Google

The World’s Biggest, But is it Useful

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The folks at Web’s Biggest say that they are “The World’s Biggest Directory Search Engine.” Last week Internetweek reported that:

A Web search engine that uses the “whois” database said Friday that it searches more Web sites than any other search engine, including Google, which crawls the Web in a different manner for its search results. ….
“Other search engines missed from a third to more than half of the Web sites [included] in the Web’s Biggest search results,” the firm stated.
Always on the outlook for better information sources I headed right over and entered a search that has pointed a few visitors to Modulator: live strong bands. The results were 3 references that appeared to be paid adds and they were preceded by this message:
Important: We suggest you make your search LESS specific. Please remember you are not searching the contents of web pages like you do at Google or Yahoo. You are searching one paragraph website descriptions. Furthermore, you will only find websites that contain EACH of your keywords in their description. Web’s Biggest is designed to find websites devoted to what you are looking for, not web pages that happen to contain those words.
On the other hand a search for Lance Armstrong generated quite a few results.
Want to find the text of the state of the union speech? Well, it is #2 on Google and the Web’s Biggest responds with the above “be less specific” message and no links of any kind. And it was a bit slow doing that.
Lesson: use your preferred traditional search service first. In fact, I’m still puzzling over why I’d use them at all…

Another Cool Google Feature

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Search autofill or auto guess. By the second letter of your query entry, Google Suggest, starts making suggestions and includes the number of references available. This should be especially helpful if you are not quite sure of your spelling, the best search string to use, or the exact description of your desired bit of information.
Another way to spin out cobwebs…..some of this stuff is getting too damn fun.
Via Dan Gillmor.

Dogs Beat Cats

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All you cat bloggers out there will be disappointed to learn that cats finished 3rd in Google’s October listing of the most popular animal searches. Dogs were first followed closely by dragons. Cats were far behind and barely edged out puppies and horses. So why do I find so few dogs and dragons for the Friday Ark?
For the politically inclined In October kerry beat bush in the category of popular news queries (though bush currently leads kerry by about 3.6 million Google listings)
For more interesting Google search stuff check out the Google Zeitgeist.
Via Marginal Revolution.

GLAT

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For the uninitiated GLAT stands for Google Labs Aptitude Test. Its been around for a while. Google appears to have posted this 4 page version back in September.
so why bring it up now. Well, a printed version is popping up on college campuses around the country right now. There are likely stacks of them in your local campus geek center or perhaps they were inserts in the campus newspaper today which is how I discovered them.
It is pretty entertaining to read the questions. Things like:

9. This space left intentionally blank. Please fill it with something that improves upon emptiness.
This one has the most room for an answer:
5. What’s broken with Unix? How would you fix it?
Some are multiple choice:
6. On your first day at Google, you discover that your cubicle mate wrote the textbook you used as a primary resource in your first year of graduate school. Do you:
Well, you can go read the choices yourself.

All the News that is Fit to Google

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It’s not clear why Vin Cosbie is surprised about this:

But when I analyzed its choices of news sources, I was surprised by the results. Although Google spiders more than 7,000 news sources, only about a dozen sources account for the vast majority of stories displayed on Google News day to day, and two of those predominant sources are owned and operated by the U.S. and Chinese governments.
A commentor hits main point number 1: real estate. There is only so much space on a web page.
A second reason is that not all 7000 sources are going to be interested in every story and many that might be will not write about it as they have made other choices.
I suspect that these dozen or so sources are, in fact, the sources that rank highest in Google’s ranking methodology. This may be a self reinforcing result since most of us probably read and, if applicable, link only the first story or two thus strengthening rank for those sources. On a statistically meaningless note I have many times gone deeper into the source material and quickly tired of the repetitive and derivative articles.
Vin can do this as well. By doing just a bit more work he can click on Google New’s always available “and xxx related” link and find the dozens, hundreds or thousands of other sources that he was originally looking for.
Via E-Media Tidbits.