Tag Archives | Search Engines

Google's New Look is Mobile, Too

Posted by Harry McCracken on May 5, 2010 at 4:20 pm

I’m still waiting for the new Google interface to show up as my default. But here’s an interesting side note: Google is rolling out a mobile version at the same time, with pretty much the same sidebar of filtering options. On phones, though, there’s less real estate to work with, so the sidebar appears only when you ask for it, and shoves the results over to the right.

I know I’ll use this at least occasionally, since I tend to use Google on phones much the same way I do on a computer. (When I have the yen to research something, I just do it on whatever device I have handy.) In theory, though, teeming masses of smartphone users aren’t that interested doing the sort of sophisticated searching that the sidebar enables–you have to be pretty serious about your Googling before you decide to restrict search results to a specific date range. I wonder just how often folks will use these features?

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Google's New Design Gets Official

Posted by Harry McCracken on May 5, 2010 at 8:34 am

The New York Times’ Brad Stone is reporting that Google is rolling out a new version of its search results with a left-hand sidebar today and tomorrow. It’s the final version of a design it’s been experimenting with for a long time, and bears a general conceptual resemblance to the sidebar at Bing, although the execution is quite different. I’m not getting it as my default yet, but wrote about a test version I stumbled across in March.

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Cuil Me Once, Shame On You…

Posted by Harry McCracken on April 13, 2010 at 12:40 am

Remember Cuil? Back in 2008, The search engine gained brief notoriety back in 2008 by claiming to be better than Google when it was in fact laughably, bizarrely bad. Then it mostly disappeared, except when bloggers need a synonym for “failed launch” or “unbridled hubris.”

Now Cuil is back with a new project I learned about in a GigaOM post by Matthew Ingram: Cpedia, an algorithmic encyclopedia with more than 384 million “automated articles.” Cuil founder and CEO Tom Costello explains:

Cpedia returns an automatically written article in response to a query, rather than a list of hits. It can be very compelling; it is especially good at surfacing facts that I didn’t know before. At other times it is weird — it does reflect the web after all.

[section explaining that Cpedia censors offensive matter snipped]

I find Cpedia best on topics that I thought I knew about. I find out things I should have known but didn’t. I’ve noticed productivity has slowed in the company since we have had it up for internal testing, as people ask each other about stranger and stranger trivia, or exclaim, “I didn’t know your middle name was Hector?”

Cpedia is very different from a traditional search engine, and not at all like Wikipedia, but that is its strength; it is something new and different. I hope you like it. I certainly do.

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Google’s China Move

Posted by Harry McCracken on March 22, 2010 at 2:07 pm

A little over two months ago, Google declared that it had been the victim of a massive hacker attack originating within China, and had decided as a result that it would no longer participate in government-imposed self-censorship within mainland China. It said it would discuss its next steps with the Chinese government, and while the company hasn’t disclosed the nature of those discussions, we now know their upshot: Google has shut down its censored Chinese version and is now giving mainlanders an uncensored search engine in Simplified Chinese, delivered from its servers in Hong Kong.

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Another Secret New Google

Posted by Harry McCracken on March 1, 2010 at 6:10 pm

Last November, I wrote about a test version of Google that left its search options sidebar open all the time. It never graduated to full public status. But I just stumbled upon what seems to be a variant. (It’s what I’m getting when I go to Google in Safari, but doesn’t show up in Chrome.)

Like the early test, it puts a left-hand sidebar of search options on the screen whenever you search–but this one’s sleeker, with fewer options (some stuff is hidden by default).

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Five Sites Beyond Google

Posted by Harry McCracken on February 14, 2010 at 11:51 am

[NOTE: Here’s another story I wrote for FoxNews.com. This one’s on cool ways to find information that go beyond Google, and mentions Aardvark.I wrote it last Monday and it was was published on Tuesday–and on Thursday, TechCrunch broke the news that Google was buying Aardvark.)

How much do I love Google? Thanks to the stats provided by Google Web History, it’s easy to quantify: Over the past four and a half years, I’ve Googled for information 43,295 times. That works out to about one search per hour, 24/7/365. If that doesn’t indicate passion for the world’s most popular search engine, I don’t know what does.

But I’d never argue that Google is always the fastest, most effective way to find facts, seek advice, take actions, or simply satisfy your curiosity about the world around you. Actually, there are more viable Google alternatives than ever. For the most part, they don’t compete by trying to out-Google Google at basic Web searching. Instead, they do useful things that Google doesn’t.

I’m nowhere near as dependent on any of these five free services as I am on Google — but I use and recommend them all.

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Yahoo’s Sketch-a-Search

Posted by Harry McCracken on February 10, 2010 at 11:20 am

I’m at Yahoo this morning for a press event the company is holding about its search activities. One overarching goal, clearly, is to make the case that Yahoo intends to remain an innovative force in search even assuming that its deal with Microsoft goes through and Bing’s index winds up as the basis of Yahoo’s search features.

Unlike yesterday’s Google Buzz launch, Yahoo’s event doesn’t involve any major announcement. We’ve seen a few brief recaps of minor recent additions to Yahoo’s search features, and gotten some quick previews of features in the works. The most interesting of the latter demos was of an iPhone app that lets you draw an outline with your fingertip on a map to indicate a geographic area, then get local results–for instance, to find restaurants on the waterfront.

Here’s a lousy photograph of the feature in action:

Yahoo says the goal is to let people search as easily as kids draw with an Etch-a-Sketch–it calls this feature “sketch-a-search.” As someone who spent a lot of time with an Etch-a-Sketch in my youth, the metaphor doesn’t quite make sense: The defining feature of the Etch-a-Sketch is that it’s hard to get a picture out of it that’s anything like the one you might have in your head. (It’s a lot of fun to try, though.)

I do like Sketch-a-Search, though–I’ve certainly spent a lot of time on the iPhone and other phones futzing with maps and having trouble zooming in to the geographical area I care about. I tend to end up either with the entire United States or a one-block radius, when what I really want is a region of half a mile or so.

Yahoo didn’t have anything to say about when or how they’ll make Sketch-a-Search available to consumers.

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Exactly Right, Google. Exactly Right

Posted by Harry McCracken on January 12, 2010 at 3:57 pm

For as long as western companies have been doing business in China–under Chinese laws–there’s been a fundamental question that’s been a subject of immense controversy: Are they helping to make China more free, or are they helping the Chinese government prevent more freedom?

Until now, Google has been one of a number of U.S. Web companies that has willingly provided a censored version of its services in China as a prerequisite of doing business there. It’s maintained that providing the Chinese people with access to some information is better than denying them access to Google entirely, and its Chinese search engine has carried a disclaimer that some links are suppressed.

But now that’s changing. In a fascinating blog post, Google has disclosed that it discovered a sophisticated hacker attack on its systems in mid-December. Its investigation revealed that the target was the accounts of Chinese human rights activists, and that the attack encompassed other large companies. It further found that the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists had been breached through such means as malware installed on their computers.

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