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Google Unveils Search Options and Google Squared

Posted by Soulskill on from the just-the-useful-bits-please dept.

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."

8 of 171 comments (clear)

  1. Google Squared? by FlyByPC · · Score: 5, Funny

    No thanks; wake me up when they come out with the "Google n*log(n)" version.

    --
    Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
    1. Re:Google Squared? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Don't worry, Google is already doing plenty of log'n.

  2. Regexp and exact word matching options by Lord+Lode · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Regexp and exact word matching options by Spy+Hunter · · Score: 5, Informative

      Google Code search supports regular expressions, so it's possible with a smaller index at least.

      --
      main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
    2. Re:Regexp and exact word matching options by JustinOpinion · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

  3. Content owners won't they lose revenue by Jeez01 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    lets say you want to research Bulls-Pistons series in 1988 and you decide to use a squared which effectively parses and gets the data you want from Basketball-reference or one of those. Those sites will not get any page hits...

  4. Re:Chicken or the egghead? by LUH+3418 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I would think they're pretty serious about this. Google pours alot of R&D money into improving its search engine. In their mind, I believe this represents another step closer to one day having a search engine that can truely understand questions asked by users, which really, is the ultimate goal for any search engine.

    It seems obvious that for them to publicize this now is a response to Wolfram Alpha, but clearly, Google wants to keep is technological edge over the competition. Now, what will be interesting to see is how much people care about these new search options, and whether or not someone buys Wolfram Alpha.

  5. Re:Blocking results from certain sites... by DisKurzion · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I would only need one domain on that list:

    experts-exchange.com