Google Operating System noticed Google has added a new search option named “page preview.” If you go to Google, search on something and click on “show options,” you can then look towards the button on the left hand side and click on “page previews.” For example, here is a view of a search for apple with page preview selected.

As you can see, Google adds thumbnails of the page directly on the search results.

Page previews is nothing new to search, Ask.com did it with binoculars and there are many Firefox add-ons that add page previews to the Google search results.

Google has just unveiled a “secret project” of “next-generation architecture for Google’s web search“. This new architecture appears to include crawling, indexing, and ranking changes. For the first time, Google isn’t simply incorporating these changes into their existing infrastructure or replacing it. Instead, they’re providing a developer preview and are asking webmasters and power searchers to try it out and give them feedback. Unlike Google’s now-defunct SearchMash, which was intended for search experiments that wouldn’t necessarily be incorporated into Google’s main web search, the caffeine index seems to be an entirely new search infrastructure that will repace what exists now.

Based on the blog post, we can guess that this new infrastructure may include ways of crawling the web more comprehensively, determining reputation and authority (possibly beyond the link graph and what’s typically thought of as PageRank), and returning more relevant results more quickly, although Google’s Matt Cutts told me that the changes are “primarily in how we index”.

While the biggest visible changes in Microsoft’s relaunched search engine, Bing, are user-interface related, Google’s new search is only infrastructure related and includes no UI changes. On first glance, however, the underlying infrastructure changes do seem to have impacted user interface as it relates to universal search (likely because universal results are influenced by ranking and relevance signals). For the sample searches I did, the first ten results were fairly similar, but the existence and location of images, video, news, and blog posts was notably different.

A search for [buffy the vampire slayer] on the new infrastructure, for instance, returns video and news results midway down the page.

A search on the existing infrastructure, however, returns news at the top, video in the middle, and images at the bottom of the page.

Undoubtedly, Google Caffeine will cause quite a kerfluffle in the web developer and search engine optimization world and many will dive in to try and figure out the changes. We’ll likely see many a speculative blog post about how best to optimize for the new infrastructure, but my guess is that it likely does what Google search does, but better. And the foundational elements of having a crawlable infrastructure and compelling content remain.

I am not sure if this is new, but when you look at the first search suggestions given to you by Google and then look at the second set of search suggestions, Google will change them, assuming you were not happy with the first set of results. Google Operating System just pointed this out and I have never seen it mentioned prior (doesn’t mean it hasn’t been mentioned prior).

Here is an example of this in action:

(1) Search suggestions by Google for the word [search]:

(2) Then I land on the search results page and try it again, and notice that the suggestions are different:

It’s no secret that Google — and other search engines — uses a variety of factors to customize search results: your search history, your location, and so forth. If you misspell a word, search engines often guess what you intended to type and show auto-corrected results. But on Google’s search results pages, it’s becoming a secret when these changes are happening.

Google Blogoscoped writes about Google ignoring some search terms altogether (as if it knows better than you what you meant to search for). The example in that post is a search for “dictionary cleaning up suddenly,” in which Google ignored the word “suddenly”:

But worse than ignoring part of the query is the fact that Google’s explanation is buried at the bottom of the search results where only a small percentage of eyes will ever see it. Why so secretive, Google? If you’re going to rewrite the query for me, wouldn’t it be more transparent to tell me right away? Wouldn’t it be more user-friendly to give me that “show results”/override link at the top so I can run the search I actually typed in?

It’s the same story with the personalization messages that show up when Google adjusts its results based on your web history or location. Those notices used to appear in the upper right of the search results page, above the blue bar, like you see in this image from a Google blog post with the ironic title, “More transparency in customized search results.”

That blog post, written almost a year ago, talks about Google’s “commitment to transparency.” But just try to get one of the customization messages to show up today at the top of the search results. They don’t. Sometime within the last couple months (or more), Google started tucking them away at the bottom of the page, again where few eyes will ever see them.

Danny Sullivan said it well when Google announced this move to transparency last year:

“It’s a nice move to help searchers know what exactly is going on ‘under the hood’ at Google and override it if the wrong choices are being made. I’d like to see more of it.”

Instead, it seems we’re seeing less of it. Auto-corrected misspellings are no longer identified; correct spellings are used instead of what you searched, with no notice that your query was changed. Here’s a search for “bellweather credit union” in which the results are changed to “bellwether.”

No doubt, fixing the spelling is the right thing to do in this case. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with customizing results based on my location or previous searches. But Google had it right a year ago with its talk about transparency: Any changes or adjustments to the search results should be indicated clearly and immediately at the top of the page, not buried below the search results (or removed altogether). If you ignore one of the words in a user’s query, tell him right away. If you’re showing a user certain results based on her previous searches, tell her right away.

Google’s privacy policy is summed up in one sentence that appears at the top of the page in extremely large text:

“At Google, we’re committed to transparency and choice.”

Maybe it’s time turn the clock back a year and make that commitment all over again.

Ever searched for yourself on Google and come away dissatisfied, especially if someone else you share a name with seems to dominate the results? Ever looked for someone else and been disappointed that you couldn’t find the person you wanted? Google’s new “Profile Results” launching today aim to correct both problems.

Since the end of 2007, Google has allowed people to create Google Profile pages for use with certain Google services. For example, if you created content in Google Maps, your Google Profile let you share who you were with others using that service. The same profile also served to identify you when using the completely different Google Reader service.

Now Google Profiles are going beyond Google’s own services. They’re being promoted as a way for people to tell the world who they are and, to some degree, being offered as a way for people to claim their identity in Google’s main search results.

“People have no control over how they appear when other people search for them on Google. That’s a big issue we’ve heard,” said Joe Kraus, a director of product management at Google. “The new results are to better control what people see and improve the ability for people to fine what they’re looking for.”

In the new system, a new “Profile results” section will appear at the bottom of a Google search page, when it finds a strong match in response to a name-based search. Up to four profiles will be shown:

You can also search directly for profiles here.

Building Your Profile Page

The profiles all come from Google Profile pages, which means in order for a chance to appear, you’ve got to have a page. That’s fairly easy. There’s no charge to have a page, and you needn’t use any particular Google services, either. Just sign-up here. You can also search for “me” on Google, and if you’re signed-in, you’ll see an option promoting how to make your own profile.

After signing-up, you can provide a variety of information about yourself, including:

• Your picture
• Your first and/or last name
• Nickname
• Where you grew up
• Where you live
• Where you work
• Schools you’ve attended
• A biography
• Links to web sites you wish to list
• Pictures from your Picasa, Flickr or other online photo albums
• Contact information, which can be shared selectively with people

Not all of these options were offered when Profile pages were first launched. The pages have gained more features over time, and the new additions have been pretty poorly communicated, I’d say. If you’re like me, you’ve probably had a fairly bare display.

The new system will cause many people to reexamine their profiles, as they hope to appear in Google’s main results. But with only four spaces, some names will be competitive. Which ones will show? Those that Google feels are “comprehensive enough,” Kraus said.

Does that mean you need to fill out all the fields, including what your “superpower” is? No. Kraus said there are no hard-and-fast rules, especially since the system’s ranking criteria are likely to change over time. But for now, those who at least fill out the form with their first and last name (this is the basic requirement), along with a few links to content, will probably increase the odds of appearing.

Profile Page Options: From Job Title To Links

As an example of what you can do, here’s my profile, which until yesterday had only consisted of my photo, my name and a few links. I’ve pimped it up since then:

Below, you can see how information in my profile’s “What I do” box gets combined with the “Current Company” box to form a job title below my name. Under that, the “Where I live now” box is used to show my location. All this is done using the Edit Profile option:

Whatever you put in these boxes will appear. There’s no attempt to verify that you really do have a job title that you claim to hold or that you work for a particular company. However, there is an option for others to report profiles that they feel are inappropriate.

As for my biography, I used the “Short bio” box to enter what I wanted to appear. This box even allows you to add links to your bio:

For those wondering, so far, these appear to be straight links that do pass PageRank. The nofollow attribute is not used, nor do I see other blocking, so potentially anyone can use their Google profile for link building efforts. I suspect that nofollow will come down the line.

Speaking of links, you’ll notice that in the upper right-hand corner of my profile are several links I’ve listed. These are added using the Links area of your edit profile page:

You can add any links you like. However, Google will also suggest some for you. Sometimes it can tell from information you’ve entered what links might be related to you, using the Google Social Graph. Or enter your FriendFeed link, and it will suggest other services you’ve told FriendFeed about.

As mentioned, you can also add a photo strip to your profile, pulling in pictures from public albums on Google’s Picasa, Yahoo’s Flickr or any URL that provides a photo feed. Just use the Photos tab to do this.

Verified Names & Emails

Now let’s look at two special things showing on my profile, that I have a “Verified name” and a “Verified email,” as shown below:

Don’t go looking on your profile page for the option on how to verify your name. It’s not there. Instead, to have a verified name, you need to enroll in the Google Knol service and verify your name there (see Google Knol – Google’s Play To Aggregate Knowledge Pages). If you’ve done that, you get a verified name. If not, you don’t.

It’s crazy, but it’s also a symptom of how piecemeal Google’s entire profile system feels to have developed over the past year. It’s as if Google drove its social networking car out onto the racetrack back in 2007 to chase after Facebook but kept adding parts to it during the race, without stopping.

Should you get a verified name? Right now, it doesn’t influence whether your profile will rank better in profile results. But if you’re trying to convince people to trust that the page is really controlled by you, it probably makes sense.

Then there’s the verified email. The idea here is that you’ve shown Google that you can send email from a given domain. For example, if you claimed to work for Microsoft, the system allows you to prove that you’ve received email from an address at microsoft.com. Or as the help page says:

When people who know you visit your profile and see, for example, your school’s domain name, they’ll be able to know that it’s the real you on your profile.

As for those who only have email from a free service, such as Yahoo, Hotmail or even Google’s own Gmail, they’re out of luck. These services aren’t seen as trustworthy enough to allow for verification.

While I understand that concern, I also find it odd. If many people start having verified email addresses, then it suggests those who don’t have profiles with verified emails are somehow less trustworthy. And since the entire Profile results system is designed in part to help those with less “net presence,” as Kraus called it, to have a shot of appearing in Google’s results, it’s unfortunate they get discriminated in this way.

Of course, as with verified names, verified email addresses don’t mean you’ll rank better. Those unverified folks have just as good of chance of coming up as the verified people. It just from a perception standpoint, they might have profiles that seem less trustworthy.

Vanity URLs For Profiles

Your profile is a web page, and that means it has its own URL. By default, your URL will be a long string of numbers. For example, my profile is here:

http://www.google.com/profiles/113217924531763968801

Of course, last week there was a great flurry when it was noted that Google started allowing profiles to have “vanity URLs.” Want a URL that uses your own name? You can have it.

Sort of.

It turns out that vanity URL must be the same as your Gmail address. In other words, whatever your address is on Gmail, that’s going to be your address in your vanity URL. If my Gmail address began emperorzorg, then I’d have a vanity URL that looked like this:

google.com/profiles/emperorzorg

Oh joy. If you have a Gmail account, and you claim your vanity URL, then you expose you email address to the world. Google explicitly warns you that this can happen, but it’s still pretty sucky. Why not operate the way that Google’s YouTube does or Yahoo’s Flickr, where you can have a username that is different than your email address?

Kraus said that Google is trying to have a unified namespace, where everyone has one name with Google and things are kept as simple as possible. That means using your Gmail name as your profile’s URL.

But wait! Life certainly isn’t so simple at Google. I actually have at least two active Google accounts, one of which isn’t linked to Gmail at all. I think I got that one by signing up for AdWords or some other service before Gmail existed. I’m also far from the only person in this situation, given I’ve seen ample Google help pages over time on how to transfer a particular service between different Google accounts.

And that non-Gmail account? The good news is that I can use that to get a vanity URL of my choosing. That’s right. Any Google Account not linked with Gmail can set the URL to whatever name they want, assuming that name is free.

Of course, this means that if you have an existing account, you’d have to find a way to move some of your services over to the new one (not always easy or even possible). You might also find the name you want isn’t free. And behind the scenes, if you ever do get a Gmail account? Whatever name you picked will be your Gmail address, Kraus said.

Clearly I’m grumpy over all this. I wish Google had let people pick whatever names they wanted for their URLs and kept it separate from Gmail addresses. But that’s how things are.

Choosing What To Reveal

Unlike with Facebook, there’s no granular control over what you share with the world on your profile. If you list where you grew up, everyone will see that rather than you selectively deciding to share it with just friends or family. It’s all or nothing. So don’t put anything on your page that you’re not comfortable sharing — which is easy, since nothing other than your first and last name is required to show up in search results.

An exception to sharing relates to Contact Info. This is an area where you can list your email addresses, street addresses, phone numbers, IM addresses and your birthday. You can selectively decide which of your friends to share this information with, and you can create groups of friends.

How’s all this play out in the Google-Facebook saga? With most of Facebook’s searches being people-oriented, is this Google trying to take on Facebook in the people search space?

“We already are a people search engine, in that people search for people all the time on Google, so we’re trying to improve it,” Kraus said.

True enough. And the change should be welcomed by many. I’ve regularly gotten email from people wondering how they could show up better for their names, especially in cases where there’s unflattering information about them. Yahoo was recently sued in one case. Personal reputation management is an entirely different issue — but even in those cases, there’s a core of the person wanting to be able to speak for themselves in the search results. The Google Profile results offer a new opportunity for this to happen.

For more, see related discussion on Techmeme.

Google’s SearchWiki is off to a rough start in the user feedback/public relations department, and has already been knocked offline by some kind of technical issue. SearchWiki usage seems fair to strong, depending on the queries you’re looking at, but is it the type of usage Google wants? Let’s take a look at SearchWiki’s first handful of days out in the wild.

The Reviews Are In…

… and they’re not very good. TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington was one of the first to voice his complaints:

“This new stuff is a mess of arrows and troll comments and stuff moving around the page. That doesn’t make my search experience more useful. It makes it move to another search engine.”

Network World’s Brennan Slattery wondered what’s the point of several SearchWiki features:

“Once you get involved in SearchWiki’s features, it becomes frustratingly meta and throws chunks of logic out the window. You can comment on other user’s comments. You can add your own URLs to your searches. How does that make sense? If you’re searching for something, you shouldn’t already know the destination URL, and if you do, why are you searching? And if you’re continuously seeking the same exact thing, why not just bookmark the site?”

One Google user echoed a similar sentiment in the comments of a SearchWiki article on the Guardian’s web site: “This is useles (sic). If I want better search results, how about Google delivering them?”

On Friday, Search Engine Roundtable opened a poll that asks, “Is the average searcher ready for Google SearchWiki?” The current results are overwhelmingly in the “no” camp — 84% to just 16% “yes” votes.

By far the number one complaint so far about SearchWiki is that Google made it opt-in for all users, and there’s no logical way to turn it off. Yes, you can log out of your Google account and search without SearchWiki’s icons and buttons, but the general consensus is that having to logout isn’t much of a solution. Many Google users take issue with the lack of an opt-out mechanism — maybe no one more than search marketer Michael Gray, who gave Google some advice:

“Google can stop pushing out changes that don’t have an off switch. If they want everyone else to follow the “do what’s best for users” mantra they should follow their own advice, instead of just paying it lip service. Lead by setting an example, not by preaching from the pulpit.”

Danny Sullivan brought up the lack of a SearchWiki optout in his SearchWiki 101 article on Friday. If you want to turn off SearchWiki, there are posts on Google Operating System and facesaerch offering ways to do it.

But It’s Not All Negative

While there don’t appear to be many glowing reviews of SearchWiki, the feedback isn’t entirely negative. In his PC Magazine review, Michael Muchmore runs through how SearchWiki works and notes that “it’s nice to see Google innovating in its core offering.”

On Mashable, Paul Glazowski compared SearchWiki to its nearest competitor, Wikia Search, and noted that SearchWiki is by far the easier-to-use of the two:

“Google has a substantial leg up here. SearchWiki has had a largely seamless introduction, and the edit options are almost too easy to learn.

Wikia Search – It isn’t necessarily unattractive, but it’s considerably more complex. Which makes it a bit slower to operate.

Although the Mashable review doesn’t choose a winner, Glaazowski does say that Wikia Search is “the more capable of the two when it comes to search results customization and annotation.”

Web Worker Daily offers what’s probably one of the most positive reviews of SearchWiki, encouraging users to tell Google whenever they find “inappropriate/poorly ranked” search results, and saying that SearchWiki can make for more productive searchers if people use it the way it’s intended:

“More customizability means more productivity for web workers in the long run.”

The Spam Problem

But, how many people will use it the way Google intends? That’s the big question, and some users are already pointing out spam in SearchWiki’s commenting system. On the Reseo blog, Chris Thomas shows a screenshot of porn links being dropped into SearchWiki notes/comments page for the query [techcrunch]. Lauren Weinstein also wrote over the weekend that “significant abuse of the SearchWiki comments system has already begun.”

Steve Rubel chimed in, calling the “unfettered user editing” an “epic fail.”

“… of course people are going to run amok on the world’s biggest online stage! That’s like turning a kid with a massive sweet tooth loose in a giant candy store. It’s going to be a haven for spam.”

The Tech Problem

As if spam and user feedback wasn’t enough of a headache, Google also had to answer why SearchWiki went offline on Saturday. While some users hoped Google was pulling SearchWiki altogether, or at least changing the functionality to allow for an easier opt-out mechanism, no such luck. Google told TechCrunch on Saturday that it was just a bug and they were “really sorry” that SearchWiki went down.

The service was back up and running after a couple hours, but with no noticeable changes to the system.

Google will announce today (Update: official announcement) the launch of SearchWiki, a major addition to its user interface that allows users to edit search results. When using SearchWiki, you can re-order, remove, or add web pages to the search results for any query. You can also add notes to specific listings. You have to be logged in to a Google account so that the changes you make will be saved and shown the next time you run the same search.

“This is a way for search to adapt to a more interactive experience,” says Google Product Manager Cedric Dupont. “We ran a bunch of experiments, and the response was overwhelmingly positive from our users. They asked for this feature.”

How SearchWiki Works

Two light-colored icons next to each listing let you reorder the search results. An up arrow lets you move a result higher on the page; an X will remove the result. After you’ve moved a result higher, a down arrow shows up so you can move it back down the page. The icons turn bright green after an edit to remind you that you edited the result. A fourth icon in the shape of a text bubble lets you leave comments on any listing; anyone can see the comments you make on a separate page. Here’s what a typical search results page might look like:

There’s an “Add a result” link at the bottom of the search results page that let’s you add web pages to the search results. There are also links at the bottom of the page to show and restore listings you’ve removed, and to see all other SearchWiki changes (in aggregate) and comments made by other users. Here’s what that public notes page looks like:

SearchWiki is turned on by default for everyone logged in to a Google account. If you don’t like SearchWiki, you can ignore the icons or you can make them go away by logging out and then continuing to search.

How Smart Is SearchWiki?

If you’re logged in, SearchWiki will remember changes you make when you search again for the same exact word or phrase. On occasion, it may also remember changes when you search for a very close match; i.e., if you re-order the search results for the word [widget], SearchWiki will likely show you the re-ordered results again if you search for [widgets]. But, if your next search is for [interesting widget], it will probably not show the changes you already made for [widget].

“We’re trying to be smart on this issue,” Dupont says.

SEO Implications?

Google emphasizes that changes made in the SearchWiki interface will have no impact on the traditional ranking of web pages. If you put your own site in the 1st position for your primary keywords, you’re the only Google user who’ll see your site at the top of the rankings. Your site will, however, be included when users click the “See all notes for this SearchWiki” link at the bottom of the page; that link leads to another page that shows what results other users have re-ordered, removed, or added.

Still, Dupont didn’t completely rule out the possibility that user data from SearchWiki may someday impact regular search rankings. I asked what would happen if 10,000 people all added “Matt McGee’s Widget Page” to their own results for the phrase [widget]. “We’re always looking at user data as a signal,” Dupont says. And in a situation like that? “We’re not closing any doors.”

Future Development?

The massive amount of user data that Google will collect from searchers that use SearchWiki should allow Google to further expand the service’s functionality. You can imagine Google suggesting pages to add when a user removes a result s/he doesn’t like, for example. “Who knows what the future will hold,” Dupont said, when asked about future development plans.

The service, which some users have been using on an experimental basis for about a year, will be rolled out today. Google says it should be fully available to all users by the end of the day.

Postscript: See also now from Search Engine Land, Google SearchWiki 101: An Illustrated Guide.

Blink, and you might have missed it. Google’s now doing synonym searching. It’s something they quietly noted in a past Google blog post and one that comes up again today in a post that covers how Google uses experiments to improve the search interface.

Back to synonym searching in a moment. The main focus of today’s post is how small changes can have a big impact on how users interact with search results. Some before and after screenshots of various search results are shown. Most compelling to me was how by making the + symbol thicker in a "Plus Box" that allows for stock quotes to be shown for a listing, usage went up. But the post also highlights how that doesn’t mean it’s an improvement. More usage might mean people are missing other important information in favor of a new gadget. Such is the thoughtful insight that goes into measuring even little changes like this.

Midway in the post, we’re told this:

The algorithm that is responsible for the titles and snippets of result pages now highlights stems and some synonyms of the original query term. For the query [hp printer drivers] we will also return results that include and highlight the word "driver".  This sort of "stemming," as it’s called, is generally a good idea, because it helps you better identify results that match your query, but not always. Experiments of this sort help us verify (or, occasionally, overturn) our assumptions regarding changes in these algorithms.

Stemming on Google isn’t new. The company has been doing it since back in 2003. It was also highlighting stemmed words back then. If you searched for "running," and it found a page with the word "run," the word "run" would be bolded in the search listing description.

So highlighting stemmed words isn’t new. What is new is that Google now goes beyond simple stemming and does synonym matching.

For example, with stemming, a search for running might match:

• run
• runs
• runners

But it wouldn’t match:

• jog
• jogs
• jogging

This is because the word run doesn’t make up part of those words (stemming means that the word you searched for makes up the "stem" of other words).

With synonym searching — or concept searching or thesaurus searching, which are other terms used — you do a search to find matches for the original word, stem variations of the word, and words that are conceptually related to it.

Google doing searches for synonyms is a big change and one I wish wasn’t buried in the middle of this other post. It deserved highlighting on its own, or in another posts where it was mentioned, such as here in July:

It is critical that we understand what our users are looking for (beyond just the few words in their query). We have made several notable advances in this area including a best-in-class spelling suggestion system, an advanced synonyms system, and a very strong concept analysis system.

I remember reading that briefly in the middle of a trip and flagging it for follow-up. Google’s doing conceptual search now? When did that happen, I thought.

Anyway, it’s official now. I pinged Google for a bit more info, and they sent:

Yes, the highlighting of synonyms has changed. Also the degree to which we understand synonyms changes and improves, and this can affect the impact on highlighting the terms. The main point is that the algorithm does change. We mostly highlight stems, not synonyms, but the distinction is lost on most people."
 

One thing I hope will come soon after this highlighting is a flag to let people know if their search as been customized to match stems or synonyms. It can make a difference to searchers, and they may not realize it happening now.

Google Now Notifies Of "Search Customization" & Gives Searchers Control from last month covers how Google does such flagging in other cases.

Google is now showing "search customization" messages to inform searchers when their search results have been modified from "normal" due to a searcher’s geographic location, previous query or web surfing and search history. It’s a nice move to help searchers know what exactly is going on "under the hood" at Google and override it if the wrong choices are being made. I’d like to see more of it.

What’s Normal?

There was a time when everyone saw exactly the same search results at the major search engines. Over time, this has changed. In particular, geographic targeting has meant that searchers in different countries often see different results (see How Search Engines Redirect Users To Country-Specific Sites for more on that). In addition, personalized search results on Google mean that, more and more, searchers are seeing things differently than what others get. "Normal" search results are becoming an endangered species.

Still, there are times when you want Google to get back to as normal as possible. Today’s rollout is designed to inform searchers when Google is customizing their results in three key areas and allow them to regain control. Note that this only works for English queries on Google.com, at the moment. Not everyone will see it immediately, either — but it should go fully live over the next few days.

Geographic / Location Customization

For some queries, Google may try to alter your results based on your geographic location. It makes sense in many cases. Johanna Wright, director of product management at Google, gave an example of this.

"If you’re in Seattle and type in the query ‘zoo,’ we’re going to show you the Seattle Zoo rather than the San Diego Zoo," she said.

Nevertheless, Google doesn’t always get it right. If you’re looking for local information but outside the area you’re interested in, you might want to override Google’s customization. Now you can.

When customization is happening, you’ll be told through a new message at the top right of the results that says "Customized for" followed by the location Google assumes you’re located in:

Next to that is a "More details" link. If you click on that, you get a new "Search customization details" page where you can change your location:

If you’re not logged into Google, your location is determined by your IP address. Selecting the "Use a different location" option will override the guess Google makes and be remembered as long as your browser accepts cookies.

If you are logged in, Google will use the location you’ve saved as your default in Google Maps. Not sure how this is done? It took me some time to figure out myself!

By default, Google automatically saves the last 100 addresses you search for into a "Saved Locations" list, something added back in 2006. You access this by using the drop-down option next to the search box in Google Maps. Do that, select "Edit Saved Locations," then click on the green arrow next to the location you want stored as your location.

Never set an address? Then Google will guide you through the process to do so, if you try to change your location when logged in using the search customization page.

Previous Query / Recent Searches Customization

In April, we reported how Google was beginning to tailor search results based on your current search plus the search you just did. Called Previous Query, it’s where Google might see that you first searched for [hotels] then did another search for [new york] and so will effectively combine the first search to the second to make [new york hotels]. You’re searching for all three words even though you only put in two — new york — on your most current query.

This is another feature that can be useful in some circumstances but where the searcher might want to override it — or just understand when it is happening. Now if previous query kicks in, a message saying "Customized based on recent search activity" will appear at the top right of the results. Clicking on "More Details" link from that message will take you to the search customizations page, where you can then discover what previous query was used.

Via that page, you can also reissue the query without the previous query being involved. Nice, but it would have been better if way back on the search results page itself you could simply click on a link to redo the query without customization. I can understand one reason this isn’t happening. Most searchers probably would want to know what the customization was before overriding it — which means showing them the actual previous query. And there could be privacy issues in that.

Indeed, Google is addressing some of these issues already For example, if you do a search, leave your computer and someone else sits down and does a search, they might get their new query customized based on your previous one. And if they click on the link, they can explicitly see what you just searched for.

To minimize this concern, Google only makes the last query performed visible for 30 minutes. And if you close your browser, it can’t be seen at all. While I’m sure some will still have concerns about this, keep in mind that most browsers themselves will automatically store an entire long history of past searches that were done — far more revealing and accessible to anyone who wants to snoop around.

Note that the customization option only impacts the unpaid results you see. Google also shows paid listings that also use previous queries. Indeed, Google Looking At Multiple Previous Queries To Tailor Search Ads covers how several queries "back" might be used to customize the ads that are shown. The new search customization option doesn’t control what shows here.

Web History / Personalized Results Customization

Since last year (see Google Search History Expands, Becomes Web History for more), Google has heavily pushed the customization of search results based on the places someone visits on the web, past searches they’ve done, what they’ve bookmarked with Google Bookmarks and what they save to the iGoogle personalized home page.

When results have been personalized, Google’s shown a "Personalized Results" message at the top right of the page. Now that’s being enhanced to say search results have been "Customized based on recent search activity" along with a "More Details" link to control this. Click from that to the search customization page, and you are then invited to either remove some items in your web history ("manage") or remove web history entirely.

I wish next to the More Details option that Google would have also just placed a "Pause" button, so that personalized results could be paused and "normal" results viewed easily, without requiring a log-out. And if someone stayed on Pause for a long-time, Google could add a further message like "See Personalized Results" when appropriate.

Being Transparent

Why do all this? Google’s pitch is that it’s part of trying to be transparent with searchers, both to help reassure them about their privacy and let them know some of what’s going on under the hood to generate their results. Indeed, Wright said some of the push for showing these options came from power searchers at Google itself.

"We had a couple of power users at Google who were complaining that they didn’t know what was happening," she said.

I can understand that and appreciate having more of this being revealed. There’s a long history of search engines changing how they perform a query from what a searcher entered, so telling searchers when this is happening and how they can override it if they want is great.

What’s next in terms of control? Wright couldn’t reveal, though I think a likely candidate might be stemming, when Google automatically searches for variations of a word in addition to the word itself.

Intriguing would be if Google really exposed even more factors. Are results being skewed in some cases toward non-commercial sites? If so, could the searcher choose more commercial listings, if they want? Could a searcher explicitly nominate sites to have higher PageRank values than Google itself gives them? If so, that might let them see a different view of the web they might prefer. Are fresher results getting a short term boost in a query? Perhaps a searcher could be told that, so they can override that decision if they want.