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Google Tests Custom Highlights, Comments In Search
Ian Lamont writes "Google is testing functionality that lets users tinker with query results by re-ranking them and commenting on them. The reason for the commenting feature: 'We're just curious to see how it will be used,' according to a Google engineer quoted in the article. The company has posted screenshots of some of the experiments, which also involve highlighting certain results as well as stems and synonyms within results. Google declined to answer any questions about the experiments, and it's not known whether Google would factor the rearranging of results by users into the overall computation for ranking results for those specific queries. It's also not clear whether search result comments would be made available to anyone to read."
Or you could use the Google cache with Firefox and scroll all the way to the bottom of their page - you'll see all the answers you need.
If you have Firefox, use the Customize Google add-on at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/743
Experts-Exchange was useful up until a couple of years ago...
Comments? From people? On the Internet?
Does Google have a line on a new revenue stream that involves harvesting every known variant on "CHAD IS TEH GAY!!!1!"?
Never approach a vast undertaking with a half-vast plan.
Scroll to the bottom of the page. You will see another copy of the comments unhidden.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
You can get a firefox extension to do this already folks :) It lets you list certain domains to block from results. (google returns full results, the extn uses regex I think to filter before showing the result set to you.
One thing I wish I had control over was the "Did you mean:" function. I'd like to be able to answer the question yes or no, rather than having to go into the query and putting quote marks where I want to search for a word it thinks is spelled wrong.
You already can. For instance, say you are looking for "FUBAR". For "no", you just use the results it gives you on the page where it asks "did you mean FOOBAR?" as if it didn't ask. For "yes", click the word "FOOBAR" and it will give you listings of "FOOBAR" with the search term changed to "FOOBAR".
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
This is what I thought until I looked more closely. EE definitely seems to serve different pages to GoogleBot, and appears to serve different pages to people referred directly from Google. I believe this is a distinct violation of Google's listing policy, and to be consistent with how they treat all the other website operators Google should be immediately de-listing Experts Exchange until it serves identical pages to Google as what it serves to everyone.
Try installing User Agent Switcher in Firefox, then browse to this URL. If it's like me, you'll get no comments at the bottom, but as soon as you switch to mimicing GoogleBot, you'll get a heap of responses.
EE is definitely serving different pages to people referred directly from Google. Try clicking through to a result from Google and you'll get the comments at the bottom. If you open a blank tab, though, and paste the same URL into that tab, you won't get the responses (unless you're pretending to be GoogleBot again). This is definitely what happens for me, anyway.
There's also something weird happening in the Related Solutions section of EE pages, which is probably to do with EE giving Google different URLs to crawl. eg. Take a look at the "Related Solutions" section of this page on EE, and look closely at the URLs. (I reached this EE page using the top result of the Google search that someone pointed out elsewhere in the thread.)
When I look at the URLs in the Related Solutions section, they all point to what first looks like static HTML, but with "?eeSearch=true" appended to the end of the URLs. If I then go to the Google Cache edition, it looks similar but doesn't pass the eeSearch=true parameter.
I'm not sure what effect this has because with or without appending '?eeSearch=true', I still get the same behaviour which is to show comments on the page if I'm pretending to be GoogleBot, and not show them if I'm not. It's almost certainly something to do with tricking Google, probably to make Google think that they're static HTML pages when they're actually not.