According to the Google blog “Inside Google Book Search“, some changes have been made recently to Google Book Search, so I took this as my cue to go and visit to check these out. To say that I was disappointed is to put it mildly, and if you don’t have time to read my entire posting I’ll summarize by stating that it’s another example of Google taking a great idea and working on it half-heartedly and trying to make developments without solving the basic problems.

However, let’s not get ahead of ourselves – we should start with the ‘developments’. According to the blog entry, they have added new starting points to help a book explorer kick off his journey.

There is a sampling of ‘interesting books’ based on Book Search’s algorithms. Of course, what is interesting to one person is going to be deadly dull for someone else, and the first selection made (this changes every time you load the page) included “The Growth of the Modern West Indies” and the “International Handbook of Bilingualism and Bilingual Education.” Without wishing to be critical of either title, they’re not exactly interesting, at least not to me. I tried again, this time logging in, and was offered cookery books, Shakespeare, and economic titles. Now, perhaps I’m being overly critical, but these offerings are as interesting and useful as walking into a bookshop and choosing a bookshelf at random. If the titles had been perhaps linked into my search history or any of the other information Google keeps on me it might have been a bit different, but this is a simple waste of my time. This does not help me in my search for books in the slightest.

Other options that appear on the front page are “Classics,” “Highly Cited,” and “Random Subject.” Unfortunately, if these are chosen by an algorithm all the choices are essentially random since they’re not based on anything that is of interest to me and consequently are of little interest except for browsing. If I want to browse I’m more likely going to use a resource such as Library Thing in order to see what my friends are reading, since this might actually show me things that I’d like to read as well. However, to be fair, Google also does provide a number of other options on the left hand side of the screen, such as Science Fiction, Chemistry, and a number of random (there’s that word again) subjects. Another chance missed – why can’t I amend this for myself? However, science fiction is an interest of mine, so let’s take a look at the results. 4 classic works, another 3 by the same author, and several titles I’ve never heard of. This is not exactly going to rock my world. To get ahead of myself, Google knows what books I have in my library – how difficult is it to integrate the two functions to provide me with something useful – Amazon can do it, why can’t Google?

Let’s press on and see what other offerings we have available. Google is aware that you may be interested in particular aspects of a subject, so they have added query refinements from related subjects at the top or bottom of your book results page. Apparently these suggestions are designed to tell me some of the popular domains that match my search. It’s a useful idea, and I like to be able to narrow or broaden out my search options, which several other search engines offer as standard (though Google isn’t actually one of them, but that’s another story). However, in order for this to work properly, the query refinements do need to have some grounding in sanity. I ran a search for “Britain” and the refinements included “Middle East,” “Biochemistry,” and “Ability/Testing.” Clearly the Google engineers responsible for this option should spend some time reading through books in that last category. I tried again, with “Internet,” and this time for no apparent reason my refinements appeared at the bottom of the screen. No attempt at consistency then; no wonder the blog entry says “top or bottom,” since they don’t seem to have any idea how this works, either! Refined results for “Internet” include “American Literature” and “Biochemistry.” I think we can put this down as another good idea wasted.

The blog entry also implies, through an example given, that I might want to keep up to date with a particular subject – marathon training was the example given. This would be a good idea, if it actually worked properly. In order to keep up to date with a particular subject, I need to be able to limit my search to new books, or new additions to the Google database. However, when I do the ‘marathon training‘ search, I get a collection of 1,382 titles, presumably arranged by relevance. In order to get close to a list of new titles I need to use the Advanced Search Option and choose a publication date. It seems that I can only limit by year, and this still gives me over 300 titles. Once again, not in the slightest bit helpful. The blog entry ends by describing these “improvements” as “pretty cool,” which really does make me despair.

In an effort to find something positive to say I looked more generally at the product. A search for “internet” gives me 1,020,600 books, which is impressive – until I try and look at the results. Oddly this number soon drops to 278 books, and I can only see a total of 258. What happened to the other 20 books? Or, come to think of it, the other 1,020,342? Thinking this might just be a glitch, I tried again with “civil war.” The results were a total of 386,600 books, which is a creditable number except that when I try and look at these I’m stopped at 320 titles. The rest appear to be there, but Google won’t let me see them, for reasons best known only to itself. Surely, if you’re doing a book search it’s rather different than a search for web pages, and it’s perfectly possible that you’ll want to look through large numbers of books?

At this point I was about to give up, but then saw one final howler that I want to share with you. A search for “hastings d-day” returns a result for Max Hasting’s work “Overlord: D-Day and the Battle for Normandy,” which is the 1984 edition from Simon and Schuster and is correctly listed as “History.” However, a search for “subject:”Fiction” hastings” returns the same book (although it’s the 1993 edition this time, from Pan Macmillan), only this time it is listed as “Fiction.”

That for me sums up Google’s Book Search function – it’s an excellent idea which could be very useful, but it’s continually let down by sloppy execution, lack of attention to details, an emphasis on “pretty cool” features that are actually almost valueless, and with no apparent attempt to correct basic flaws in the system.

Greg recently mentioned that Reuters have launched a new video/people search engine powered by Viewdle, and I’ve been playing around with it. While it has some drawbacks (currently it’s only possible to search through 612 hours of footage held by Reuters), it has a lot of features that I like.

The results screen tells you how many videos have been located that feature the person you’re interested in, the context (”Mandela statue unveiled in London”), date of the video, overall length, and time the searched for individual is on screen for. When viewing a video it starts at the point where the subject first appears, rather than right at the very beginning. Searchers can also view the full story in a textual format, view an index of other people contained in the video and when they appear, and view a complete chronology of the video, making it easy to jump to the exact point the subject appears.

If you are in a rush and need to quickly locate an individual on a video, this search engine certainly shows promise.

The advanced search function was a little disappointing, in that it was only possible to limit a search to various different Reuters channels (though to be fair there are 14 of them, allowing searchers to reasonably closely focus on a subject) and a date option, starting from January 2007. While this is a shame, it’s important to remember this is still only in a beta format, working with a limited database.

Other limitations do, however, limit the functionality – I can do a search for “Gordon Brown,” but I cannot exclude other names, since I end up with zero results. A search for gordon brown mandela also gave zero results, which was surprising, given that several videos of the two men appearing were listed in my first search for the Prime Minister.

Balancing this is a nice feature that’s not been well highlighted on the page, which is the ‘Top Charts’ option – allowing searchers to see who has been in the news in the last 24 hours, week, month, and year. Unsurprisingly, George Bush dominates the latter two categories, with a total of 743 appearances and on screen time of over 2 hours.

In summary, the main disadvantage of this search engine is that it’s still in beta, with a small database and limited functionality. However, the underlying concept is good and seems to work reasonably well. I’ll be interested to see how this develops over time.

As pointed out on Bruceclay.com — Ask.com thinks you’re an idiot — Ask can sometimes be an irritating company. I like the new Ask3D interface, and they’re doing a lot of good things in the search arena. However, when it comes to how Ask is marketing itself, I’m completely baffled.

In the UK they have been running an “Information Revolution” campaign, employing a font reminiscent of Soviet-era dissident ’samizdat’ typescript. I wrote about this in a column for the Ariadne magazine, and things don’t look any better on the other side of the Atlantic.

In the US, first we had the “Chicks with swords” video (which mercifully doesn’t appear to have made it over to the UK – perhaps Ask thinks we’ve suffered enough), and now they’ve released another one with a woman searching for a gentleman by the name of Kato Kaelin (we don’t know who he is in the UK, and I’m hoping it stays that way).

Admittedly they are also running a couple of other adverts that focus on ‘The Algorithm’ but these are also vague and obscure. Lisa Barone over at Bruceclay is rather more forthright, calling Ask the “king of failed advertising … depicting their users as vapid idiot searchers.”

I really can’t disagree. How hard is it to come up with a campaign that just says “We do search. We can find what you’re looking for quickly and easily?”

Ask has a great search engine; will someone in the company tell that to their advertising team please?

The Ask.com blog posts today about Ask’s new home page, which they are particularly proud of, and I think rightly so. They talk about their icons, suggest feature and skins, all of which are worth a quick peek.

The nice neat new icons are consistent across the interface and across country versions. There is the “suggest as you type” feature, although there’s nothing particularly new about that, since Google has had Google Suggest for some time now.

Interestingly though, Google Suggest kicks in immediately you start typing, while with Ask, it takes two characters. However, from a very brief and unscientific study, the Ask suggestions seem more information and research based, while the Google suggestions appear biased towards commercial content.

“Co” gives us conversion chart, costco, consumer reports, conversions with Ask, while Google gives us costco, comcast, continental airlines and comcast.net, though I’ll admit it’s a close call. Google does however have the added advantage of indicating how many results there are for each term, which is helpful.

Ask also has eleven skins to choose from, and they’ve promised users can upload their own in the future.

All well and good, though I’m slightly at a loss as to why the Ask team felt it necessary to devote an entire blog entry for something relatively minor that we all knew about. Well, I suppose it makes a change from reading about their advertising campaign I suppose.

Postscript From Danny: I’m actually a fan of the series of posts Ask has been doing about the changes they brought in as part of Ask3D. For those of us that deal with search all the time, the components they’re talking about might seem minor or already known. But I’ve been viewing those posts as an on-going education effort for a more general audience and thus useful.

Flickr has recently introduced content filters, allowing users more control over what images they view, and to ensure that they don’t get nasty surprises by accidently viewing some of the more adult images that are hosted. However, while this is a useful option, the option of turning it off has been removed in Germany, which means that those users are unable to see images that users from other countries can. This has led to some very unhappy users indeed, drawing parallels with recent situations with some other high profile Web 2.0 companies.

In the Flickr Forum a staff member has said Flickr’s intent is never to censor content, but rather to comply with local legal restrictions. In Germany, local law (Jugendmedien-Staatsvertrag JMStV) requires stringent age verification in order to display online content that could be considered harmful to minors.

This has not however satisfied many irate users who are claiming that Flickr is censoring images, limiting freedom of speech and so on in a Flickr group ‘Flickr: Against Censorship’ (the irony of which is not missed). Flickr has recently changed their initial stance and is now allowing pictures rated as ‘moderate’ to be viewed in Germany, so it would seem that the group can claim some level of success.

However, what is more interesting is that this is yet another example of the way that users are flexing their muscles when companies move in directions that they don’t approve of.

We’ve already seen this happen with Digg and LiveJournal also recently found that the decision they took to ban or limit some journals did not meet with the approval of many of their users either.

In all three cases the grass level revolts seem to have taken the companies by surprise and they have, in relative terms, been slow to respond. There is still no comment on the Flickr blog or their news section, discussion from staff members being concentrated in the forum section of the site. While this may in practical terms be the best place to have such a discussion it does at least give the appearance that they are trying to keep this dispute as hidden as possible.

Clearly there is more to creating a Web 2.0 based resource than coming up with a good idea and some funding – customer relations would also appear to have to be close to the top of the agenda as well.

Sproose, a social search engine that allows users to rank results which I wrote about back in February, has updated, making it easier for users to rank the index of results.

Simply run a search, find a site that you like and click on ‘I like it’ to move it up the rankings. And move it up the rankings you can. I took a site that was listed in the 100th position and turned it into one ranked on the first page.

While it’s a nice idea, I think for one person to be able to manipulate results to that extent is slightly extreme. Yes, I know that it’s only because there were a few votes and it won’t happen in a subject area with lots of results, but until Sproose gets to the point I think it’s a valid criticism.

I also found that I couldn’t ‘unvote’ the page either; there wasn’t an ‘oops’ button, and while I could remove a page, it was only removed from my version of the index, so I couldn’t backtrack that way. I still think that there’s some way to go before this concept starts to work properly, and it’s a system that looks like it’s open to abuse.

Although Google currently has a wealth of books in their Google Book Search database, this isn’t enough either for them or us, so they’ve taken steps to improve the situation.

If you now do a search, you’ll find references to millions of books that they haven’t yet digitized. You can then click on an “About the Book” page where you can find basic book information such as author, title, publication date, and where possible, reviews and web references.

Since Google hasn’t yet digitized these books, you won’t be able to preview or search the text, but when you find a book that interests you, they are offering links to places where you can buy it at a bookstore or borrow it from a library.

It’s a sensible move on Google’s part and pushes the blending of results a little further. After all, if I’m interested in a book, and I can’t find it in the digitized collection, I’m still going to be interested in it. This is a helpful move.

I was impressed with the currency of the database, and the easy availability of options to limit searching from All Books to Limited Preview to Full View. In summary – a really good improvement on the service providing immediate benefits to all searchers.

Pipl is a people search engine that tries to be a little different. Rather than just go off and hunt for email addresses, this tries to search through the deep/invisible/hidden web to return content that other search engines are going to miss. The interface is simple – type in first name, last name, city, state and country, then let it go to see what it’ll find.

It searches across a wide variety of resources, and it does it reasonably quickly – with the searches that I ran I’d get responses in 5 seconds or less. Pipl pulled content from 192 (which is a British site providing access to electoral registers for example), Friendster, and it pulled up what it calls ‘quick facts’ that are snippets from webpages. This was useful, since it provided useful thumbnail sketches of the person/people with the name the searcher is seeking.

So, for example, our own Danny Sullivan is variously:

+ Editor in chief of Search Engine Land, + A brilliant guy who does an amazing podcast + An architect + An idiot + A long time commentator on the search engine industry

Pipl also pulls content from profile and directories such as Amazon, publications, public records, web pages and news items.

It also suggests possible name variants as well, so ‘Danny Sullivan’ may be a nickname for ‘Daniel Sullivan’ or ‘Sheridan Sullivan’. The first I could have guessed, the second took a little more thought to work out.

It was certainly interesting to hunt through the information provided, and Pipl has made a good start, but there were a few gaps that surprised me. No mention of social bookmarking services for example – I would expect to be able to see if people with the name I was looking for had marked things in del.icio.us or Furl for example.

Although Pipl do mention Flickr I didn’t see any references to images that either Danny or I had put up. I would also expect to see material from the BT phone book, or some of the other school reunion websites.

This however maybe a little churlish, given that it’s only recently launched. It’s an engine that’s worth taking a peek at – even if it’s only to see what they have on you and your namesakes. It will probably be more than you expect.

My colleague Chris Sherman briefly looked at the PC World ‘Search Engine Shoot-out’ article the other day, and I also mentioned it in my own weblog. I read through the article briefly, but something about it kept nagging me, so I wanted to go back and look at it in rather more detail. The more I look at it, the more concerns I have over the piece.

The first concern of course is the idea that there’s a ‘best search engine’. There’s very little difference between saying that and saying that there is a ‘best reference book’ or ‘best President’ or ‘best television programme’. It simply doesn’t exist, yet there does appear to be this Holy Grail in the industry that we should all be trying to find some ultimate resource that will be the answer to all of our needs. Of course, nothing is further from the truth – there IS no ‘best search engine’ in the same way that there’s no best reference book. What is best in one situation is not best in another, and in order to use search engines successfully we need to employ a blended approach, moving from one engine to another as needed. In fact, on my own website I have a listing called ‘Which search engine when?‘ that lists a variety of things you may want to do or search for on the Internet, and which engines may be best at helping with that task. I’ve listed over 100 different resources, all of which are good at some elements of search, and not so good at others.

This is not difficult to move from one option or alternative to another and I see no reason why we shouldn’t expect people to do this when it comes to internet searching when they’re perfectly capable of moving between different resources in the rest of their lives. The idea, promulgated in this article is that Google is in fact the best search engine, and quite simply this is not the case. It may be the best search engine in some situations for some users, but that’s a rather different situation to saying that it is ‘the best’ which is quite simply a silly, simplistic statement.

A second concern that I have relates to the competitors Jeff Bertolucci, the author, decided to pit Google against. Some of these were excellent choices and he hit the nail on the head – Yahoo, Live Search, and Ask do need to considered in any comparisons between search engines. However, what puzzled me was some of the other choices that were made – the Wikipedia for example is not a search engine, and it simply cannot be considered in the same way, or be expected to perform searches that are not appropriate to its interface. Similarly the Open Directory Project is a completely different type of search engine – an Index or Directory engine, getting its data, storing, indexing and displaying it in a completely different way. It is obvious from the very outset that both resources would perform poorly as indeed they did. What about the omissions from the list as well? I was very surprised not to see Exalead on the listing, and when I used some of the sample queries Bertolucci used it performed very well indeed, and would certainly have been very highly placed in the final table. In fact, I could name a number of other engines that could easily have slipped into the list replacing those that simply should not have been there in the first place.

The approach used to work out the results also needs to be looked at in some detail. At this point I’ve got a lot of sympathy with Bertolucci because it’s very hard to test and compare search engines unless you do hundreds if not thousands of tests. Anything less is going to open you up to criticism of anecdotal testing (looking for favourite names or football teams), but if you only have a limited time or budget available it becomes inevitable that this approach has to be taken. The type of searches used, with keywords and phrases is of course going to work well with certain engines and not others. If you are looking for an explicit result giving a particular fact (as all the test queries were) some engines will of course perform better, because that’s what they were designed to do. However, if a different approach was taken, to provide perhaps a holistic response, with a search engine giving the searcher lots of information about a particular subject, an overview, or ways of expanding or narrowing the search then quite clearly Google is not going to excel in that situation, since that’s not what it does best.

Moreover, a search engine is not simply the sum of its results – there is much more involved than that. The level and amount of functionality is of vital importance, and comparisons need to take into account the ability to search on regions of the world, file formats, periods of time, different languages and so on. It’s also necessary to look at the way the information is displayed on the searcher’s screen; there’s no point in having the correct result available if it’s difficult to read.

Now of course it’s very easy to say this, and much more difficult to put into practice. Indeed, much of this is going to come down to individual preference, and while one person may like thumbnail shots of a page on the results screen, someone else will hate it. All of which goes to provide additional weight to my point that there’s no best search engine, so why pretend that there is? Given that the tests were run on a small number of (sometimes ill chosen) search engines the fact that the overall result showed that Google was “indeed the best search engine” is quite frankly completely meaningless.

Let’s move along and look at some of the other categories included in the shootout, and in particular the second section of the article entitled ‘Undisputed Champ’. The very first sentence highlights another problem area for me. The author states “If you use Google and are happy with it, you have no reason to switch engines.” There is a fundamental flaw in this opinion. I may be very happy driving a 20 year old Cadillac, without realizing that newer models are faster, with better fuel consumption and a whole host of interesting gadgets, but does that mean I should stick with what I’ve got? Of course not. In fact, the people who most need to look at different engines are exactly those who are in an unthinking comfort zone and not looking at other alternatives. This is bringing us very close to the territory of ‘There are things that we don’t know we don’t know’ and the only way you can find out what you don’t know is to do the exact opposite of what Bertolucci is suggesting, which is to explore, move out of the comfort zone and see if you can be more effective with other tools.

This section of the article also illustrates another failing with the overall methodology used. An image search was run on the term ‘windform’ with the searcher having a specific idea as to exactly what they wanted – a horn that measures 20 feet in length. A search engine gained points if it returned an appropriate image on the home page. However, simply because a search engine did, or did not do this is entirely irrelevant. As long as it found images that matched the search term it would have done a good job. I’d be concerned if an engine returned pictures of cats with a query like that – unless it was pictures of a cat called ‘Windform’, but when this doesn’t happen it is not the search engine that has failed, it is the searcher. If a searcher cannot clearly indicate what they want, then a search engine has little to work with, and a single word search is quite simply a poor search. I’d be willing to bet that if the search was expanded to something like ‘windform horn’ all the image engines would have done a good job. It is unfair to criticize a search engine when it fails to live up to your unarticulated request for a specific piece of information; we need to move a lot further down the road towards personalization for this to become a valid criticism and we’re certainly not there yet.

The section of the article ‘What’s new in search’ was also a puzzle, given that the author of the piece was actually spending his time looking at existing search engines, rather than the test beds that all the major search engines use. Once again there is a fundamental flaw in the assumptions made in this section. Search engines are criticized because they don’t, for example, display a photograph of a daffodil when that search term is input. If that’s not their job, that’s not a valid criticism. To be fair however, there is an inconsistency here – Ask for example did not show images of daffodils, but it did show an image of the Eiffel Tower when that term was searched for. So the functionality is willing, even if the search term is weak. However, in order to do the search engines justice at this point surely the author should have been looking at the test beds? Ask X displays images of daffodils along with a whole host of other information. Searchmash (from Google) did not.

The section on television guides is one that I’m going to pass by, simply because it did exactly what it said on the tin. It’s one of the few sections that didn’t surprise me, that chose good contenders and provided an excellent summary.

It is a shame that I can’t say the same about ‘Smart Interface Tricks’, which primarily limited itself to looking at the Ask smart answers function, and comparing it to the other contenders. It was a shame that the ability to suggest different search terms wasn’t mentioned, or the opportunity of saving searches as RSS feeds, or the fact that some search engines (Google Suggest and Ask X for example) can suggest terms while the searcher is typing. Or the ability to a phonetic search, offered by Exalead, or the various ways that Accoona has of targeting search results. I could go on, but I think the point is made, though I’m slightly concerned by the term ‘tricks’. None of these are tricks; just good, old fashioned programming based on an understanding of what will make life better for the end user.

The picture search engine section also puzzled me. It’s true that the major contenders were included, but again limiting the success or otherwise of the engines to their ability to return specific images was a waste of possibilities. Returning photographs that match the search terms is of course paramount, but the ability to restrict results to colour, black and white, size, royalty free images and so on is also important to the searcher. Seeing lovely accurate colour images of daffodils is of no use to me if I want black and white images. Once again the parameters used in this section have to be called into question. Flickr for example is a huge repository of photographs and is a key search tool when it comes to images – partly because of the images themselves of course, but also the opportunity to browse through specific groups of images as defined by users, or easily have discussions based around particular subjects, or the chance to comment on images is hugely important.

There is a section on News resources, but again there were strange omissions. The BBC site was ignored for example, yet the search engine is perfectly functional and I would have found it helpful to see how it matched the other engines out there. Once again, the emphasis is placed solely on results, with little reference to functionality – these really are not the be all and end all of the worth of a search engine, and other considerations do need to be taken into account. Though unfortunately apparently not in this survey.

I’m going to ignore the Mobile/local section of the report entirely; very few search engines are paying attention to local needs if those needs are not based in the US. Since I did not have access to the particular type of mobile/cell phone being used I can’t provide sensible comments anyway, other than to say that simply because a search engine looks good on one device it doesn’t necessarily mean it would look good on another, and just using one resource does, in my view, render the testing fairly pointless

The shoot out has a section specifically devoted to the future of search. Ask X is mentioned (though the author of the piece continually refers to it through the entire article as Act X, which does make me wonder slightly), as is searchmash. Snap also gets a brief mention, but that’s about it. No mention of Yahoo Mindset, no mention of Google labs and the things they are working on, no reference to new and developing Web 2.0 search functions. Perhaps by this point the author was beginning to realize that he’d bitten off more than he could chew, or alternatively it was badly edited, but in either case the opportunity to look at this in depth was missed. These errors continued in the section on creating customized search engines – where was the discussion of the Eurekster swicki? Mention of the Yahoo search builder? Or even, in a piece which seems to take every opportunity to point out how wonderful Google is, was there no mention of the Google custom search function?

At which point the article draws to an end, with an explanation of how the testing was done. The author claims to have covered the ‘real world use’ of search engines, but were was mention of multi or meta search engines? Search engines designed for children? Social bookmarking search engines? I could continue (and still not stray into the area of search engines not designed for the average member of the public), but there seems little point. As a shoot out the article is sadly lacking in almost every area, and as a consequence the results are of little value. For a resource such as PC World, which has an excellent reputation and has previously produced some excellent resources this is less of a shoot out and more of damp squib.

Properazzi is a multi search engine that scans property websites and provides access to over 1,800,000 properties for sale or rent in 45 European countries. Searchers can limit searches to particular towns or countries, by price, keyword and sale or rental. A Google powered map allows another method of locating a particular place or region.

Individual property entries are limited to the information provided by the originating website, but they include price (obviously), usually a photograph and a description of the property. Clicking on the property takes the searcher through to the originating website in a (removable) Properazzi frame.

Overall I found it to be an easy to use, intuitive search engine. Nice additions were the ability to have RSS feeds and a widget to send results to a mobile phone. I would like to see more use of Web 2.0 concepts, perhaps with links to information on specific regions detailing things like population statistics, crime figures, local government information and so on. The ability to post queries or have discussions about particular areas would also be a welcome addition. However, if you’re looking for property in Europe and don’t want to chase around a wide number of different property websites, Properazzi is certainly worth spending some time with.