Search Engine Showdown Blog

Remember Gigablast?

After no activity since 2005, the last several weeks have seen additions to Gigablast's press page. Who? Gigablast is an older search engine that has done some interesting and unique things in the page. It does have its own, unique database. Now it has databases for blog search (last 30 days only) and a Wikipedia search. Also, the main blog search page has a link to the "Most Linked-To News Posts for the Last 24 Hours" along with subsets for several different languages. Gigablast also now claims to be "the leading clean-energy search engine" with 90% of its power coming from wind energy. Strangely, the new "press news" consists of single line statements with no link to a longer story. Still, if you haven't tried Gigablast in a while, it might be time to take a look at yet another Google alternative.

About Us - Gigablast via kwout

Some See "View Customizations"

After checking back with Nate and Google and asking several others to help out, I am getting reports that others at least can see the "View Customizations" notice and link. It is indeed down at the bottom of the results, much more hidden than when it was up at the top.

Here's the screen shot Nate from sent me today. Note that this is from the bottom of the search results page beneath the search box along with other seldom noticed links.

I heard from several people elsewhere who also did not see this, including Chris and Mary Ellen in Colorado and Gary in DC, and then later this evening Danny in California and Barry in NYC were starting to see this. I especially like Chris' comment to me that "The new interface doesn't seem to be working on all cylinders yet." He sent a screen shot of the databases section offering "fewer" than none! Maybe we just need to wait a few more days (or weeks?) until the new interface settles down and is a bit more consistent.

Anyone Seeing "View Customization" Links?

Last week when I wrote about the new Google look, I listed several items that appeared to be missing. Most troubling to me is the loss of the "view customizations" notification and link. So I asked Google why the "view customizations" message is no longer visible and whether it return. The response I got is that "The view customizations link is still there. It is now located at the bottom of the page below the search box."

OK, but why can't I see it then. I've done numerous searches, both logged in and not, in Firefox and in IE, and I still don't see it. I've tried different computers. I compared search results in different browsers and saw different results ranking but still no message.

I've sent a follow-up email to Google asking for a screenshot with no reply so far. So, is anyone else seeing this anywhere on the new search results page? If so, please post a screenshot at http://drop.io/showgoogle or at least post a note there that you've seen it.

Oh, and here is a screenshot of where the message used to be before the new interface changes last week.

More Google Losses

Yesterday I posted about the recent changes at Google including a few lost (or at least temporarily missing) features. One more change that I have noticed is on the advanced search page. I expect that many advanced searchers will use the left hand search tools to limit and refine their searches, especially since it contains options not available on the advanced search page. What surprised me is what is now missing on the advanced search page.

Down at the bottom of the advanced search page, up until the redesign launched, Google had a list of "Topic-specific search engines from Google" including specialized searches for government, Microsoft, and Linux.

Here are the old choices and links. All but the "Universities" search (one of their earliest) still work. While the ones in the first are linked elsewhere (and Code is not new -- it launched in 2006), the others do not appear to be linked from Google elsewhere.

And a screenshot of the bottom of the old advanced search page:

New Google UI: Always-On Left Hand Facets

Google announced yesterday that is rolling out several significant changes to its search results pages. Dubbed the Jazz user interface at SearchEngineLand, this has been in experimental mode since at least Nov. 2009. See Danny's excellent and exhaustive overview which details many of the changes. Here are several of the key points and a few cosmetic changes:

• The Search options are now always displayed in the left margin
• The options are now divided into databases and search tools
  
• Click the down arrow to display more databases under "Everything" and more search options under "Show search tools"
• New "Something different" section under Search Tools links to related but different search suggestions
  
• Estimated number of results is now under the search box
• Search button is now directly attached to the search box
  
• Google logo changes and drop shadow is gone

Additional databases and search options may automatically show up for some searches. For example, in the search on 'blue' shown to the left, three other databases (books, image, & videos) display and two search options (2 months limit and sites with images). The full set of options will only be seen when the down arrow "more" links are clicked. Expand both to see all choices. The "Something different search suggestions also only show up for some searches, but they are always displayed if available underneath the search tools.

The roll out will likely take a few days as it is expanded to more and more users. Some other country and language versions of Google are also seeing the roll-out, but it may not be available for all. It will be interesting to see if it is on the left or right for languages that read right to left like Arabic and Hebrew. Some other Google databases show a similar results display (Web, Images, Videos, Shopping, Books, Blogs) while others look more like the old "Show options" left hand facets (News, Finance), and others have no left hand choices (Scholar, Groups, Directory).

What is gone or missing for now at least:

• The "View Customizations" message that could previously alert searchers to when the ranking had been changed based on previous searches, geolocation, or search history is nowhere to be seen
• Search terms used to show up after the estimated number of results
• For single word searches, the link to a dictionary definition is gone
• For country specific versions that used to offer an option under the search box to limit to pages just from that country is gone. Instead it shows up after the search in the left margin. See discussion.

Back in the Saddle

I know it has been a long time (several years) since I have done much with SearchEngineShowdown. Now that a very busy few years are winding down, I will try post more frequently and start updating much of the old content on the site. For readers still with me, thanks for your patience!

A Comic View of Google

Know anyone who thinks of Google this way? From today's Pearls Before Swine:

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Google's Skimpy Site Results

For all the subtle and experimental changes Google has been making to its results display lately, such as the jump to links and enhanced page links, and that Google even announced the changes (which does not always happen), I don't think I'd previously seen this particular approach to (what should I call them?) site links, or subsite links, or indented results from the same site. It seems related but not the same as the contextual show more results change from July.

You can see it in the screen shot below or try it yourself. For the past two days, I've seen the same results for this search on both IE and Firefox, and on at least three different computers. What's different from the usual indented display?

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Google, reCAPTCHA, and the Internet Archive

Google has announced that Google acquires reCAPTCHA. reCAPTCHA is a clever use of scanned, poorly OCRed text as a Captcha that prevents bots from spamming forms and at the same time helps improve OCR (Optical Character Recognition - the process of taking a scanned image of a page of text and converting it into searchable text).

I had always liked the idea of reCAPTCHA, especially since it was reputedly helping the Internet Archive with their scanning of books which (unlike Google books) they make open to everyone and focus on clearly out of copyright works.

However, with the Google announcement, I saw very little mention of how this might impact the Internet Archive. I assumed that Google would switch the reCAPTCHA underlying data from the Internet Archive to the Google Books project (which is not open and it remains to be seen how willing, if at all, Google will be to let other search engines use the searchable data from all their scanning).

Then I was even more surprised to read at reddit that the Internet Archive had never received any correction data from reCAPTCHA. "I don't expect to get any data from the reCaptcha project, since we've asked several times and received no response."

Just another example of a great sounding project that failed to deliver the results it implied. I'm sure Google will make sure to have it help their scanning and OCR projects, but I, for one, am no longer interested in using it.

Google Search Focus

Sometimes I find the Google blog posts to be long winded, high on hype, and low on information value. Yesterday's post about Google Search Quality started out in a similar vein, but it quickly improved and contains a number of interesting points about how Google handles searches and ranking. And for all those who like to say, "Just make it more like Google" and expect that to be a simple fix, please note the way Google describes their hard work on search quality is that "more than one thousand programmer/scientist years have gone directly into their development."

Several extracts that I found of interest include:

• Ranking algorithms include many aspects beyond PageRank:
  
• language models (the ability to handle phrases, synonyms, diacritics, spelling mistakes)
• query models (how people use language today)
• time models (some queries are best answered with a 30-minutes old page, and some are better answered with a page that stood the test of time)
• personalized models (not all people want the same thing)
• Evaluation includes automated evaluations every minute (to make sure nothing goes wrong)
• Change Frequency: "In 2007, we launched more than 450 new improvements"

While these do not, perhaps, have any direct bearing on how we can better use Google, it does help to inform us about the rationale for changing results and different processing from one day to the next.

Major Expansion at Google Translate

Earlier this month Google expanded the number of languages available in Google Translate. While the press release and most other coverage talked about ten new languages, the number of language pairs (from language X to language Y) increased far more substantially. Previously, Yahoo! Babel Fish had the most with 38 pairs. Google not only upped the number of possible languages, but every language listed can translate to the other. So depending on how you count, Google Translate now has over 500 language pairs available! That's a major increase. As Google Operating System notes, the counting varies depending on how you count Chinese. Only one choice is given for input of "Chinese," but Google Translate seems to accept both the Simplified or Traditional versions. Output can specify either Simplified or Traditional. So, if you count both versions of Chinese as one languages, this means Google Translate can machine translate 506 language pairs. If you consider that as two, it would be 552. And do note that you can input either version of Chinese characters and have it translated to the other.

Also note that Google has not only expanded its machine translation abilities but has augmented its Translated Search as well. Translated Search (also available on the Language Tools page as "Search Across Languages") will translate the query words and then display results in both the original language and in translation. Google translated search can machine translate query words and pages between the following languages. The following ten languages have been added along with the ability to translate between any of the possible language pairs.

• Bulgarian
• Croatian
• Czech
• Danish
• Finnish
• Hindi
• Norwegian
• Polish
• Romanian
• Swedish

Presumably, Google has been able to make such a major expansion of language translation pairs available by using statistical machine translation developed in house. This process is described in their FAQ: we feed the computer billions of words of text, both monolingual text in the target language, and aligned text consisting of examples of human translations between the languages. We then apply statistical learning techniques to build a translation model." Moving to this approach certainly seems to have allowed such a major expansion. Bear in mind that all of this automatic translation is prone to error, although it should give some rough sense of the underlying meaning. I've updated my Online Translation and Translated Search pages with the new languages.

Search Switching

For some time now I have been speaking and writing about ways of speed searching and search switching. Somehow, I've neglected to add the links to my site. So I'm fixing that tonight, before my presentation on Wed. at CIL 2008. The new Search Switching page includes sections for Search Switching Between Web Search Engines, Geographic Search Switching, Book Search Switching, and other options including another link to my Bookmarklets page (with its search transfer bookmarklets).

See also my article, "Speed Searching," in the March 2008 issue of Online (available for fee at ITI's InfoCentral or free from many library databases such as AccessMyLibrary) and my article, "Switching Your Search Engines," from the May 2007 issue of Online (available from many library databases including AccessMyLibrary).

Related Searches Moving Up?

So maybe I missed this earlier, but today is the first time I noticed Google showing related search suggestions at the top of Google results. In this case, I just happened to run on search for talking heads, trying to get an example of integrated content. While it worked for that, it also gave this one line of "Related searches:" at the very top. This is the first time that I can recall seeing this at the top.

Whether this is just one of Google's many user interface tests that may just run a short time or may continue and be seen at more searches, I don't know. Maybe it only shows up for music groups, although it did not for a few other searches I just tried. So far, the only other search I found that showed "Related searches:" was beatles. Anyone else seeing this?

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Language Limit Showdown

In recent months I have been speaking and writing about some of the language search and translation features of the search engines. Which search engine has the most language limits? Which online translator has the most language pairs? And which ones offers translated search? (Exalead, Yahoo!, and Google, respectively). So I've added a new Language Search Tools page, with links to pages about Language Limits, Online Translation, and Translated Search. I have also finally made a major update to my Search Engines by Search Features page and linked the language page from there.

For many searchers, especially those of us in the middle of a fairly mono-lingual part of the U.S., the language tools may have little appeal, but even in the midst of Montana, I still find times that I come across a non-English site, email, or term that can benefit from the use of these tools.

Yahoo! Face Change

The main Yahoo! page has cleaned up and re-emphasized its search box. The whole top inch or so of the page has a new look.

Similar to the cleaner, pared down page at search.yahoo.com, and reminiscent of some other well-known search engine, it is a pleasing change. The main page still has plenty of portal content below the search box:

Contrast that with the old look that had the logo on the left and additional buttons and boxes. See the Google Blogoscoped post for a series of home page screenshots over time. I still wish that News was one of the choices above the box instead of having it hidden under "more." Otherwise I find the new look to be easier to use and cleaner than the old.

Updated Bookmarklets

I've updated my search bookmarklets page due to changes from some of the search engines including Gigablast's new interface, finally changing msn.com to live.com in the code, and the addition of several new links:

• An animated .gif of the search transfer bookmarklets
• Moving the search transfer bookmarklets to the top
• A new bookmarklet for numbering Yahoo! results
• Updating the bookmarklet for numbering Google results
• Gigablast and Exalead search box links

The search transfer bookmarklets are the ones that I use the most to quickly switch from one search engine to another with the same search query. It has been interesting seeing how the bookmarklet functionality changes over time even when I do not change the underlying JavaScript of the bookmarklet. For the past several months, I could use the Yahoo! bookmarklet after a Google, Ask, or Live search, but I could not use any others after a Yahoo! search. Now those bookmarklets work again. So at the moment, I am only have a problem using them after a Gigablast or Exalead search.

Amazon Dropping Search Inside The Book?

I am very disappointed to see that Amazon seems to no longer have the Search Inside The Book feature. Clued into this loss by Marydee's post yesterday, I can no longer even get Marydee's workarounds of going to the Canadian or British versions of Amazon to work. So what's missing?

• No more Search Inside the Book arrows on certain cover shots
• None of the text statistics and ability to search within a book on those books
• A search on a unique term like tilinca which only occurs in the contents of books now gets no results.
• No Look Inside excerpts or any view of the contents of the book

I certainly hope that this is a temporary issue and not a permanent closing of the program. Some of the initial cover shots still have the Search Inside graphic on top as in the following example. But clicking on the link takes me to a page with no ability to view any of the contents.

Searching via the nearly-defunct A9, I was able to get a list of results for books including my search term, but I still could not get inside the books at Amazon. If this continues, it would be a significant and major loss of searchable content in books!

[Update: Just before clicking post, I am starting to see the Search Inside links again. Phew! I hope this was just a temporary glitch and not a major change in policy!]

More Caches: Japan and China

So after learning yesterday that the Russian search engine Yandex (Яндекс) cached pages, I started looking at a few other well-known, non-English search engines. Baidu, the Chinese search engine has just expanded into Japan with a Japanese Baidu. Both of these also have cached copies of pages. At Baidu, look for the 百度快照 links after the URL (similar to Google's placement). For the Japanese version, the cache linked is キャッシュ in a similar location.

For us non-Chinese and non-Japanese speakers, is there any use in these? Well, they are one more source for archived versions of pages, including English-language ones. For example, a search on library of congress (in English) finds hits at both. Here is a screenshot the Chinese version with the cache link in gray at the end.

And here's the Japanese version, with the cached link again in gray at the end. I'll be adding both of these to my Finding Old Web Pages page.

(Screenshots via  kwout.)

A Russian Cache

I do not usually spend much time with country-specific search engines, especially those in languages I do not speak. Even with English-language country-specific search engines, the general search engines usually have more comprehensive results and better search functionality. So when Phil posted about the Russian search engine Yandex (Яндекс), I just thought I'd take a quick look. Something piqued my curiosity, and I tried a few of the links. Sure enough, Yandex caches copies of many of the pages that it indexes. Look for the Сохраненная копия link at the bottom left of a search result record as in the screen shot below.

Yandex's cache does not include a date, at least that I could identify, but from a few tests, it seems that the cached page may be quite recent (the day before) to several months old. I've added Yandex to my Finding Old Web Pages page.

Yahoo! Adds Del.icio.us in Search Results

TechCrunch discovered that for some Yahoo! searches, they have added in links to (Yahoo!-owned) Del.icio.us bookmarks. Yahoo! does not use the Del.icio.us name. Instead, the Del.icio.us logo is followed by number and "people bookmarked this page under" whatever tags they used. See the two lines outlined in red in the screen shot.

While not all Yahoo! results have been bookmarked in Del.icio.us, this is a great combination of information from the two services. Click on the number to see what comments and notes people have written about the site when they bookmarked it. While I wish the comments would appear when I mouse over the link, it is still an incredibly easy and quick way to see what others have said about a Web page before you visit it. So how do you get Yahoo! to show the Del.icio.us information?

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Google Stop Word Message Gone?

At SearchEngineLand, Barry noticed that Google is no longer alerting searchers that stop words are not searched. Previously, stop words in a query that was not in phrase marks would usually find Google prompting searchers that the stop word in the query is "a very common word and was not included in your search." Does this mean that Google no longer has any stop words? Based on a few of my tests with a small retrieval set, comparing a search with a stop word and another search with a + in front of the stop word, it does seem that Google will on occassion still ignore some stop words.

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AskEraser: Privacy Potential

Forgot to mention my Newsbreak article from last week, AskEraser: Privacy Potential. In working on that article and looking at AskEraser, one issue occurred to me that I did not cover in the piece itself.

I received email from Ixquick about AskEraser even before I saw anything from Ask. press release. In that email, Ixquick claims that

there is one crucial element Ask overlooked and did not address. It reduces their privacy offering to near zero: As can be read in their privacy policy under ''Third Party Providers'' they continue to send the ''users search activity data'' to these third party providers, one of which is .......Google! In other words: Even with Askeraser ON the user gets the same privacy as with .......a Google search!

OK, Ask uses ads from Google. To display context-sensitive ads, related to the actual query, they have to send at least the query string to the Google ads server. While I could not get a definitive answer from Ask about what specific data elements Google sees, given Ask's commitment to privacy with AskEraser it seems likely that not much more than the query is sent. Even so, I was curious to see how Ixquick funds its service, and sure enough, it uses Google AdWords as well (under Sponsored Listings). So how is their privacy better than AskEraser?

While neither Ask nor Ixquick gives complete privacy, nor do they claim to. I credit both of them with raising the search privacy issue and providing at least some tools for helping protect searcher privacy. Since the vast majority of searchers pay no attention to such issues, I'd rather see all the search engines providing better privacy options rather than just criticizing their competitor's attempts.

Scholar Down, Books Up

Dean posted a scathing review of Google Scholar's performance over that past year based on a 32% decline in unique visitors according to ComScore data. More data on the changes at various Google properties between Nov. 2006 and Nov. 2007 are available in a TechCrunch posting. While I am sure that this data does not fully reflect actual Google traffic (and at least one comment on Battelle's Searchblog post says "a staff member from Google . . . tells me that ComScore has some of their numbers wrong"), I still find it fascinating. To no one's surprise, Web search is by far the busiest Google property. Google Directory traffic went down, which is not surprising since Google has made it so much harder to find. But the huge declines in Product Search (down 73%), Scholar (down 32%), and the Video Search (12% decline) surprised me. Book Search on the other hand has grown significantly in visitors (up 55%).

The chart showing which Google properties get the most visits is interesting as well. Web and Image search dominate and are both growing. After those two comes Gmail and Google Maps, which both rank higher in visitors than Google News. Given its increased prominence on the Google News page, I was also surprised to see how few visitors ever went to Blog search.

For Google users who visit many of their services, this is a telling lesson about how others use or do not use so many of Google's search services and applications. I also agree with Dean that Google Scholar's drop in visitors (if that is indeed accurate) comes in part from their failure to improve the service. I have found general Web searches often more effective than Google Scholar searches for at least some scholarly documents.

Live Links Lost Again

At least it worked for awhile. The trick of using the plus for getting Live's link searching commands to work again (link:, linkdomain: and inurl:) that has worked since those commands were disable in March has stopped working. It looks like link searching is again unavailable at Live, it continues to be incomplete at Google, so Yahoo! is the best choice for link searching.

While I can understand that problems with "automated usage for data mining" caused Microsoft to disable the command in March 2007, it is really sloppy of Microsoft that all these months later, the advanced search still has a "links to" section that does not work, and their online help still has instructions on how to use this non-functioning "links to" section.

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LiveSearch Turned Off

Yahoo!-owned AlltheWeb had their LiveSearch experiment running for over a year, display suggested search terms as you typed. Now, the LiveSearch address just redirects to Yahoo! I assume that this is because of Yahoo!'s new search assist feature giving a similar experience.

Karen posted about this on Dec. 13, and it is still re-directing, so it seems likely that it is gone for good. AlltheWeb itself continues to work, but remember it is just using some portion of the Yahoo! database.