Arne van Elk's Library tagged google →  View Popular

Google web search results can be limited by timeframe using the "search options" link on every page, but one startup company CEO discovered today that searches can also be limited to results indexed minutes or seconds ago by making a simple change to the search results page URL.

Startup search engine Omgili's CEO Ran Geva wrote on his company blog today that time-limited search results pages include a parameter called QDR - perhaps standing for Query Date Range. You can change the number following the letters qdr and change the timeframe for your search.

PageRank is altijd het paradepaardje geweest van Google, bedacht door de oprichters van Google en vernoemt naar één van hen (Larry Page).

PageRank was in de beginjaren dan ook de kern van Google’s zoekmachine en daar dankt PageRank z’n populariteit aan.

Maar is die populariteit ook nu nog terecht? En hoe werkt PageRank eigenlijk? Lees hieronder mijn uitgebreide uitleg en antwoorden op deze en andere vragen over Google PageRank.

But the important thing is….

GOOGLE SOCIAL SEARCH IS NOT REAL TIME SEARCH

That’s not bad, by the way. In fact, Google Social Search is pretty cool. It’s just important that it doesn’t get confused with a completely different type of search engine.

Social Search Is Trusted Search

Social search was in the news this past week when Google and Bing announced that they would be getting access to the Twitter fire hose. A flurry of subsequent posts speculated on what this "social search" would entail, and some expressed concerns over privacy and spam.

But social search is not something to be afraid of. It's really just an extension of behaviors that we're used to in the real world, brought online, thanks to the advent of real-time social computing.

How it Works and How to Trigger Social Search Explicitly

Once activated, Social Search results will appear at the bottom of the standard search results page and will be clearly labeled as "results from people in your social circle." As Google's search evangelist Matt Cutts pointed out to us in an interview earlier today, it is important to note that not every search will trigger Social Search results. When it does, however, the results should be highly relevant.

You can also explicitly trigger Social Search from the search options panel. There, Google will now also present a list of your friends that it thinks are the most closely related to the keywords you were searching for. By clicking on a name, you can restrict your search even further and just see results from this one person.

Things Feel Worse, But Hard To Quantify

Sadly, we still have no commonly accepted measurements of relevancy across search engines, and it’s an area that gets harder and harder to assess, as more material is blended in alongside web page results. That’s something I’d still like the search engine to collaborate on, some independent regular assessment of their quality.

To me, it feels like they’re getting worse, not better. But I can’t document that. What I can do is demonstrate without much difficulty, for areas where I have subject expertise, how bad they can be. They get by because along with the bad, there’s enough good. But they should be better than this.

Search, however, is inherently post facto. It is a mechanism of forensics to help humans parameterize what they are looking for on the interwebs and the search tools diligently do their job to identify and produce results in a fairly consistent ‘page rank’-oriented way. Then you start the laborious process of hunting through the results to find the needle in the haystack and hope it’s relevant. In other words, an event happens, the search engine indexes this event (even if moments after it was created in near real time) and thus allows it to be discovered later via search. I think that our CEO Todd Vernon summed up three distinct categories for search really succinctly in his post on this subject of examining real time search…





1. DISCOVERING: Something is happening, it may or may not be something I care about, and I don’t know it’s happening. I usually find out about it via some source, personal network, facebook, twitter, digg, CNN, etc. I don’t have a specific mission to know it before I find out about it.
2. ALERTING: Something is happening and I knew ahead of time I wanted to know about it when it happens. I usually find out about these things via some source such as Google Alerts or Filtrbox. Alerts behave a little like a broad based search with asynchronous results that come back some day.
3. SEARCHING: Something is happening or has happened or simply exists. I want to know more about it. I generally want the best answer, or the most recent answer. I may want the best recent answer, but that’s highly subjective and generally defaults back to my trust in the source as the tie breaker.