Search 1.x

Bing Search Improves on the Search Results Page

Felix — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 10:40:00 +0000

So Bing has a good name that you can now replace “To Google Something” with “To Bing Something!” and has been getting tonnes of positive media coverage, but from the searcher’s point of view, what is the big fuss and why should I care? Well the good new is that Microsoft has done their homework this time and Bing is definitely a better search engine than the old live search service.

By in large, it is a very similar Search experience to Google in terms of the display layout and results relevancy which is a good thing. However, Bing has some cool innovations that Google currently does not have and I think not only improves on the Google design but really helps the searcher and I give Microsoft and the Bing Search team for thinking beyond the Google offering.

Sure the Bing search screen has nice interactive background that changes everyday, but for me, it’s all about the search results page!

Microsoft research apparently identified that one of biggest frustration in search today is in clicking through to a page, only to find it is not the right one so helping searcher identifying the correct page to click through on the results page was identified as a main area of focus for the Bing team.

I am happy to say that the focus on delivering useful information on the results page itself has been a good one and I think has delivered real tangible benefits for the searchers.

Now on to the Bing search results layout…

Whilst the Bing search results page looks similar to any other results page, the secret is revealed when you mouse over a particular result entry.

When your mouse is anywhere on top of a result, a vertical rule shows up at its right edge to visually clue you that this preview is available. Hovering the cursor to the right edge of any Web result brings up a small window containing text from the linked page. It can even find relevant deep links within that page. It’s great for getting a peek at pages that are relevant, and for helping avoid clicking through to pages that aren’t.

Furthermore, if the site contains malware, the Bing engine will also reveal that in the preview text window and let you make up your mind as to whether to visit the site.

If you don’t pay attention, you might actually miss this little feature, but I think it is a small clever innovation that actually works really really well!

The other nice touch is the placement of your Search history right on the results page to speed things up. I for one find I often re-run some of my previous searches so this is definitely another handy feature to have on the results page.

A bit of a tip for you if you are from outside of the USA, you should click here to switch to the USA version of Bing as I find some features were disabled with the Australian local version so I am guessing this might be the case with other local versions.

The Bing Image search and research tools of Bing also have some really cool features that makes it superior than the current Google offerings. I am planning on covering them soon so be sure to come back to check them out!

If you have not already checked out Bing, then You should most certainly have a go at the new Bing search engine! as I suspect you will be pleasantly surprised with the Bing search experience.

Tell us what you think about your Bing experience!

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Are You Asking More Of The Search Engines?

Felix — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 03:49:00 +0000

Well, according to the latest report released by Hitwise released today. (PDF download), we are! According to this latest report by Hitwise, the interesting trend revealed is that the the search strings that people use are getting longer, with the biggest jump in people using 8 or more words query when compared with last year!

What does it mean? Well according to the general manager of Hitwise in this article, http://www.australianit.news.com.au/story/0,24897,25261858-15318,00.html

"There is so much long tail (increasingly niche) content that internet users are finding it harder and harder to find,"

"The long tail is getting very difficult for search engine algorithms. We are seeing an increase in the number of words per query and a decrease in the success rate.”

“people were using more and more words in their search queries because they were dissatisfied with the results”

In summary, people are using more and more words in their search queries because they want more relevancy but were dissatisfied with the results.

My theory and the whole premise of Search1x.com is becoming a reality!! Well, I think anyway….

What’s my theory ?

My theory is that.

People are becoming more comfortable with searching and combination of keywords
People want more accurate results quicker
People want more detailed niche information.

BUT

The search engines are failing to deliver to the high standards people are expecting from the search engine
This is partly due to people’s lack of skills in Search!

The importance of Search is increasing as the amount of searchable material is increasing. What is being left behind is people’s knowledge and skill around Search.

Whilst searching using a couple of keywords for generic concepts were largely a satisfying experience, using the same approach to tackle more challenging problems (such as searching for long tail contents) might not be the right answer.

In a way, I think it also partly explains the rise of specialist search engines (such as Google Blog search, and Twitter search), and in a way, specialist search engines can be part of the answer, as they definitely have a role to play

So are you?

So are you using longer query?

And are you getting disappointed with the search results?

There may finally be a shift in the way we all think about and use Search.

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Take a Navigational Approach To Search

Felix — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 09:58:00 +0000

What’s navigational search you ask? It’s a search approach where you are not searching for a specific answer but more looking for good materials that relates to a particular topic. The search results is a start of a navigational experience where it leads you on a guided navigational experience that allow you to drill down to the relevant concept or topic area that you are interested in. Or in the words of the founders of Kosmas, the goal of its search engine is to “tell their users more about something,”

A good example is when you are researching about a particular travel destination. This is the case where you are not looking for a particular answer but are just looking for general material ABOUT a particular destination. You are looking for someone to help and guide you through the most important topics or concepts related to your travel destination.

In order to have a navigational search experience, someone needs to act as a guide, and that’s where Kosmas comes in.

Kosmas has been mentioned by the New York Times as a potential Google killer and have often been described as a semantic search engine, I like to think the unique search results it presents lends itself also to a navigational search approach.

The search experience on Kosmas is hard to explain other than describing it as sort of like a metadata search engine except it actually knows what you are asking about and customise the content sources it searches and present it to you in a useful manner in a magazine like layout.

For a start, it clusters your search query results and present you with related topics that you can drill into. But it then go on and provides you with a wealth of material that are somehow RIGHT for the search you are conducting. For my search of “iPhone case” above, it presented me with a number of related topics such as iPod and iPod Touch, it then presented me with images of iPhone cases, links to shops where I can buy them, and tweets of people talking about iPhone cases.

The interesting thing is, if you search for something different, the types of contents presented may be completely different. For example, if I search for “Sydney”. I am presented with the Wikipedia entry for Sydney and a map of Sydney!

Kosmas claims that the results for any search can contain information from over 15 sources and may include images, videos, reviews, and conversation. The neat thing is that the search engine works out what you are searching for semantically and searches through the best contents sources that relates to your search string.

It is remarkably accurate and comprehensive when you are searching for basic concepts such as an object or location, but when the number of keywords starts to go north of 3, the results becomes less useful, the argument would be that you really should be searching for basic concepts that you like to explore more and less narrow topic areas using Kosmas.

One thing is for sure, if you are planning a trip, or doing research on a new product, Kosmas is definitely a good place to start, and I will definitely be using it in the future.

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Leverage the Time Dimension For Search Relevancy

Felix — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 02:23:00 +0000

Here is a tip that I think people sometimes overlook but can pay huge dividend when used correctly! :+)

Google has done such a good job in providing great search results sometimes we take it for granted and become lazy in thinking about basic search strategy.

Google by default returns results sorted by relevancy based on its ranking algorism that includes the now famous “PageRank” algorism. Now whilst nobody really knows the secret source/formula Google use in its ranking algorism, it is understood that freshness or time dimension plays an important part. In addition, Google also give you the option to control the date range or how recent the page is in the advanced search options, use it to supplement your search query when you know timeliness of a result set plays a critical role in terms of relevancy.

By selecting the date range, you can restrict you search result to pages created or updated within the last 24 hours. week, month or year. This operator is invaluable for certain types of search as sometimes instead of dreaming up keywords to include or exclude, it’s much more effective to limit and control the time elements.

For example, as you searching for information about a newly released gadget that’s only been out on the market for a month. Restricting your search to pages created or update within the last month is going to dramatically help you filter out material not related to this particular release of the product without mucking around too much with product version and keywords.

By the way, if the time dimension or freshness of a source is very important to you when searching, chances are you should also leverage other sources of more timely search engines where time plays a more important factors. These include News search sites such as Google News, various Blog search engines and Twitter search for searching through more update to date web contents and near-realtime web conversations.

Once again, thinking beyond keywords when it comes to intelligently structuring you search query can make your life easier as well as make your search much more effective :+)

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The Dawn of Conversational Searching

Felix — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 23:37:00 +0000

The popularity of the Twitter Service has created a lot of chatters, chatters that are

1. Less than 140 characters long,
2. Very easy to publish anytime, anywhere, ANY PLATFORM
3. Mostly rubbish about what people had for lunch!

However, similarly to what happened to the evolution of blogs, more reputable (and knowledgeable!) people and companies are starting to use twitter as a mean of communicating, branding and marketing mechanism. As a result, there are actual quite a lot useful information in the tweets that people produce today.

Now in order to leverage these information you can follow people’ tweets all day, or you can search people’s tweet, for me, searching is a better use of my time and that’s when a number of the new conversational search service comes in handy.

Twitter search allows to search for what about what is happening now and what people are talking about now. The results are gathered from people’s tweet now or in the last hour or so and hence the other name given to this type of search “Realtime Search”

Whilst you are mostly searching through people’s chatters which are not exactly high quality content, it does have some interesting and useful applications. Firstly, since it is much easier to twitter than to setup a blog site and provide good blog content, you will see contents you normally don’t see in blogs from people who don’t really know how to blog. What good is this search and what useful information can you find? I can think of at least 4 applications:

1. Verify whether some web service is down: There has been numerous time when I am having issues with Gmail and I wasn’t sure whether it was Gmail or something wired with my wireless/network/firewall/ISP, a quick search on twitter will easily reveal whether 3 millions other web users are complaining about the same thing.

2. Product Release: Twitter now is often the first place you hear about new product releases.

3. Search for discount coupons: This one I am keen to try out one day.

4. The very latest gossips about _ _ _: Now this could be a celebrity, politician or anything you have a interested about and can not wait for the bloggers to catch up.

I’d like to think of Twitter search as “a box of chocolates, and you never know what you gonna get!” hence the best way to find out its value and effectiveness is to just try it out.

If you use Firefox You can even integrate Twitter Search Results right into your normal Google Search Results by following these tips from the good folks at Lifehacker.

I am now so excited about what I will find in Twitter every time I do a Google Search!

Since Twitter is not the only realtime microblogging service, we are also starting to see the emergence of meta search engine or search aggregation site that allow you to search across these micro blogging sites such as Twitter and Friendfeed. One such site is Whostalkin.

I personally think this is one of the most exciting search development since the Googzilla has taken control of our search experience, watch out for this space!

I am also pretty sure there are lot of other interesting applications of conversational/realtime searching, so let us know what you think!

UPDATE: Just came across this fantastic post by Chris Allison on how to get the most out of your Twitter search with tips on how to use the advanced search features!Similar Posts:

Why You Need to Check Out Google Scholar Search

Felix — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 01:51:00 +0000

When it comes to authoritative source or fresh new thinking based on actual research, you just can’t beat academic research. Sometimes, you are looking for what the latest thinking or theories is on a particular topic or wants to know what academia thinks about a theory you want to apply in business. If you have been in those situations and have not checked out Google Scholar, then you are are missing out big time.

Google Scholar is an obscure search service that Google has been providing for a while that I was not familiar with until I was introduced to it by a professor. It indexes all well known and popular journal databases, publications and research publications (Harvard Business Review, etc), and allows you to search through the index using the same intuitive search interface as the general web search. From my personal experience and feedback from people who uses it extensively, the publications that it indexes is extensive and of high quality, and that’s important when it comes to scholar research.

In another word, Google has taken library catalogues searching to another level. Gone are the bad, old days when you need to go to the library and search through the physical catalogue of academic journals, gone also are the days when you need to log onto various academic database, learn the intricacy of their search syntax individually and collate the results together to compare them.

You can sort by relevancy or date in the Google Scholar search results , and Google uses a number of factors to calculate relevancy including how many times a particular paper was cited by other researchers.

There is a catch though. :+)

Whilst Google Scholar give you access to the index and allow you search for articles, getting access to the actual article is a different story. Whilst you will find a lot of publically accessible articles, most high quality papers have restricted access from the general public.

The good news is that most articles are in digital forms and are linked to directly from your Google Scholar search results, the bad news is that you will need to be affiliated or have membership to a library to gain access to them as most libraries have subscriptions to popular journal databases. As far I can see, there are two ways for you to get access to these restricted articles.

1. If you are doing any sort of undergraduate study or post graduate study, ring up the library and request access to their online library databases.

2. If you have a colleague or family member doing any sort of study (and there should always be someone studying around you !) ask him or her for access to their online library database

Once you obtained a valid library access account, you can even tell Google to automatically link to the article in the specific library that you have access to as shown here where Google Scholar is providing a link to the article from Macquarie University where I have access to their online database.

Once you set it up, it truly is an amazing piece of research tool.

There are a lot of hard core theory based content in Google Scholar, but if you search effectively, you ought to find exactly what you are looking for. Give it a go and as Google puts it, leverage the wealth of knowledge available through the research of others and “Stand on The Shoulder of Giants”!

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Four Easy Tips To Increase Your Search Productivity Today

Felix — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 01:35:00 +0000

Apparently blog readers love lists about tips they can use immediately, and I know people love tips in simple, brief easy to implement list, because I do! So here is one for the GTD fan or productivity junkies!

These tips are easy to pickup, high impact and you can use them today. In a way they are about getting back to the basics of search!

1. Read the Search Help Page

This one seems trivial and almost idiotic but it will more than likely give you the biggest bang for your time spent.

We have all probably read the search help page one or two times in our life, but unless you read it last month, I have news for you: things have changed! There are likely to be new features released and advanced functionalities add since you last read the help page. By reading the help page, I don’t mean read it from page to page but focus on the areas that you think you can benefit the most, it might be the “What’s new” section if you have heard some new image search features that you want to know about or the “Advanced Search” section if you believe you are ready to take your search to the next level.

Here is the Google Search Help, Yahoo Search Help and Windows Live Search Help

2. Get a Search Tool Bar

And Learn what you can do with them. I love my search tool bar and that’s because it give me huge productivity boost as a searcher. I even blogged about it!

3 Reasons Why Search Toolbar Makes You A Better Searcher

Install search tool bar from your favourite search engine and know the features offered in them will save you time, increase your productivity and allow you to use your browser more as a powerful search platform than a HTML viewer.

With a search tool bar installed, did you know you can:

Execute a search for images right from the search tool bar!
Highlight the keywords you searched for within the page (Huge time saver!)

If you already have Google Toolbar, you can always try out Yahoo Toolbar or Windows Live Toolbar.

3. Try an Alternative Search Engine

People are so accustomed to Google that they think it’s the end all an be all of search. Well, its not. Whilst even Google has a huge range of specialist search engines, there is a wealth of alternative search engines that can make your search experience more productive today.

I can think of least three cases where Google is trumped by alternative search engines (and that I have blogged about here!)

Blog search using Technorati: Google Blog Search Is No Good!
Visual search using Cooliris: The New Visual Search Experience
Product comparison/review search using Retrevo: Tell me more about this product

Check out the Search 1.x search engine directory for more alternative search engines and why trying them out can sometimes make you a better searcher.

4. Believe That You Can Find It!

This one is a mental tip, but it’s one that will get most people. Often when people fail to find the exact information they are looking for, they give up or settle for “good enough” content where there are often much better material out there on the web

If it’s out there on the web, there is a way to search for and find it, and my experience has taught me that this statement is largely true, I am always amazed at the stuff you can find on the web using the search engines.

For example, did you know that you can find a huge listing of active webcam by using Google ?

By changing your mentality, you are more than likely to persist with it and when there is a will, there is a way, you just have to know how to search for it!

What’s your favourite tip when it comes to search?Similar Posts:

Your Voice Powered Search Options On The iPhone

Felix — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 12:55:00 +0000

If you have an iPhone, you are in luck as the battle is heating up in terms of search offerings on the iPhone. Google has updated it’s iPhone native Google search App numerous time with the most recent app being the most exciting one due to the inclusion of voice activated search.

1. Google Search

The Google Search experience on the iPhone using the Google app is similar yet, optimised for the iPhone. The results pages are the same except smaller, the sponsored link ads are there except smaller. However Google has done a couple of optimisation on the iPhone to make the search experience a bit pain less on the iPhone

Firstly, as you type your search keyword, possible results are listed continuously below as you add new keywords, other keywords are also guessed by Google and suggested to you as you type your search strings out. All of this enhancement is there to decrease the need to type as it is not a pleasant experience to type using your thumb on the iPhone, and I must say, it works pretty well.

The second enhancement is the much hyped voice search. The premise sounds simple enough, you bring your iPhone to your face, you tell it what you are searching for and it gives you the results without you having to type any thing: the holy grail of searching on the phone. My experience and from what I read on various review site led me to conclude that it does not work well at all. Speech recognition is a difficult computing problem, even with the might of modem computing hardware such as the iPhone, it is difficult to do well. Unless you speak with very simple one keyword search spoken VERY SLOWLY, your chance of a correct transcription is near zero, you end of having to type it anyway. More of a gimmick rather than a useful feature if you ask me.

2. Vlingo

In terms of current crop of alternatives, Vlingo stands out with its outstanding voice recognition technology. Vlingo has been providing a very popular search app on the Blackberry and their offering on the iPhone is rock solid even against the might of Google, frankly speaking I am surprised that vLingo has not made it to the top 50 free app list but you can download it from this link.

One good touch with Vlingo is that it is at least humble, in that if it believe it did not get a good recording, it will say so and ask you to say it again.it will also offer variation of what you might have said along with what it think you said.

Compared with the Google search app, it has more features, you have the option of searching Yahoo using the vLingo app, and most importantly, I believe the voice recognition is superior based on my usage.

The superior speech recognition accuracy is apparently due to the app’s ability to learn your speech patterns. From its pool of 5 million utterances so far, the system is also sampling other users, "so it improves for the entire community,"

You can search for web sites, location, business, and even make voice activate call by saying the person’s name you want to call. Just for good measure, Vlingo even threw in the ability to update your facebook or twitter profile by speaking to your iPhone.

The verdict? Since they are both free, why not have both. The possibility is endless in this area of voice powered search and in the meantime, the iPhone can be even more handy in the car with a car kit as you try to find the nearest pizza shop as you drive.

I expect there to be plenty of new comers to this space and very exciting innovation, as a searcher and a fan of the iPhone that can only mean good news and that I will be holding on to my iPhone a lot longer. If you are an iPhone user, you ought to give mobile search a try!

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The New Visual Search Experience

Felix — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 10:44:00 +0000

As video and image content on the web becomes more prevalent and compelling, search engines are finding new and innovative ways for users to search and browse through these rich contents and provide a more visual search experience. Google Image search is great but the interface is really built on top of the traditional text web search and hasn’t evolved along with the type of rich content available now and user’s expectation in terms of searching for visually rich contents.

There has been various visual search engines that caters for these needs, they are really a special type of aggregation search engine that focus on video and images contents using a number of search engines such as Google and Yahoo. These search engines are visually rich with very innovative user interface that are completely different from your traditional web search experience and you primarily browse and decide on where you want to drill into from the results set based on images or screen shots of the websites.

One of these visual search engines is SearchMe which display screen shots of the page and images in the results in an iTunes Cover Flow like layout that is familiar to iTunes users. This allows you to quickly decide which website to focus on based on the look of it by flicking through them.

CoolIris which is one my favourite alternative search engines is another visual search engine that is taking the idea of cover flow to the next level to provides a completely new and unique search experience.

As an example, when I search for “iPhone leather case” the look of the case is probably of the utmost importance to me as a searcher. additional, the ability to visually browse through all type of leather cases quickly and efficiently is also of benefit to me as a searcher. This is exactly what Cooliris allow you to do!

Cooliris not so much as provides a cover flow layout but more of a cover WALL layout that gives you the feeling of walking pass a continuous walls of images that stretches indefinitely after you do a search. You can use the same unique search interface to search through Flickr, and YouTube and find your results in a wall of images. The shopping search option is particular useful as it not only lists images of the product you are searching for but also include the price and a link to where you buy it. I must say it works very very well. This visually rich experience is achieved through a browser plugin for both IE and Firefox and the the result is indeed a very un-browser like experience.

The layout is not only beautiful but effective. I personally think it is one of the most effective design in terms of searching for and browsing through visually rich contents.

More importantly, what is it good for ? Searching for images and video from multiple sites is an obvious area where you can have a lot of fun. If you are searching for ideas or products and are primarily interest in how it looks, Cooliris can definitely make you life a lot easier and make the search experience more interesting.

As an added bonus, CoolIris also offer an iPhone app version of its search engine which amazingly delivers a similar visual experience using the comparatively much smaller iPhone screen!

Definitely worth checking out!Similar Posts:

How To Find Your Answer In Other People’s Discussions

Felix — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 05:58:00 +0000

People’s opinion and discussions often provide the best source of information. These discussions boards or forums are often attended and contributed by people who are both knowledgeable and passionate about a particular area. Best all, people have been having discussing on the web for a long time and chances are someone somewhere on the web has discussed or even answered the very questions you are asking now.

Whilst discussion board do not provide the ultimate truth on a particular topic, they are fantastic for:

Product/travel location reviews and recommendations
Troubleshooting or technical help with software/hardware products
Get opinion or idea within a hobby or interest area

And whilst it is possible to search through discussion boards and forums using Google (is anything impossible with Google ?) by narrowing and limiting your searches to various discussions boards and , there is a better and easier way !

Omgili is a fantastic search engine that specialise in indexing and searching through discussion boards or forums.

Omgili claims to scans millions of online discussions worldwide in over 100,000 boards, forums and other discussion based resources and can differentiate between discussion entities such as topic, title, replies and discussion date.

Based on my personal experience, it works reasonably well! Once you have done a search, you can see the number of post and replies within a discussion thread (so you can skip the ones with zero replies!) and then narrow your search within a particular forum.

The other way to leverage discussion board effectively is to find the forum or discussion board offered by the company that offered you the products or services. These days, most companies will have some sort of community forum or discussion board on their website to foster a community, build loyalty and get the users to help each others ! For example, if you have issues or question about your iPhone or Mac, the Apple discussion board might be a good place to start your search.

The worst case is that you do come across a community discussion board that covers your area of interested but no one has answered your very specific question, you can always register and put the question out there and join the discussion!

And remember, try to give back to the web community by contributing to these discussion boards so that someone else can benefit from it the way you did!

UPDATE: Google Group Search has just started to include forum discussions in its search results along side results from Google Groups. Just goes to show how important are peopleâ€™s discussions as a source of useful information!Similar Posts: