the google bar in opera now and have my summary in 2 clicks.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Every time you try to use this on a different computer, you'll have to re-enter your preferences: with no login or registration, your preferences are no more than a cookie.
Not implying this is a huge problem, but it does have a downside.
"Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself." -Richard Feynman
He's not on the list of execs anymore!
Did Brin and Page fire their first employee?