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."

Comments

Re:How about this --

[InvisblePinkUnicorn]

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.

Re:How about this --

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Re:Sweet!

[MyLongNickName]

Scroll to the bottom of the page. You will see another copy of the comments unhidden.

grob

[kkffjj]

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.

Re:Did you mean:

[sm62704]

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".