Google Trials A9 Style Image Search

Grugnog writes "Google has started including images from it's image search on the main search page. This is similar to Amazon's A9 search engine. With Google kicking off Google Print (A9's other specialty) could A9 become redundant?"

Comments

dumb question

[Anonymous Coward]

google's finally copying someone else, and you wonder if A9 is redundant? Talk about google-fanboy!

We should be happy that there's actually innovation happening. competition is good.

Re:dumb question

[aussie_a]

Innovation on Amazon's part to cause other search companies who are considered better to add features.

Re:dumb question

[l3v1]

You mean Google doing web search, A9 using Google's web and image search results to enhance (their word) the results, now Google doing search which you/they/whatever say it's a copy of A9's. Now, stop that, I'm spinning. From the beginning A9 was a results ripoff with it's own interface. If they have something really worth using, that should do us (users) just good and fine, a little competitiveness can never hurt (if you leave MS out of it, that is :P ).

A9 Seems Redundant Already

[filmmaker]

With Google kicking off Google Print (A9's other specialty) could A9 become redundant?"

Wasn't it always? I spent some time on A9 one day -- liked the inline images -- but overall wasn't impressed. I'm sure there are dozens of handy, idiosyncratic features I missed that I'll be informed of momentarily, but my first impression was "blah."

I'd like to see more mixing of results onto a single page though. Seeing the first few images and the first few Froogle results would be a nice addition.

Re:A9 Seems Redundant Already

[Jugalator]

Something I liked with A9 was an easily accessible site info page with a site review and even rating, along with other misc. info like page ranking (from Amazon.com? Alexa?) The link was right next to the search result, like "show cached" is in Google.

What would be nice is if Google had something like this that wasn't tied into Amazon.com like that, and gave graphs for PageRank history instead of whatever ranking technology they had used.

Ummm...

[keeleysam]

http://www.google.com/search?complete=1&hl=en&q=tr aktor&btnG=Google+Search
ummm... i'm not getting pictures....

Re:Ummm...

[game kid]

ummm... i'm not getting pictures....

me neither. I, and certainly keeleysam, feel duped and disappointed.

The posted link is not Google though it seems genuine; its much larger home page is, in fact, a blog.

Makes me glad to have a status bar on my browser.

Re:Ummm...

[keeleysam]

the link in the story showed a image of a googe suggest search.

Re:Ummm...

[That's Unpossible!]

I... feel duped

No, no, no... that comes later. Possibly as early as tomorrow.

Re:Ummm...

[game kid]

i'm happy that you have a status bar.

Funniest phrase I've ever heard. Shall be sig'd any second now.

however, the posted link did not claim to be google, it's a link to a screenshot of someone getting those results. likely it is being tested, or only rolled out on some regional varieties of google.

Understood. I just don't want to be phished or something like that. I hope we all see this in Google soon.

Patents

[tajmorton]

Does Amazon have a patent on any of this? After all, they do have the "one-click" patent...

Kinda..

[krin]

throws the whole feel of Google off. The less images the better.

NSFW

[kdark1701]

So what if pornographic images pop up? Say I search for my friend's name, and then there's porn thumbnails across the screen. Not good for those of us who use google in public.

Re:NSFW

[bigberk]

Reminds me when I was in junior high (and the Internet was young), we all started trying www.dot-com's of each others' names. The girls' names usually led to porn sites. Come to think of it, that must be have been kind of hurtful when the girls see how they are just seen as sex objects

Re:NSFW

[jesser]

You assume that SafeSearch successfully blocks all porn.

Re:NSFW

[That's Unpossible!]

The girls' names usually led to porn sites. Come to think of it, that must be have been kind of hurtful when the girls see how they are just seen as sex objects

Give it up, berk. There are no girls here on slashdot, so that fake sensitivity crap will get you nowhere.

Re:NSFW

[Red Pointy Tail]

Err what's NSFW by the way? New Stuff For Wanking?

A9 IS google image search...

[MadAnthony02]

I'm pretty sure that A9/Amazon is using google's image search in it's engine. The bottom of A9 says:

Search results enhanced by Google. Results also provided by a9.com and Alexa.

Also, from the faq

Who provides web search results? A9.com's Web Search Results are enhanced by Google. Data provided by A9.com and Alexa Internet is also used for search history and Site Info.

since it doesn't mention the images as from Alexa, and since I'm guessing the A9 stuff is Amazon's inside the book, it seems logical that the image search is from google.

elaborate scam?

[gl4ss]

*****************
domain: GRUGNOG.COM
owner-address: Owen Barton
owner-address: 14 Parc Derwen
owner-address: Glan Conwy
owner-address: LL28 5BZ
owner-address: Colwyn Bay
owner-address: United Kingdom
*****************

when you use normal google there's no pics. then there's no explanation wtf is this grugnog.com

and there's no pics on normal google... which is good. pics suck most of the time when you're looking for information in TEXT.

Re:elaborate scam?

[gl4ss]

flamebait? wtf? how is it flamebait pointing out that the SITE IS NOT GOOGLES? it's all public information anyways.

the site might have worked for 10 secs, that i could admit. but it sure as hell has nothing to do with official google. such a search frontend, like a9, that included images as well would be pretty easy to implement with googleapi.

so at best some guy coded his 'own' crappy version of a9, at worst he just hand made the html for whatever reason, maybe he's trying to score on the googleads there. ....but one thing is 99.99% sure: THE FUCKING NEWS POST IS FRAUDALENT.

Re:elaborate scam?

[LocoSpitz]

Or maybe, just maybe, it's REAL and he's mirroring the results page, because Google doesn't always unveil new features like this to everyone all at once. Oftentimes new features are released only to certain subnets before they are put into wide release.

Calm down, man.

Re:elaborate scam?

[dcavens]

As mentioned in a previous slashdot story, Google often tries new features on a subset of users. Depending on how they work and feedback from users, they may or may not include them in the standard interface.

For those too lazy to click through to the original article referenced by the above story, the relevant line is:

Google makes changes small-and-often. They will sometimes trial a particular feature with a set of users from a given network subnet; for example Excite@Home users often get to see new features. They aren't told of this, just presented with the new UI and observed how they use it.

Re:elaborate scam?

[gl4ss]

you know, then he should have told us so that we would have known - and even then the story would have been unverifiable, he could have just as well said that google creates a mindmap out of every search.

as now it only looks like he took some html and edited in pictures - with no explanations whatsoever.

i hate titling posts

[Knights who say 'INT]

But A9's results are provided by Google, so if Google manages to provide the same services A9 does, then A9 _is_ redundant.

Being taken for a ride?

[PornMaster]

Grugnog.com is some guy's page, and submitting anything in that search box just gives a 404. Is this the musing of a guy who posts stuff to slashdot that he doesn't even mention in his blog (on the root of the domain)?

Re:Being taken for a ride?

[gl4ss]

maybe it's just a showing of how crap of a random job the editors take while combing through the potential news items.

you can get anything on slashdot.

Nuthin'

[liangzai]

Tried searching "pussy", got no pics. Lame joke. Mod parent down to hell.

But will it be updated?

[BigDawgES]

Remember when . . .

There was a slashdot story about how you couldn't find any of the Abu Ghraib abuse photos on google image search, and people cried censorship only to realize that google simply hadn't updated its image database?

Anyone have an idea about the current update schedule of google image search?

WTF?

[derEikopf]

This is stupid. It's not on Google's site, all other searches yield a 404, and if you click on "Images" then on "Web" again at the top, the images disappear. Editors, what were you thinking?

More info

[grugnog]

For what it's worth, the magic word is trials. Google doesn't release a new feature to everyone at once - specific subnets will see the feature first. Even I only see this with a search for 'traktor' - other searches just look the same.

Maybe others in the /. herd can verify if they get this?

...I am redirecting to mirrordot to avoid server meltdown :)

This is bogus

[Xoo]

Not to repeat what everyone else is saying, but this is definately bogus.

Grugnog used the following URL to access the page in the first pic of his search for "traktor":

http://www.google.com/search?complete=1&hl=en&lr=& safe=off&c2coff=1&q=traktor&btnG=Search

As you can see it shows the typical google search results page with the TEXT ads at top. After subsequent refreshes of my browser, I got the same thing.

I browsed around Google Suggest, even the Advanced Options, and got zilch. So please, include a working demo URL next time... and lastly, why would this make a FPP if it's not even verifiable?! Lol, :-)

Re:This is bogus

[Vacindak]

Actually, no this is not bogus, mod parent down. A couple of days ago, before this story hit, I happened to notice this feature when I did a google search for "loneliness" since I couldn't remember how to spell it. Got three images up at the top of the page, exactly like what the article showed. Subsequent attempts to get those results met with failure. So this is just a case of Google rolling things out to specific subnets. Not a hoax guys.

Re:It's not a scam

[gl4ss]

i did not get pics on google.com when typing traktor there, not even on the google suggest beta site.

local differences or whatever(but google suggest seems to use the same server anywhere..).. but the poster should have had the courtesy to link to GOOGLE, and not his own site pretending it's official google.

Strange...

[bergeron76]

I changed "Traktor" to read "Upskirt" and I got a 404 page.

I hope google doesn't make this new behaviour permanent.

Re:How about previews of the web pages?

[Roguelazer]

Try the GooglePreview extension for Firefox.

Re:Huh?

[LocoSpitz]

Duped? Not necessarily.

The HTML is from a different source because the guy just mirrored the Google page on his own site.

Why? Because oftentimes Google offers new features only to certain subnets. As that may indeed be the case here, which would explain why some but not all Slashdot users appear able to use this new feature, it only makes sense to offer a mirror or screenshot; otherwise, most people could not see this new feature.

And if the guy was trying to trick people into thinking his page was actually Google, he wouldn't have shuffled things over to Mirrordot.

Re:FAKE! FAKE! FAKE!

[LocoSpitz]

Not necessarily fake. Here's why you wouldn't link to it: As noted by numerous posters in this thread, and also on a Slashdot FPP just days ago, Google oftentimes rolls out features only to specific subnets. If you're not in that subnet, you don't get to see the feature.

Since the majority of people are unable to see this new feature, it only makes sense to offer a screenshot.

Everyone who thinks this is an elaborate hoax, or that the mirror was intended to be seen as an actual Google.com page, is reading waaaay too much into this.

Re:It's not a scam

[United544]

Have you stopped to think that possibly the reason it wasn't linked to Google is because it doesn't show up for everybody who does a search? As others have already noted, Google phases in new features over a period of time. So the poster took a screenshot and posted those instead, I can't speak for others, but I for one would call that a courteous gesture...

Fun with double entendres

[poetofnumbers]

I wonder if they'll ever have pictures for a search for tits?

It'll give goatse search a kick in the rear

[Linuxathome]

I'm sure I'm not the first person to bet that goatse.cx will increasingly be ruining young minds when google image results is truly implemented in the main search page.

A friend saw this

[Captain Nitpick]

I was on IRC back on January 6, and a friend of mine got some images at the top of a particular Google search. Nobody else on the channel could reproduce it, and it wasn't appearing for him on any other search.

His screenshot was identically formatted to these.

Ever heard of A B testing?

[graiz]

Google like many other web companies probably does some amount of A B testing. This is a way to get feedback and gauge response from a feature by releasing it to a small subset of the total population. The results of one group A are then compared to the total population B.

As an example Amazon uses A B testing all the time with many A B tests happening every day. They track to see if small changes that they make have any impact in the percentage of their users who purchase products.

It's very likely that Google does similar tests to see what minor changes can be made to improve accuracy of results and possibly increase click-through in advertisements. This particular test could explore if showing images increases the average number of searches or increases awareness of the google image tool.

Re:FAKE! FAKE! FAKE!

[dotcher]

Perhaps because if it breaks, only a smaller proportion of users are affected?

Remember the latest Google site redesign - I got to see it around a month and a half earlier than its general release, if I visited Google from Uni.

Whilst there's no evidence that's what they're doing this time, there's no evidence to the contrary either. I'll take a look when I get to Uni - if they're using the same subnets as last time, I'll probably see it.

Preview images of search results (for Firefox)

[eddydude]

There is a Firefox extension that shows preview images (thumbnails) of the sites in the google search results page:

GooglePreview Firefox extension