Google Unveils Search Options and Google Squared

CWmike writes "Saying that its users are becoming increasingly sophisticated, Google has unveiled a list of new search technologies geared to help users 'slice and dice' their Google search results, along with a new tool to help them cull information instead of Web pages. Marissa Mayer, vice president of Google's Search Products, said of Search Options in a blog post, 'We have spent a lot of time looking at how we can better understand the wide range of information that's on the Web and quickly connect people to just the nuggets they need at that moment.' Google Squared, set to be released to users as part of its Google Labs program later this month, pulls up information from different sites and presents it in an organized manner."

Comments

Regexp and exact word matching options

[Lord Lode]

I wish Google had the ability to search for regular expressions and exact word matching. Searching for exact words or things that contain other symbols than letters is unfortunately very hard with Google and so sometimes it's useless in situations where it could have been so powerful.

Re:Regexp and exact word matching options

[JustinOpinion]

Likewise, using quotation marks (that's what those double-apostrophes are called) makes it fairly easy to search suing terms including symbols.

Using quotes can help... but Google seems to strip out non-alphanumeric symbols. For instance a search for "Error 2005" and "Error #2005" yield the exact same search results, with none of the first page including the number-sign. But in theory if you're searching for an exact phrase (e.g. an error code) then those extra symbols are important.

The same thing happens for all kinds of searches that use symbols. The quotes enforce word-order but don't enforce symbols. For instance a search, with quotes, of "1.5 J/s" returns some correct results, but also matches to "1.5J S" and "1.5 (Js" and other variants... This makes searching for scientific things (e.g. parts of an equation) difficult.

This probably happens because Google works by pre-computing indexes of term frequencies and caching a huge number of queries. A free-form regex can be arbitrarily complicated and would be difficult to pre-compute and cache. To get the right results it would have to search on the full database. Similarly I guess they decided that not enough people search for crazy symbol combinations, so those are ignored. There are probably solutions to the problem (e.g. using the sub-pieces of a regex or symbol search to find candidate pages, and then only searching for the exact string on that subset), but again Google seems to have decided that the functionality is not in sufficient demand.

Re:Chicken or the egghead?

[Darundal]

Why do I care who came up with the idea first? I care about who does it best.

Here comes another lawsuit!

[Captain Spam]

Saying that its users are becoming increasingly sophisticated, Google has unveiled a list of new search technologies geared to help users 'slice and dice' their Google search results, along with a new tool to help them cull information instead of Web pages.

(emphasis mine)

And ten minutes after they release this for real, they get sued by thousands of websites claiming that they're circumventing their ad income or whatever by giving viewers an option to get the data without going to the website and thus not see the ads.

I mean, that's what the AP's whining about, right?

Re:Chicken or the egghead?

[tsalmark]

Best, and by a long shot, is how Google came to be damn-near ubiquitous.AltaVista (for search) and Yahoo (For directory) had the lions share of the market. Google was just another one of hundreds attempting to gain a foot hold in the market, until the first time you used it, then you never went back.

Re:Blocking results from certain sites...

[DisKurzion]

I would only need one domain on that list:

experts-exchange.com