Google Interesting Experiments Entice

A look at a few of Google Labs experiments

by Rupert Sharp
of http://www.oyster-web.co.uk

Last updated: 9 Oct 2007

The Google experiments section, as I may have mentioned in a previous article concerning Google Suggest, is a place where Google tests its ideas for improvements to the Google service and get user feedback before they integrate it into the main 'actual' engine or turn the idea into a stand-alone service. A few successful experiments, as the Google Labs section will tell you, are Google Docs, Google Maps and iGoogle. The most recent one brought to my attention was view:info, this is an alternative way to view search results by giving you a choice to view your results in the regular way and also by more advanced options such as date, location, measurements and by viewing what images that page has on it.

The date view basically lists all the results in order and instead of the usual description it will show an excerpt of the paragraph that includes the date in context, this presumably could be used for research purposes i.e. looking up information on historical sites for the right year or day. A similar experiment Google has in view:(n) commands is view:timeline which basically uses the same date search structure and creates a time line at the top to show you what dates are most commonly related to your term, if you click a year it will give you an overview of the months and allow you to see which months have a mention in the sites. I personally think some timeline system which would show the pages by when the pages were most recently created with the term focused would possibly be more useful and would present quite a useful marketing aid for finding what topics were or indeed are being discussed the most.

The measurements selection in view:info is a bit strange; it searches the results for any mention of things like acres, metres, tons etc. and allows you to set 'from' and 'to' so you can get all the numbers in between the two figures (anything that mentions 10 tons to 20 tons, 11tons, 12tons etc). It then displays the results in a similar way to the date view by listing the results with the description changed to the paragraph which mentions those figures. I can't say I totally understand the need for that but I'm sure someone somewhere needs it; maybe a particular length hiking trail or some such.

The locations section is quite interesting but follows in the same vein; it replaces the description with the paragraph containing any location it recognises. I had originally presumed that it would display the results that are hosted in a certain area or country so you could find websites presumably closer to you but this is not the case. There is a way of viewing the data taken from these location results and displaying them with Google maps by adding view:map to the end of your search term. This will list the results down the left hand side along with an identifying letter and the map to the right showing the 'pegs' with the letter on it on the location mentioned on the page.

The final one is the images option and (you guessed it) it replaces the description with the images that it could find in the pages in the results, which can be quite intriguing bar the fact it occasionally puts pointless images up such as the background from the menus etc. but I think it has a size limit to prevent huge files being compressed into a 50X50 square and big background images. I'm sure it wouldn't be beyond imagination that if you really wanted to see the images of the page you would either go to that page or do a site:www.blah.com in the images section. I could be missing the point but it just seems more 'because we can add even more bells and whistles to it!' for that one rather than a possibly needed feature.

The view:(n) features are not the only ones Google is currently concerned about testing; there is a 'keyboard shortcut' experiment which allows users to scroll and select search results using shortcuts on the keyboard. The keys are J to scroll down the list, K to scroll back up, backspace or O to open the selected result, / to move the cursor to the search box and the escape character to return it to the search results, once there are no more results to scroll down to, the page will change to the next (or previous) page of results. The idea might make things easier for some people particularly people who enjoy using keyboards to navigate programs rather than the mouse (keyboard shortcuts are already used in some other Google services such as Gmail).

Another experiment that seems like quite a good idea is a short menu system down the left or right hand side of the Search Engine results, this menu presents you with alternative options and terms to search for that Google thinks might be useful. You get a list of types of search at the top which include video, news, products etc. depending on whether or not Google has something of that type to show you, e.g. type in the name of an author and you're most likely going to get the option 'Books'. Underneath that it lists related searches which thankfully doesn't use the Google Suggest engine to figure out what you’re thinking of. It will only suggest related searches if what you've typed in doesn't seem too specific; type in fish and you get 'pet fish', 'fish names' and stuff like that but type in 'Edgar Alan Poe' and you won't receive any.

One thing that I did find odd about the experiments particularly the view:info ones is that the normal results from both normal Google.com and the results from the experimental version have a different order; to prove this I searched in google for 'cat food' and noted that Wikipedia was second and Cat Food UK was 7th down the list, I did the same search and selected normal results from the experimental options and saw that Wikipedia was now at the top and Cat Food UK was the fourth result. I'm only guessing that the improvements made on the main search engine were not included in the experiment; seems a bit strange to me.

Generally I think Google has some good ideas up their sleeves and if they where a tad more refined they would make a welcome addition to the engine's system. I presume if they were added that some of the new features at least would be optional to keep the luddites happy, but otherwise I think Google would be heading the right way with them.