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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."
oh well...
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.
If you're curious what a personalized version of Google News might look like, take a look at Findory News. Findory learns from the news you read, searches thousands of sources, and finds articles that match your interests.
Wow, and the day isn't even over yet. When's Slashdot ever going to get a Google icon?
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.
Agreed. More options are good - but this search seems significantly slower than the normal Google - I really don't think that Google can get /.'ed can it?
As a side note, selecting computers as your interests doesn't skew any results for the search term "bass" towards computers - I still get bass fishing. The FAQ is wrong man!
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.
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.
I might have to fire up Mozilla or IE, since it doesn't support Safari just yet.
But I could see where this could be useful to me. Right now, my only problem with Google is that it returns too many results. By letting it know I'm not interesting (usually) about sports, religion, and other issues, I can start to specify what I want. And if I need more general, that's what the slider is for.
Nice idea. Be interesting to see how they handle things (like can I make an "account"), and then there's the privacy issue. I don't mind Google sells the data in a generic sense, as in "people interested in Clark also research political books" or some such, as long as they don't say "John Hummel has a fetish for Swedish schoolgirls with giganticly think eyebrows".
'Cause if that information got out, man would my face be red.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
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.
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!
Okay, so the categories are:
Arts/Cinema
Business/Industries
Computers
Health
Home
Kids/Teens
Music
News
Recreation
Science
Society
Sports
Regions
There should be a subcategory of "Porn" under each and every one of those.
The coolest voice ever.
(Please ignore (or mod down) the same post further down, this is where it was meant to be)
"Place hard core lesbian porn at top of search" really should be an option.
"Would you, could you, with a goat?" Dr Seuss
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.
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)
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.
Just as an example, I put redhat, debian, and mandrake into the Google Sets. It returned a bunch of alternate Linux distros. This could be useful for finding targeted information on a subject that one isn't familiar with except for a few starting elements. Not groundbreaking by any means, but it could have interesting uses, even if it's only reducing search time to find relevant information on a topic.
Qualitas edurus commercium, nullus penitus net rimor, nullus deus beneficium
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.
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.
From what I've heard the beta versions run on smaller single servers and don't harness the full power of Google's server farms. Note the disclaimer on labs.google.com that says: Please note: These technologies are still in the beginning stages of development, so they may disappear without warning or perform erratically. If something's not working on this page, please come back and try it again later.
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.
Hmm ... There are no options to remove SCO or Microsoft from the results :(
...
nick
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
You realize the slider bar at the top personalizes it in incriments deafulting to around 0, so at first it will show fish, then as you slide it to the right it will show bass related to computers. Note the special icon next to personalized items.
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
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?
Note the disclaimer on labs.google.com that says......they may disappear without warning or perform erratically.
In other words, "we're about to get slashdotted".
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
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/
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