October 15, 2007

Debby From The Block: U Penn Long Tail Blockbuster

No way I could pass on pointing to the Debby Richman blockbuster post.

Wharton says: Online recommendation engines may chop off Long Tail of Search.

Prick up your ears, Chris Anderson Your Long Tail doberman (below) is under attack:

Search Technology & Relevancy area of the Search Engine Watch Forums.

Posted by Bill Slawski at 6:52 AM | Permalink

July 12, 2006

Yahoo's Livesearch Added To Firefox

Yahoo launched Livesearch on AllTheWeb back in May. Danny has a detailed post about how it is similar to Lookahead and Google Suggest. Anyway, as we suggested on May 16th, Livesearch capabilities from Yahoo has been added to a new version of Firefox 2.0. You can download the new Firefox here and give it a try. Also you can read more at the Yahoo Search Blog, which has links to more methods of downloads.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 2:52 PM | Permalink

July 6, 2006

Search For "Therapy Products" On Google Suggests Yahoo As Alternative Results

SEO Speedwagon posts notes that a query on Google for [therapy products] displays a See Results For box listing pages from Yahoo. These mid-page results are supposed to help people find pages somehow related to their original query -- but Yahoo really has nothing to do with therapy products. How weird, how strange? I had to take a screen capture myself, just in case the others get lost.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:26 AM | Permalink

May 16, 2006

Firefox To Add Search Suggestions To Search Toolbar

Gary Price spotted that Firefox will be adding search suggestions in the Firefox search box from Google and Yahoo. Search suggestions is becoming very popular...

(1) Yesterday Snap.com added suggestions/auto-complete search results. (2) Yahoo added Livesearch to AllTheWeb, which is search suggestions. (3) Of course we have Google Suggest (4) I use Inquisitor for my Apple Safari browser. (5) But LookAhead has been doing this before anyone.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:03 AM | Permalink

May 15, 2006

Snap.com's New User Interface & Adds New Features

Snap.com has released a new user interface for its search results page. As you begin typing your query, it does the whole Google Suggest, LookAhead, AllTheWeb LiveSearch auto complete suggested query thing. Then you submit your query and the interface snaps (literally) into a two column view. On the left are the search results and on the right is a preview of the landing page of the result selected on the left. This is a more, in your face approach to Ask.com's Binoculars, that allows you to mouse over to see a site preview. For the full release, download the PDF document.

Postscript From Danny: See also Upstart search engine blurs the lines of advertising from the Associated Press, which covers issues raised over whether Snap is doing proper disclosure of paid listings. Meanwhile, Overture Founder Starts Pay-Per-Action System from the San Jose Mercury news covers the move to a cost-per-action payment system for ads.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 10:27 AM | Permalink

May 10, 2006

Yahoo Tests Livesearch On AllTheWeb; Google Patent Problem, Perhaps?

Yahoo's AllTheWeb service is sporting a new Livesearch feature. It's pretty interesting. As you type into the search box, search results automatically start appearing. And more interesting, it's similar to something Google's already sought to patent.

Let's dive into the Livesearch system first. Say you are looking for information about HD TVs. You type h, and a list of suggested searches appears to the left of the main search results area, including:

  • h
  • hotmail
  • home depot
  • hi5...

In the search results, you start seeing listings for hotmail, second on the list. That's the term AllTheWeb is guessing you might be after. Ah -- but we're not after hotmail! That's OK. As soon as you enter another letter, making hd, you get:

  • hd
  • hdtv
  • hd dvd
  • henry draper star catalogue
  • hdfc bank...

In the search results, hdtv is automatically selected as your search query, giving you results on that topic.

It'll be fun to see if this takes off more if it moves to regular Yahoo. Potentially, it will speed up searching, giving you answers faster than you've even completed typing in your search terms.

Certainly it's nice to see the query refinement given better play than on Yahoo, making it easier for people to understand there are alternatives and related terms to their queries. Query refinement has long felt neglected, as I've covered more in my Robert Scoble Wants What We Had -- Better Query Refinement. So Do I! and More On Query Refinement, The Human Scale Problem & Creating The Search Dialog posts last year.

Yahoo explains a bit more about Livesearch in its blog post, Livesearch on AlltheWeb, plus they give some feedback options there. Meanwhile, a revisit to some things that Livesearch is similar to:

  • SurfWax LookAhead: SurfWax has offered its tool since at least 2003, where it suggests related searches (but not actual results) based on the content in a web site or from a controlled vocabulary. Surfwax's SurfWax News service is an excellent place to see it in action, where suggestions change as you type in the search box. You can also try WikiWax, which gives you suggestions for searching against Wikipedia. Gary Price explained more about both services in this September 2005 SearchDay article: Surfwax Offers Look-Ahead Technology for Web Sites. Gary's also just put LookAhead technology into his DocuTicker site.  
  • AOL Pinpoint Shopping: Start entering a query and watch how suggestions start to appear below the search box. Pinpoint's been doing this since September 2004. AOL's main search site sort of offers a similar thing with its Smartbox service rolled out last January, but looking today, it doesn't seem to work nearly as well as the Pinpoint service or some of the other services above, giving me mainly company info suggestions, if anything at all.  
  • Google Suggest: It also doesn't give you answers automatically, but it does suggest related terms as you type. It's not built into regular Google (still -- it launched at the end of 2004!), but it was added to the Google Toolbar last September and to Google News earlier this month.  
  • Snap.com: You can't see it now, since Snap's currently down with a "come back and see the new Snap on May 15th" message. But it did offer a dynamic suggestion tool last April that probably will return.  
  • Ask Zoom: It's not a dynamic suggestion tool, in that you won't see things appear as you type. But it probably is the most sophisticated or substantial query refinement feature any major search engine offers. Enter a query, then on the results, you can use the Narrow Your Search or Expand Your Search sections to access related queries. Introduced under the Zoom name in May 2005.  
  • Become.com: Start entering a query, and like Google Suggest, it suggests searches right below the search box. Debuted in June 2005.  
  • Yahoo Instant Search: Like Livesearch, enter a query and see a result appear -- but only one. Debuted in September 2005.  
  • Answers.com: Same as Become.com -- entering a query and get suggested searches below the search box. Debuted in December 2005.

Just to stress, none of the services above goes the extra step of actually showing results automatically, in addition to suggested search terms, as Livesearch does. I do feel like I've seen someone do this combo move before, but I can't think of any offhand or after doing some searching. Those closest thing is how Google will prefetch the first result in a listed for a query for those using Firefox, as a means of speeding up access to pages. But that's a different concept altogether.

Closer to the mark, Bill Slawski's very detailed Can Google Read Your Mind? Processing Predictive Queries article talks about a Google patent application on a system that seems very close to what Yahoo's Livesearch is doing. Bill might pop in here to postscript some thoughts on how this applies to what Yahoo's doing.

Certainly Livesearch demonstrates one thing -- how quickly search engines can generate results, or more correctly, how many results they already have cached and ready to serve up without having to "hit disk" to actually do a search.

In other words, when so many people are constantly searching for things like "hdtv," search engines don't have to always go back and search through billions of pages for the results. They can simply pull up the same results they already served recently from fast memory, a long-standing practice for being speedy.

It's also nice to see AllTheWeb finally used for something again, I suppose. Back when Overture bought it, it was positioned as sort of a alpha testing platform with AltaVista a more consumer friendly beta site. Then Yahoo bought Overture, pretty much throwing both AllTheWeb and AltaVista into abandonment.

Postscript

I do see a number of similarities between Live Search and Google Suggest, but there are differences, too. I'm excited to see AllTheWeb being used in this manner.

I did look back at some of the Yahoo! patents and patent applications to see if I could find something similar to what Yahoo! is doing in this Livesearch. I did come up with something close in a patent application that is part of a larger set of refinements to a search user interface in Universal search interface systems and methods. There, we're told that:

The present invention provides highly sophisticated query completion features. As a user types, related words and units are shown (could appear in a drop-down box). These could be based on related searches but personalized to an individual user. For example, when user types in "sf", a drop-box showing weather, hotels, restaurants, etc. may be shown based, in part, on what this user has searched for in the past about "sf".

This patent application was filed April 5, 2004 and published December 9, 2004, earlier than Google's Anticipated query generation and processing in a search engine. But it covers a wider range of enhancements to a search interface. It will be interesting if some of the other concepts discussed in the Yahoo! patent application make their way into livesearch. -- Bill Slawski

Postscript 2 From Danny: I did ask Yahoo about the patent issue, but they said they couldn't comment on legal issues.

Want to comment or discuss? Visit our Search Engine Watch Forums thread, Yahoo Powered Livesearch on AlltheWeb.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:55 AM | Permalink

May 1, 2006

Google Suggest For Google News

Google announced that they have added the Google Suggest feature to Google News. To try Google Suggest for Google News out, visit http://news.google.com/news?complete=1. This is a nice feature to help people narrow down the news searches they perform.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:08 AM | Permalink

April 4, 2006

Google Related Links Now Out; Challenges Yahoo's Year-Old Y!Q Links

Google Blogoscoped spots a new Google Labs release, Google Related Links. We wrote about these appearing last month, but there was no way for people to get them then for their own sites. Now you can.

The service puts a little box on your page where Google analyzes the content to show related searches, news and web pages to your visitors. And for helping promote Google in this way, you get .... a little box to put on your page.

Well, it's not like Yahoo's paying you either to put Y!Q links on your pages. Y!Q -- I prefer to write it YQ -- puts a link on your page allowing people to search for related content. You know, sort of like Google's just done, only Yahoo did it a year ago.

In a face-off between the two, I guess I like that Google gives you the option of up to three types of related material: searches, web pages and news rather than just web search. But be aware that YQ has a ton of developer options you can dig into.

Also be aware that despite being out for a year, you're hardly stumbling over YQ links across the web. Maybe Google will have that ever so more cool factor that picks up adoption. I'd personally be more inclined if it helped me direct users to find related content on my own site. YQ does have a feature allowing this. However, it involved going into the API which leaves little old non-programmer me thinking it far too much work to play with.

Meanwhile, Google certainly is easier to install. YQ wants me to put stuff in the header area of my pages, which sucks since I might not want to have YQ on every page. You also have to associate YQ with sections of text, rather than just slap it up on a page and let it figure things out automatically. Too much work for me.

Google Related Links FAQ here; YQ FAQ here. An example of Google Related Links is also shown below:

 

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:44 AM | Permalink

March 21, 2006

Amazon Changes "Did You Mean?" Result For "Abortion" Query

Wired News reports that Amazon has changed the way to handles the search query "abortion." In that past, Amazon would place a message at the top of the search results of a query on abortion; stating, "Did you mean adoption?" The message was completely algorithmic, based on related searches for adoption and abortion. They are recently changed the page to not show this message, but you should still notice "related searches" for alternatives to abortion queries at Amazon.com

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:52 AM | Permalink

January 29, 2006

Related Phrases Now Part of Google's Define: Feature

Philipp asks if a feature from Google that provides links to "related phrases" when you search for web-based definitions using "define:[foo]" is new. Nice catch P.L., not sure if it's new or a test (I'm checking) but it's something I haven't spotted before. Clicking a related phrase link runs another define: search for that specific phrase.

Danny recently posted about a UI test that offers refinement keywords on web results pages.

Examples: + Define:Google + Define:search engine + define:san francisco + Define:olympics In this case the related phrases seemed random. For example, why "1956 Olympics" but not "1976 Olympics"? Why "canada at the 2004 olympics" but not "Canada at the 2000 Olympics?

I also tried searching with personal names to see if the service would return other people who are/were related in one way or another.

Examples: + Define:"Danny Sullivan" or Define:Danny Sullivan Other search experts? Other race car drivers? Nothing.

+ Define:"Thomas Jefferson" Places and things relating to TJ are listed but individuals who are linked in some way (Benjamin Franklin, John Hancock, etc.) are not.

+ Define:Peter Jackson An entry for the director of King Kong and The Lord of the Rings trilogy is provided but others like stars of the films, producers, writers, etc. are not listed.

Similar Services Yahoo I've noticed that for some time that Yahoo provides "Also try" links at the top of web results pages for some searches. Examples: + Chicago Bulls Clicking the more link provides this page of NUMEROUS suggestions. + Thomas Jefferson

Ask Jeeves The AJ Zoom feature launched last year (similar to what Teoma has offered for many years) offers the ability to narrow or broaden your search and in some cases also pulls out related names. + Chicago Bulls + Thomas Jefferson

+ MSN Search I tried searches for Chicago Bulls and Thomas Jefferson and did not spot any type of related search suggestions or search focus choices.

+ Gigblast offers Gigabits

+ Exalead offers related terms in the left hand column. This example shows related terms for the phrase "search engine marketing."

+ Clusty's dynamically generated clusters are available to help narrow and focus a result set and like the services from the other companies can also provide info discovery.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:50 PM | Permalink

January 13, 2006

Google Testing New Refinement/Clustering Links -- Sign Of Google Base In Web Search?

Maybe it's new -- maybe not, but another Google query refinement test is out in the wild, as covered in our SEW Forums thread Google Refinement Keywords. There are links to screenshots showing that after a search, a "Quick results" area appears at the top of the page with links that seem to narrow refine results into clusters/topics. Something similar was seen last month.

The topics and implementation resemble what happens after a search at Google Base , such as with apple, which brings up this at the top of the page:

Refine your search:  products   housing   homes for sale   apartments   wanted ads   services  

It makes me wonder if the refinement is going along with some Google Base material flowing into the main web index as part of a test.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:53 AM | Permalink

December 27, 2005

Google Patent May Shed Light On Google Suggest & Speeding Up Search Results

New Patent Application Explains Google Suggest over at Search Engine Roundtable points at and summarizes Bill Slawski's discussion at Cre8asite about how a patent application for Google Suggest reveals that it may gather terms from most popular searches, hot news searches, recent searches and most used searches. Bill's also got a very nice blog post, Can Google Read Your Mind? Processing Predictive Queries, on how the prediction could also be used to cache search results for anticipated queries and speed up answers even more.

Poistscript from Gary: As I've pointed on several occasions, Google Suggest is not the first tool to offer dynamic search term suggestions. In fact, other resources not only point to potential results but also take you directly to a specific page. This recent post about a new "find as you search" feature from Answers.com offers a look at several of these tools.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 11:08 AM | Permalink

October 4, 2005

More On Query Refinement, The Human Scale Problem & Creating The Search Dialog

Yesterday, I wrote of how search engines could do a better job of query refinement and indeed did so in the past, especially because there was more human involvement in the search process. That drew out Jim Lanzone, senior vice president of search properties at Ask Jeeves, who sent me an email raising a good point that humans haven't gone away just because of the expense. Humans also have a "scale" problem. More comments from Jim on that are below, along with a further look at the scale issue and the need for the Google Generation to rediscover query refinement.

I agree with both Jim and Christopher Coulter, who commented on Robert Scoble's reference to my blog post:

Yeah well the Yahoo Human-Edited model couldn't scale, so you get Google Pagerank automational noised chaos. It's back to 1996 all over again. And the best 'search' is with a database

Indeed, humans haven't scaled well in terms of helping us gather content from across the web. Crawlers do a great job of that. I used a library metaphor on my ODP Founder Comments & Moving Past Directories post earlier this year to explain why directories, after some promise, went away in the face of crawlers.

In short, imagine you go into a library and can use one of two card catalogs to find books on a topic you are interested in:

  • The human-compiled card catalog looks only at book titles and short human-written descriptions of the books, maybe 25-75 words in all.  
  • The crawler-compiled card catalog will let you scan every word on every page of every book in the library.

The crawler-built catalog is far more comprehensive. It's also far more up-to-date. Remember, in the library of the web, the books often rewrite themselves or add pages in the way books in a physical library do not. Humans simply can't keep up with that activity.

The key, of course, is that the crawler service isn't just comprehensive but relevant. It will find not just all the matching pages but often rank them so you are getting the very best ones.

While humans don't scale well in the info gathering and retrieval side, they can play a role. More on that in a moment, but first, here's what Jim said in response to my post:

To say that the problem with human editors was due to it being "expensive" is true, but I don’t think it goes far enough to explain the problem.

Sure, Ask had great relevancy, but only for a single-digit percentage of the overall query stream. That is not how people search, and neither you or I or any number of Web Search Universities is going to change that for the vast majority of searchers.

Algorithmic search was the only solution to that problem because only an index of billions of pages could meet the user need that exists across the long tail of rare queries.

At its peak, the Ask Jeeves "knowledgebase," as it was known internally, matched on about 85% of searches. That was a lot. However, it was only picked 20-25 percent of the time, despite having premium placement at the top of the page.

Sure, some searches resulted in far higher pick rates than this. But the vast majority did not. Therein lay the problem. And due to the exquisite overpromise made by the premise of question-answering and the butler, this had consequences for the Ask Jeeves brand.

The brand was lucky, on the other hand, to gain a foothold in the market early on, and to hold on to millions of users because of it. But at the end of the day, people use a search engine to find what they need - quickly. That foothold would have become more tenuous had we not bolstered our ability to answer searches (questions or keywords) more accurately, more quickly, and more easily, than the original Ask product could deliver.

Today, with a combination of algo search, structured data search (Smart Answers), and unique tools that help people find things faster (Zoom, Binoculars), we are delivering against user needs exponentially more than we did before.

At the end of the day, this is about playing defense, not offense, against that wide and vast stream of searches. Most people are going to do what they want with that little white box, and will not have the patience of learning how to "search better" or set up a bunch of parameters ahead of time. The minute we understood this and started intuitively responding to their searches with better results and options, the more loyal those users became to our search engine.

Again, I agree with much of what Jim says. Historically, we know that searchers don't read help documentation, don't make use of options, don't do anything much beyond put a word or two in that black hole of a search box and get sucked in to click on whatever seems like the first "normal" result that comes up. Put a bunch of refinement links/suggested searches in front of them, and they're likely to just ignore those as being "weird" and move down toward the real results.

Solutions? First and foremost, do break the habit! I've taught search classes for many years, and people are amazed that when they look a bit past the standard 10 listings, there are options and suggestions that are useful.

In fact, we'll be doing a "Pimp Your Search Engine" or "Bling Your Search Engine" series shortly via SearchDay to try and help many readers understand some of the many features that are offered to you on your own favorite search engines that habit just may have blinded you to. Get 100 results at a time! Pop open new windows from search results! Discover easy ways to refine your queries!

Beyond that, let's see the search engines do more to make use of both humans and automation. I do want a human-created knowledgebase at Ask Jeeves and elsewhere to return.

Maybe it has to be much smaller and serve only the very most popular queries. But why not make it that if I type in hotels on Ask Jeeves, the automatically-generated "Narrow Your Search" options off to the right-hand side might be determined to make more sense to show up in the main part of the results, to better help people narrow in.

Moreover, look at what I get now at Ask Jeeves in that Narrow Your Search section:

Why not step beyond the automation and for this type of broad, common search, come up with some human-generated suggestions, such as:

  • Find a hotel by price, location or other options Find the official site of a hotel chain
  • Find reviews of particular hotels

Those aren't perfect solutions/options, but I think they make the point. There ought to be more the search engine can do to have an actual dialog with people in the right cases.

I know, the risk is the less Google-like the results are, the more likely people are to feel uneasy or unsure about using a search engine. Well, the Google Generation needs to be smacked upside the face.

Honestly. Google has been an absolute, horrible failure in helping people refine their queries. It's no wonder people today may not even realize there are query refinement options out there beyond Google and before it existed, given that the major leader in the space hasn't made use of these. Let's see all the search engines dare to experiment more with these features and applaud them with they do.

By the way, speaking of applause, notice this over at Yahoo for hotels:

Make Hotel Reservations  -  Research Hotels  -  Special Deals Yahoo! Shortcut - About

That's listed right above the first search result. I checked it out AFTER making my suggestions above, and you can see Yahoo's hit two of the three things I thought made sense. Great work, Yahoo! OK, cynics will say these links just help push people into Yahoo's own travel search areas. Yes, but they are good areas. People should be checking them out!

Why might you miss these links? Because they still don't look like the "regular" results that are numbered. So maybe they need to change. Maybe instead of being like this:

Make Hotel Reservations  -  Research Hotels  -  Special Deals Yahoo! Shortcut - About
  1. Hotels.com - Your One-Stop Shop for Hotel Pricing, Amenities and Availability Find your hotel at Hotels.com. Get huge discounts on rooms at over 16,000 hotels and 800 cities. Rates for special events and sold out dates. Book online or call. Category: Lodging Reservation Services www.hotels.com - More from this site - Save - Block
It needs to be more like this:
  1. Make Hotel Reservations  -  Research Hotels  -  Special Deals The Yahoo Shortcut links above will take you to our special travel search areas designed to let you scan the web for hotel prices and information. You can sort by price, location, amenities and more.  
  2. Hotels.com - Your One-Stop Shop for Hotel Pricing, Amenities and Availability Find your hotel at Hotels.com. Get huge discounts on rooms at over 16,000 hotels and 800 cities. Rates for special events and sold out dates. Book online or call. Category: Lodging Reservation Services www.hotels.com - More from this site - Save - Block

Again, top of my head stuff. But I think it makes the point of the "dialog" being presented in a more listings-style format. Maybe, maybe, that might help users see stuff they're missing.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:50 AM | Permalink

October 3, 2005

Robert Scoble Wants What We Had -- Better Query Refinement. So Do I!

Robert Scoble's just finished reading John Battelle's book The Search and ponders creating a new chapter to follow John's ending one on "The Perfect Search." In short, Robert wants better query refinement. Well, we've had in the past and maybe will get again in the future. Below, I'll walk you through how exactly what Robert wants came and, sadly, went away. Plus my own thoughts on The Perfect Search.

Robert writes:

Now, go to "hotel" and you'll see what I call an intermediary at the top (hotels.com). You'll also see Hilton, Marriott, Best Western, among others.

But that's not what you wanted. Remember, you were going to New York. So, you realize your search isn't specific enough. So, you enter "new york hotel."

Now we're getting somewhere. Lots of hotels. But, the first one is a hotel in Las Vegas. That's what we call "noise." Google can't decide between hotels IN New York or hotels NAMED New York.

Ahh, now you are understanding the problem. Today's search engines don't understand the CONTEXT of your search.

Yep, that's the classic problem. Nor is it a new one that today's search engines are grappling with. They've understood it for over a decade.

This is what I quoted WebCrawler creator Brian Pinkerton saying when I wrote my How Search Engines Rank Web Pages page originally back in 1996:

As WebCrawler founder Brian Pinkerton puts it, "Imagine walking up to a librarian and saying, 'travel.' They’re going to look at you with a blank face."

OK -- a librarian's not really going to stare at you with a vacant expression. Instead, they're going to ask you questions to better understand what you are looking for.

Unfortunately, search engines don't have the ability to ask a few questions to focus your search, as a librarian can. They also can't rely on judgment and past experience to rank web pages, in the way humans can.

Many search writers have quoted Brian on this, because he's explained it often and well. A search engine, unlike a librarian, can't interrogate you. It can't ask further questions to help you narrow in on what you are looking for.

That's why the regular trend of someone trotting out a super-magical "natural language" search engine is always laughable. The pitch generally goes something like, "This search engine is smart enough to know when you typed in a sentence about AIDS that you meant AIDS the disease rather than aids as in something that helps you."

That would be great if people entered sentences with a variety of terms helpful for analysis. They don't. They enter anywhere between one to three words, typically. There's no context to analyze.

Instead, what you really want is someone to ask you further questions and give you options to explore. As Robert writes:

So, what COULD search engines do? Well, first, give me some choices at the top of the page. Why couldn't search engines ask you these questions:

1) "are you looking for hotels in New York or named New York?" 2) Are you looking for hotels with free Wifi? 3) Are you looking for hotels with great views? 4) Are you looking for hotels nearby major tourist destinations? 5) Are you looking for hotels with above average ammenities like super large bathtubs, well stocked minibars, etc.?

Indeed, they could. Indeed, they have. That was the claim to fame for Ask Jeeves, when it launched in 1997. As I wrote then:

[Ask Jeeves] provides matching web pages, but results are usually prefaced by questions aimed at helping users find the information they want. For example, a search for "Bill Clinton" brings back a results pages topped by these questions:

+ Where can I find information about US President Bill Clinton + Who ran for U.S. President in 1996?

That's what Robert wants. And it worked. Ask Jeeves had great relevancy that helped it gain marketshare that it continues to hold on to today because of this initial "question answering." But it wasn't natural language search technology that made it happen, as people often mistakenly assume about Ask Jeeves. It was a bunch of human editors who watched the queries that came in, then made questions to help refine your search further, then linked you to preselected pages that seemed to have the right answer.

My Ask Jeeves: Asking Questions To Give You Answers article from 1998 looks even further at this:

Enter Ask Jeeves. The service does an impressive job of getting people to what they want by asking questions.

For example, imagine you want information about cars. Enter "cars" into the Ask Jeeves search box, and the service comes back with questions like:

+ Where can I find product reviews for cars? + Which models of cars are most frequently stolen? + Where can I locate information on the history of automobiles?

In front of each question is a Go icon. Choosing it takes users to a web site that answers the question.

The secret to the accuracy of Ask Jeeves is human intervention. About 30 people work full time creating the knowledge base of questions, which currently numbers about 7 million. They come up with ideas on their own, especially for popular topics, and they also watch what people are actually searching for.

So what happened? Why don't we STILL have the refinement Robert wants? Because humans are expensive, and analyzing links was cheaper. Google popularized that, and all the search engines went the crawler/algorithm/automation route. Ask dropped its editors.

So did MSN, by the way. MSN used to have editors that did this type Ask Jeeves-style refinement. As I wrote back in 2000:

New "Popular Search Topics" links that now appear below the search box, after you perform a search. These are suggestions designed to help you easily narrow your request to a particular topic, if your original search was ambiguous. For example, in a search for "saturn," you'll see these options:

+ Saturn Corporation (auto manufacturer) + Saturn (planet) + Sega Saturn cheats (game hints)

Select a topic, and the search engine will rerun your request focused around that particular topic. However, the real beauty to these is that you're not simply giving the search engine new words to search for, such as "planet saturn," if you were to choose the planet-oriented topic. While those words will appear in the search box, behind the scenes they are mapped to other words that editors at MSN Search believe will bring up the best sites for that topic. Moreover, the editors may have preselected what they believe to be the best sites for that particular query.

That's just one example of the hard work going on at MSN Search to improve the quality of their results. A team of editors closely monitors search logs and provides human intervention where needed to improve the listings. Misspellings are a good example. Consider:

That editorial oversight I always felt was a key reason why MSN did, at one time, have very good relevancy. But in the quest to embrace links and crawling (and cost savings with that), it went away.

How about Yahoo? Yahoo's human compiled directory structure helped make the service popular in my book because the directory lead to query refinement in a way the crawlers couldn't match. You can still get to that, as I explained in my recent Google Ranking Itself Tops For Britney Spears & The Need For Better Categorization post, but you've gotta work hard to get there:

The reality is every search on any search engine will have some irrelevant results. Ideally, what you'd want for a popular and broad query on Britney is to get a better classification of types of results you can see: official sites, fan sites, sites about her film career, Britney as a part of popular society and so on. Since everything has some relevancy, such groupings help ensure you get into a particular area related to Britney that you're interested in.

For example, consider if you searched on Yahoo Directory, where you could see all directory categories like this:

  • Rock and Pop > Britney Spears
  • Rock and Pop > Anti-Britney Spears
  • Britney Spears Concert Tickets
  • Britney Spears > Lyrics

    • See how the "topical relevancy" of all things Britney is divided into four major areas? How about the 208 topics that Clusty finds, which include:

    Sadly, the demise of human-powered directories on major search engines has all but killed such categorization from really being show to searchers.

    I've seen various prototypes of query refinement tools from smaller players over the years, and query refinement at the major players isn't dead, of course. Ask Jeeves just improved its Zoom tool, for example. In addition, the continued growth of vertical search helps. It's easier to give you lots and lots of options of hotels to choose from when you're in a travel vertical search engine. That's because unlike in regular search, you're probably in a better frame of mind to make use of relevant drop-down boxes and checkboxes that would be ignored in web search.

    Overall, I share Robert's frustrated times 100! One of the reasons I've found tagging a waste of time, as I ranted in my Another Poke At Tags As Search Savior piece, is because search engines have had tools to help us better refine our results and cluster pages into topical areas. It's just been ignored -- ignored to the point that we're making use of tools like tagging to make up for what we ought to get from the search engines directly.

    John's seen Robert's post and gives a few comments here. Tim Bray touches on Robert wanting the Semantic Web here. General comments from those reading Robert's post can be found on his blog here.

    FYI, John asked me for thoughts on The Perfect Search that didn't make the cut for the book. But if you're curious, here's what I emailed him back last September. I'll ask him if I can add in the email I was responding to, that puts my response in better context. If so, you'll see it added here later. My response:

    I can't imagine such a world. It makes a nice pitch for the search companies, but knowledge is a messy thing.

    If we're talking about indisputable facts, it's a bit easier. Thomas Jefferson was the third president of the United States. I know of no one who questions that.

    Who was the first person on the moon. Neil Armstrong -- unless you are of the contingent that believes moon landings never happened. OK, I think those folks are crackpots. But the perfect search that comes back with Armstrong isn't the perfect search for them.

    What's the answer to gay marriage? Who killed Kennedy? Was Bush right or wrong for going into Iraq? Is the MMR vaccine safe for children?

    None of these can be answered definitively. They're more than just questions with nuances. They're questions that have answers ultimately determined the by reader themselves, answers that may be different for each person, based on what they choose to believe after reviewing many opinions.

    I can envision a system that tries to collect for you a variety of references on topics. Maybe it even assembles them into an encyclopdia-like, wiki-like page. The assemby of this knowledge might be considered "answers" by some. To me, it still represents the start of a knowledge quest. It's akin to exactly how search works now -- a list of references, with the searcher still needing to explore.

    I'm sure we'll see search advance on simply pointing people to the easy stuff, the facts that can be produced, direct navigation to web sites and so on. I'm also sure we'll see search improve to better understand what we're interested in, based on past habit and visits. But all knowledge will never be accessible, unless they figure out a way to digitize the minds of everyone living and dead. Even when dealing with what knowledge we do have chronicled, distilling a perfect answer is impossible. God could provide a perfect search as you outline. Search engines aren't God today, and they'll never be.

    Having said this, I was agast last year when some Wi-Fi exec likened Google to God in Friedman's column. While we may not have the perfect search, nor will we, some people may believe search engines (and the web by extension) already offer it.

    We've had articles about judges searching the web themselves to see if they can dig up evidence. Fox News lamely tries to defend calling the BBC anti-American by citing search counts. Students apparently are abandoning traditional research methods and assuming the magic little search box brings up the right answer. I've watched people spend tons of time searching for a company's phone number rather than just calling information. Two television shows I watched this week had characters talking about how they "Googled" something, with the assumption that whatever they retrieved must be correct. Some people already believe a perfect search tool exists, and the way it is shaping them is that they're relying on it too exclusively.

    So the threat is this. In a world where people believe a perfect search exists, that world may fail to seek out knowledge in other ways. Someone blogs something that's factually incorrect. Search picks this up. There are no other references out there. Search is perfect, ergo, what's wrong becomes right. No one bothers to actually follow up on the fact.

    I was fortunate enough in college to hear Loren Needles from Analytica talk about the need to fully question any facts. At the time, he talked about how a recent hurricane had been blamed for a dropoff in some economic indicators. In short order, he quickly demonstrated how there was no way the hurricane could have cause a dropoff of such extent. Despite this, newspapers across the country accepted the explanation as fact.

    That's what a perfect search potentially does for us, makes us less questioning because we think the answers are all in that little box. They aren't, nor will they ever be.

    Posted by Danny Sullivan at 12:41 PM | Permalink

    September 29, 2005

    MSN Shopping Adds Search Refinements for Hundreds of Product Categories

    Just up on the MSN Shopping Insider is a post about some new and useful features that have gone live at MSN Shopping. Now, it's possible to focus and refine a shopping search using attributes that are specific to the product category your searching in. This has been possible with MSN Shopping in the past with categories like televisions and computers but as of today these types of refinements are available in more than 300 categories. For example, if you're searching for flowers, you can now focus your flower search by type (roses, lillies, etc), arrangement type (bouquet, vase, planter, etc.) flower color, and seller. Of course, you can also focus by price range. If you're searching for a diamonds, you can refine by color, carat, clarity, cut and price. Little to no learning curve to use these refinements. A good example of keeping it simple.

    I didn't check all 300 categories (-:, but I did look at other shopping engines to see what refinements they offer shopping for diamonds.

    + Shopzilla also allows to refine by stone shape, carat, cut, color, clarity, and price range. + Shopping.com allows a searcher to refine a search for diamonds by clarity, carat, and price. Very similar to MSN Shopping. + PriceGrabber offers a carat refinement. + Yahoo Shopping, refine by price. + Become.com, refine by price. + Froogle, refine by price and store

    Posted by Gary Price at 8:31 PM | Permalink

    August 19, 2005

    More Testing Of Middle Of The Page Query Refinement At Google

    The Googleplex is playing with its search results again. Out is the "Dissatisfied" query refinement we wrote about earlier this month. In is, well, the same thing -- they've just seemed to drop the word dissatisfied.

    Mike Grehan dropped me a note yesterday about what seemed like to him to be commercial listings in the middle of regular results for el dorado. Looking more closely, they don't appear to be ads. Yes, they do have tracking codes. By they aren't codes as used for ads. Instead, it just looks like Google in particular wants to track clicks here as part of evaluating the test. For the record, as noted below, Google itself says these aren't ads.

    Dave Naylor spotted the change last week and posted yesterday some screenshots of what he's seen. He illustrates how this test seems to be the same thing Google did earlier this month.

    Look at his first screenshot, and you'll see in the middle of the page this section:

    Dissatisfied See results for: tokenizer java

    Under this comes three URLs, one from Sun.com and two from Koders.com. Now look at the second screenshot, and you'll see:

    See results for: tokenizer java

    The results have changed -- still three URLs, but this time two from Sun.com and one from Princeton University. Why the change? Results change all the time, so it's not surprising to see some shift.

    What's going on? Google is likely wanting to help people refine their queries. Imagine the person who searched for [tokenizer] who was looking for that as it relates to Java. The skim the first results and don't see what they want. Google doesn't want them dissatisfied, so it's saying in the middle of the page essentially -- maybe you'd prefer these other results.

    Go to Ask Jeeves, and you can see the much more mature way Ask has long done this. Same search, tokenizer, and on the right-hand side is a Narrow Your Search area which lists as alternatives to try, "tokenizer.java" as one.

    So basically -- nothing really new here other than to drop the word "Dissatisfied." That makes sense. Directly suggesting to your searchers that they may be dissatisfied with you -- even if they are -- isn't the wisest of moves. There are other way to help them without calling yourself out as a failure.

    Google Tests "Commercial" Results In Organic Listings from ClickZ looks at the situation leading off with one firm implying that Google is doing something "commercial" in nature in what it presents in that area. Google denies these are ads in that section, nor do they appear to be. One of the cited searches, for on demand, has plenty of commercial stuff outside the results. And in the tokenizer query above, the Princeton URL isn't commercial. FYI, MediaPost also has a brief article mentioning another example where you'll see this in action, us.

    By the way, here's a thought. Over the past few months, we've had Google testing three ads up top rather than two, clustered results, a "more results" experiment and this current query refinement test.

    I know there's a balancing in wanting to test things without messing with the test by drawing attention to it. But neither is it good for people to wonder if there's spyware at work or ad slip-ins happening without their knowledge. Put a message out on the Google Blog when these things are going on, so enquiring minds know and others don't have to guess or speculate.

    Want to discuss? Visit our forum threads New More Results Experiment On Google and "Dissatisfied?" UI Change to Google.

    Postscript: If you're looking for an official statement from Google, they just sent the following to SEW Blog: Google is testing an automated technique for detecting when an alternate query might help users find what they are looking for more quickly. For these searches, which are both commercial and non-commercial in nature, Google displays one or more alternate queries together with a preview of their top results. Postscript 2: Google's Matt Cutts provides further details in his UI fun: Better queries and UI fun: Better snippets has more information.

    Posted by Danny Sullivan at 1:25 PM | Permalink

    August 5, 2005

    Another Google UI Test?

    Yesterday, eagle-eyed Steve Rubel sent me a note about what he was seeing on a Google results page. Could it be another UI test? Here's a screen cap that Steve sent along with his note.

    The searcher first sees a few results for specifically what they've entered. Then, the searcher is asked if they're "dissatisfied" with what the results they're seeing. Without needing to click, a suggestion is made and a new result(s) is listed. I'm thinking of it of variation on a traditional spellcheck.

    Btw, I tried transposing letters of acronyms and also misspelling words and was unable to find a "dissatisfied" option but I rarely seem to be able to see Google UI test on my home computer.

    Postscript: Google has confirmed this UI test.

    Posted by Gary Price at 11:00 AM | Permalink

    June 7, 2005

    Become.com Now Providing Dynamic Search Term Suggestions

    Via Threadwatch and an e-mail from Become.com's CEO and Co-Founder, Michael Yang, news that the shopping research engine is now providing dynamic search term suggestions that can help the searcher create a more precise query (with little effort) even before clicking the search button.

    For more about Become.com, here's a link to a SearchDay overview article by Chris. Become.com joins other search services that provide dynamic search term suggestions. In some cases, suggestions are related to the popularity of the query. In other cases, the suggestions come from a controlled vocabulary of terms. Some of these services include:

    News Accumulator from SurfWax PinpointShopping Google Suggest AOL Search PinpointTravel WikiWax from Surfwax Snap.com

    Posted by Gary Price at 11:08 PM | Permalink

    June 2, 2005

    Seekport UK Offers New Refinement Service; Announces Contest

    An article from Netimperative reports that Seekport's UK engine has released a new service that tries to identify homographs (words with the he exact same spelling but two different meanings) and then allow the searcher to clarify their search by simply clicking.

    For example, a search for the word "tear" asks if I'm looking for material about a "muscle tear" or a "tear drop." If yes, I can then click and run a new, more focused search. Interesting idea that if nothing else might help remind searchers that using precise search terms can help deliver better results.

    First prize of an Apple iPod photo will be awarded to the entrant who submits the most homographs, second prize of an iPod mini will be awarded to the most unusual homograph as decided by Seekport’s UK index team. In addition, iPod shuffles will be presented to five random contestants who submit at least one homograph. Homographs that are already listed on the Seekport search engine will not be admissible.

    Google offers a feature to include synonyms (words with the same or nearly the same meaning) in your search. I've also found that using the dynamic clusters that Clusty provides can sometimes help with these types of issues.

    Posted by Gary Price at 9:48 AM | Permalink

    May 26, 2005

    Ask Jeeves Gains "Zoom" Query Refinement & "Web Answers" Features

    In today's SearchDay, Chris Sherman and Gary Price look at new features added to Ask Jeeves. The new "Zoom" query refinement feature lets you better locate alternative topics that you may wish to search for. The web answers feature generates answers to questions from content found across the web. More in the SearchDay article, Ask Jeeves Serves Up New Features.

    Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:45 AM | Permalink

    April 19, 2005

    A New Dynamic Search Term Suggestion Tool from Snap

    Searchblog clues us into a new dynamic query suggestion tool from Snap.com. It might look and feel like Google Suggest but the difference is that instead of listing how many hits a search term or phrase might have, Snap.com lists how many times the terms have been searched. Snap's Bill Gross tells JB,

    Google suggest is awesome, but doesn’t do substrings, just the leading characters of the search term, I believe. Also, Google shows you hit count in the index, not number of searches performed by users. Number of searches by users seems to yield useful results from the “network” of people in a collaborative filtering kind of way.

    Want to check out other dynamic query and search term suggestion tools? Resources from Surfwax and AOL's Pinpoint Shopping are linked to in this post.

    Posted by Gary Price at 3:43 PM | Permalink

    April 6, 2005

    Google Testing New Related Searches & Clustering System?

    Over at Search Engine Lowdown, Andy reports that a member of his team has possibly discovered a new feature that Google might be testing. Then again, it could be adware.

    So what is Google possibly testing? As Beal explains (screenshots provided), an icon at the bottom of web results pages labeled "try alternate searches" allows the searcher to open a new page with searches for related terms. For example, a search for "desktop computer" offers a link to a page of "Try alternate searches" for the queries:

    + computer support + computer buying guide + free desktop wallpaper + desktop computer prices

    The first three results for each search are provided along with a link to get more results.

    I ran a few Google searches but was unable to duplicate the results. Not a surprise however since Google is likely testing with a small group of users. However, as Andy notes at the end of his post, this could all just be adware. Stay tuned?

    Postscript: Google has confirmed that they are testing the alternate results feature.

    Posted by Gary Price at 12:23 PM | Permalink | TrackBack

    March 10, 2005

    Google Makes Suggestions in Japanese

    Here's one for those of you who search in Japanese, or know people who do, a Japanese version of Google Suggest is now online.

    Posted by Gary Price at 1:10 AM | Permalink | TrackBack

    February 3, 2005

    Yahoo Testing YQ "Search By Example" Tool

    Yahoo is launching a new tool that lets you submit all or part of a web page that you're viewing as a search query, rather than the traditional method of typing words into a search box. The tool, called Y!Q, analyzes the content you've submitted and extracts the most relevant terms from the page, and presents results accordingly.

    It's an interesting idea. Northern Light used to allow searchers to cut and paste an entire web page as a search query, but you had no way to refine results. Y!Q allows you to tweak results in several ways, even letting you add subsequent search result pages into the mix with just a click of a link. Today's SearchDay article, Yahoo Offers New Contextual Search Tool, describes this cool new utility, available for both Internet Explorer and Firefox browsers.

    Want to discuss? Would adding sponsored links make this a threat to Google AdSense? Join the discussion in our forum thread, Yahoo Testing Contextual Search Tool.

    Posted by Chris Sherman at 12:01 AM | Permalink | TrackBack

    January 4, 2005

    ObjectGraph and Other Dynamic Search Term Suggestion Tools

    If you find Google Suggest interesting and/or useful, Tara lets us know about the ObjectGraph Dictionary. It has the look and feel of the new Google new term suggestion tool.

    ObjectGraph allows you to find definitions based on a word list using a version of the 1913 edition of Webster's Unabridged Dictionary (about 200,000 words) or the Free Online Dictionary of Computing (about 14,000 terms).

    Btw, in this December blog post, I pointed out two other services: AOL's PinPoint Shopping and the LookAhead News Index from Surfwax that also offer dynamic search term suggestions. AOL's tool has been online for several months while LookAhead News has been available for about a year. Worth a look.

    Posted by Gary Price at 6:46 PM | Permalink | TrackBack

    December 10, 2004

    Google Suggest Offers Query Refinement

    Google is long, long overdue to provide query refinement tools that other search engines have had for ages. You know, like if you search for cars on Yahoo, it will come back and say at the top of the page:

    Also try: used cars, rental cars, cars for sale, new cars   More...

    Or over at Ask Jeeves, a search for cars brings up a list of "Related Searches" on the right-hand side of the screen.

    This type of feature is great for searchers who begin too broadly with their query. Google's beta tested refinement links like this in the past against a small random sample of searchers. But now the new Google Suggest feature finally lets anyone use it.

    There's a twist Google Suggest from what Google's experimented with before. Rather than show you suggestions AFTER you search, Google starts popping up suggestions within the search box while you type, before you search.

    It's different, and I don't really know if I like it yet. I wish I could get the traditional "do the search, we'll show you the most popular related searches as links" style of refinement in addition or instead of this.

    Tara Calishain, where I picked up the news of the new feature from, also finds it a bit distracting and wants more as well: Google Has A New One for the Labs -- Google Suggest.

    Gary points out that AOL's Pinpoint Shopping has a similar feature that when you type "drops down" suggestions as you type but before you search. I checked it out, and it's a nice implementation.

    Want to learn more? Be sure to check out the Google Suggest FAQ.

    Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:45 AM | Permalink | TrackBack