It was hard to avoid the news last week about Google’s new “Instant” search, but in this 4cast we’re still offering a couple of links to articles you may have missed about the implications of the new Google search. And Google is not the only recent news in the search engine business, as you can see below. Of course, if you want to find articles in journals, magazines, newspaper archives, encyclopedias, etc., then the search you really want is ohioweblibrary.org.
- Google’s Schmidt: ‘Next Great Stage’ of search (Search Engine Land/Matt McGee) “[Google CEO Eric] Schmidt also says Google is focusing on trying to gauge meaning and intent from user searches. ‘Ultimately, we think we can understand things like what you really meant… what is the problem you’re really trying to solve?'”
- Will “Google Instant” distract from Google Ads? (Silicon Valley Watcher/Tom Foremski) “The dynamic nature of the page, constantly changing as users type, forces users to concentrate on the search results as they are being presented. This is far different from typing in a search term and then receiving a static page of results where the eyes are not drawn to any movement, and they can take in a much larger section of the page, including the text ads on the right.”
- New search engine promises relevance, now (Information Today/Avi Rappoport) “For NowRelevant.com, ‘relevance’ means fresh, original, and unspammed, with results limited to items posted in the last 2 weeks (5 days by default). The company’s original service, TheInternetTimeMachine.com (ITM), analyzes high volume search terms and the results to find unsaturated markets. In compiling a research corpus of search terms and results linked to them, ITM scrubbed out spam and trivial pages generated by content factories.”
- Greplin is a personal search engine for your online life (TechCrunch/Michael Arrington) “Sign up and authorize any number of social services for Greplin to index — I signed into Facebook, Twitter and Google Voice to start. After a few minutes of indexing time Greplin then presents you with a Google-like search box. Run a query and find the public and private data you’ve locked away on those sites.”
Timely Fact:
Google’s testing indicates that Google Instant saves the average searcher two to five seconds per search.
