Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Yahoo Search Direct??? Google Instant???

One week since Yahoo launched it's new search feature, "Search Direct"! "Search Direct is the fundamental shift in search in more than a decade, We believe Search Direct will be the simplest and fastest to find answers and not links!" says Yahoo on the launch of beta version of the feature @US..


Yahoo Search Direct starts as soon as you click inside the search box where as Google Instant does after a few words are typed in search box.. The outcome? If instant and most importantly "relevant" information is given, it does really keep users smiling and give them a way away from "wild goose chase" to find answers for their simplest of queries... Yahoo Search Direct does provide the top 30 results and provide the top most 10 likely searches and for each of those the top 3 results.. On the user selection of a site, it is directly rendered without the unnecessary result page... This does reduce the time between entry of search query and getting the results in a way although Google Instant also helps one to frame the search queries faster!




Despite all efforts, there is a strong opinion that both engines do not render "relevant and most wanted results" - they are still yet to become "What you think is what you get" kind of search engines...... We should of course mention that the various features coming up these days on both the search engines do reduce the search efforts in terms of framing the query.. The "semantic" proximity of the search results to the query are yet to go a long way...... What i mean is that the search engines are still syntactic in the very sense...........

Thursday, March 10, 2011

New feature of Google Search - Block the results from selected websites!!! How far does it help???

Google Search has come up with a new feature, "Block what you don't want!"

It comes as a feature after your first search query... Say you would want to block http://www.w3.org/ search results from the query "Owl", you will have to do a first search on OWL.. Go to each of the results, on a click back to google search home page from each result, a new feature "Block all w3.org results" appears next to cached and similar links.. On clicking "Block all w3.org results" link, the future results shall not be from "w3.org". The link appears even though the user has not signed in, but blocking requires the user to sign into the google account. Although the feature could help in blocking results which are offensive or are of low quality or pornographic stuff, it requires efforts from the user in traversing to the search result page of the site you would want to block.. Is'nt this a burden on the user? Would it not be better to have a settings feature where the user can first block/unblock domains he would not want in search results? Or on the first shot, on a search, the search results can directly have a link to block the corresponding domains from future search...

This feature being previously available as Chrome extension is now rolled out for both IE and Firefox users.. Developed by search quality engineers, "Amay Champaneria and Beverly Yang",
the new feature might add value to increased personalisation for the users with extra burden of traversing each link which the user would want to block..

Read more from Official Google Blog