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.

Yahoo just started redirecting people in the UK who are trying to reach Yahoo.com instead to its Yahoo UK web site, something that Google has done for a long time. With the change, this seemed a good time to revisit how all the major search engines may intercept people trying to reach their ".com" versions from countries outside the United States.

Below, the examples are drawn from someone in the UK trying to reach .com versions of each of the major search engines. Those in other countries often will find similar interception in place.

Yahoo

If you are based in the UK, Yahoo will now redirect you to Yahoo UK & Ireland. The UK site shows the Yahoo UK & Ireland logo but also has a top banner explaining the new behavior. Search Engine Land editor-in-chief Danny Sullivan — who is in the UK — sent me a screen capture and explained the behavior of the feature. The screen in the UK looks like this:

Yahoo, right off the bat, tells you your Yahoo experience will be customized based on your locality. If you do not want a locally customized experience, click on "Go to yahoo.com" link, and you will be taken to the US version. Once you do this, the choice is remembered and stored via a cookie. The next time you try to go to Yahoo.com, you can go there directly without being redirected to Yahoo UK.

It is important to note that Yahoo’s results, even if you use Yahoo.com, will be skewed toward what it believes those in the UK would like to see. This will happen EVEN IF you DO NOT use the "UK only" box. The other major search engines also do such skewing. For Yahoo, we don’t know any way to override this behavior.

Google

Like Yahoo, try to go to Google.com in the UK and you’ll be redirected to Google UK. Also like Yahoo, you can override this. You use the "Go to Google.com" link at the bottom of the page. Do this once, and your choice is remembered for the future. Redirection will no longer happen (unless you clear your cookies for some reason).

Also as with Yahoo, results and ads on Google.com will still be skewed to favor what a UK user may want. There is a way to override this for ads and, to some degree, for the general search results. After you do a search, add this to the end of your query:

&gl=us

For example, if you searched for football, you’d see this in your browser’s address bar:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=football&btnG=Google+Search

At the end of that, insert the gl code, like this:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=football&btnG=Google+Search&gl=us

Now the results will be more US orientated. Want to see how they look for other countries? Instead of US, use the two digit code for any country you find listed over here. You can also use the AdWords Preview Tool to see locally based Google search ads.

Live Search

Live Search does NOT redirect you to a new URL. Instead, it gives you a customized look and localized search results for your country. The screen capture above shows the option for "Only from United Kingdom" results, since it was snapped from within the UK.

In the advanced options, there’s an option allowing you to set your location for anywhere in the world. However, Danny says that hasn’t worked properly for at least a year.

Fortunately, those wanting to see US results (or those from any country) can use a brand new Live Worldwide page he was just told about from Microsoft this week. The page hasn’t even been posted to the Live.com site, so you’ve got an exclusive to play with it.

Ask.com

Ask will redirect you to Ask UK. There is a link at the very bottom of the page that says "Ask.com US." Click on that to get to Ask.com. Unlike Yahoo and Google, this isn’t stored. You’ll have to do it each time you want to go to Ask.com from your browser address bar.

With the US about to celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday tomorrow, how are the major search engines gearing up to support an onslaught of Thanksgiving queries? Let’s take a look at how you can use them, ranging from flight tracking tools to special "shortcut" or "smart answer" boxes leading to related information.

Many people travel by air on Thanksgiving. Want to know if friends or family are going to make it on time? Several of the major search engines prominently list flight tracking information, as well as airport conditions and related information. Do the right search, and you’ll get special links at the top of the pages, like this, showing flight tracking at the top of Google:

Here are traffic conditions on Yahoo:

And here are airport conditions at Ask:

How to make these special links come up?

• Google: Enter the name of an airport or a flight number to get relevant information or links at the top of the search results. Weather info is also offered. More is explained at Google help here. Some examples: aa123, ohare airport, weather los angeles.
   
• Yahoo: Get information about airport conditions, flight tracking, as well as local weather and traffic reports, all at the top of your search results. See more advice covered here at Yahoo. Some examples: aa 123, weather los angeles. traffic los angeles. NOTE: A search like ohare airport is supposed to bring up special info, but I found it didn’t, so the airport conditions feature might not be working as advertised.
   
• Ask: Get weather info, as explained here (and weather los angeles brings up an example). Airport conditions aren’t explained on that page or in the help files that I can find, but they do work for some, such as jfk airport, lax airport, but not ohare airport.

Want more flight tracking resources? See ResourceShelf’s recent post on dedicated flight tracking services, which are free and easy to use. Nothing is cooler than tracking the flight of friends, family, and loved ones as they progress to you.

Back on earth, remember that most of the major search engines have real-time traffic info available through their mapping services. Our Google Maps Tailgates Yahoo, Microsoft With Real-Time Traffic Info explains more about this, with illustrated examples. Mobile editions of the mapping tools from the major search engines also have real-time travel, if you have the right type of phone. Get them here: Google Mobile Maps, Yahoo Go, & Microsoft Live Search Mobile.

That chart above? That shows you how, according to Google Trends, searches for "thanksgiving" ramp up before the actual day, then skyrocket when it happens. How have the search engines prepared for the rise in queries?

Over at Yahoo, there’s a Yahoo Shortcut telling you the exact day of Thanksgiving in the US and leading to an encyclopedia entry hosted at Yahoo about it. There’s also a link to Thanksgiving menus and recipes at Yahoo Food:

Yahoo has also blogged about their turkey recipes shortcut that appears.

Ask also provides the date and a recipe links, but the Ask Smart Answer it runs further includes a link to history, Thanksgiving crafts, games, and more. An screenshot of this is at the top of this article.

Some of these links really just run a new search, such as the history link bringing up a search for history of the First Thanksgiving. That’s a crafty way to get people to generate more searches on Ask, but I would have preferred if they send me directly to some selected information, rather than a new search page with yet another Smart Answer box at the top.

Ask also has a special blog post up illustrating how to search for Thanksgiving information from video sources to news reports.

As for Google and Microsoft, neither have anything special going. But over at Quintura, those that light the idea of clicking on through "clusters" or topics to get search results will find a new "Thanksgiving" tab at the top of the page. Select that, then you can click on Thanksgiving-related topics to generate results.

Now to shopping. As many know, there’s heavy post-Thanksgiving shopping happening on the day after, Black Friday, and the Monday after, Cyber Monday. Related to that, Hitwise tells us:

Searches on the term "black friday" and "black friday ads" are up 174 and 143 percent respectively, compared to last week. Combined, the percent of U.S. searches on the two terms has increased nine percent compared to 2006.

and:

The iPod and the Nintendo Wii were the most popular search terms sending visits to Shopping and Classifieds websites for the week ending Nov. 17, 2007. The terms "ipod", "nintendo wii" and "wii" were the top three product searches. Video game consoles remain a popular product search so far this holiday season as the Nintendo Wii, Xbox 360, and Playstation 3 were all among the top 10 searches this past week.

Finally, tomorrow, expect to see some custom Thanksgiving logos hit the search engines.

The LiveSide blog points to a blog post which shows Microsoft has launched Windows Live Translator Beta.

You can translate from English to German, Dutch, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, and Russian. It supports up to 500 characters and uses Systran, but can override the Systran source with their own in-house translations.

Google Operating System goes deeper into this translation service.

Aside from Microsoft, there’s the classic Babel Fish translation service, which Yahoo acquired. Also, Google offers translate services, which were recently upgraded, as do many other companies.

ResourceShelf noticed last week that Microsoft acquired some domain names related to this live translator service.

Ask.com Takes Lead In Designing Display Of Search Results by Walter Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal reviews Ask.com’s new 3D look.

Mossberg gave Ask.com great reviews, comparing Ask.com’s three-pane approach to Google’s Universal Search approach. Mossberg said Ask.com “took greater strides” than Google with their user interface. The new Ask.com user interface makes for a “better advance in unifying” the different levels of vertical search options available to the searcher, said Mossberg. He explained that this makes “search results easy to navigate and use” than Ask.com’s competitors.

Mossberg’s last word on Google’s user interface compared to Ask.com’s user interface,

Google deserves credit for universal search, which I’m sure will get better. But Ask’s new design is much more compelling and well worth a try.

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.

Back in 2002, I called Google the "Marcia Brady" of search. Fans of the Brady Bunch know that Marcia was one of six children, and middle daughter Jan felt Marcia got all the attention. "Marcia, Marcia, Marcia," she’d often complain, just as today, it often seems to be "Google, Google, Google" that’s all you hear about in search.

There’s more to search than Google, of course. To encourage people to understand this, I’m resurrecting an idea from 2003: Google-Free Friday. In July, each Friday, we’re encouraging everyone to try a search engine other than Google.

Understand that this is most definitely NOT motivated because Google is somehow now too big, too scary or bad in anyway. Sure, plenty of that sentiment is going around right now. John Battelle blogged today about perhaps hitting a "Google saturation point" and not wanting too much of his life going through one source. Last week, Google took fire for privacy issues. Everyone Fears Google (Again) & Will The Last Googler To Leave Turn The Lights Out? covers more fear of Google that seemed to hit a new height in May (and 14 "Is Google Evil?" Tipping Points Since 2001 covers other fear benchmarks over time).

Instead, I was inspired by the Day Without Google effort that Alt Search Engines tried earlier this month. I felt that fizzled for a few reasons:

• It seemed to be suggested without little advance notice for people to prepare.
   
• Rather than be a day without Google, it was really a day without using any of the major search engines — which was going to inevitably be an impossible option for many people. As David Berkowitz remarked, "The top 5 are the top 5 for a reason," with the two chief reasons being that they offer comprehensive web listings with high relevancy.

So let’s try it again, with a new twist. In July, on each Friday, use a different major search engine that is not Google. Here’s the schedule, with a different service to be used, in alphabetical order:

• July 6: AOL
• July 13: Ask.com
• July 20: Windows Live
• July 27: Yahoo

While I’m calling this Google-Free Friday, it doesn’t mean you have to be entirely Google Free. It’s mainly applicable to searching. On these Fridays, feel free to use Gmail, Google Analytics, AdWords, Google Docs or whatever Google products you might normally use that aren’t specifically search related.

However, when it comes to seeking information from the web, on each day, use these alternatives. This also includes not just general web search but also vertical/specialized searching. Try Yahoo Maps on July 27, rather than Google Maps. Use Windows Live Image search on July 20, rather than Google Images.

To help you, on each day for a specific search engine, we’ll post a solid list of various search offerings available from that service. You’ll likely be surprised to see how much they offer. On the following Monday, we’ll also provide a place for people to share reactions and remarks.

I started out saying this isn’t designed to be anti-Google. It really isn’t. To echo what Richard MacManus wrote:

Note that our intent wasn’t to "boycott" Google – Google is number 1 for a reason, which is that it’s the best search engine around. The reason behind the ‘Day Without Google’ was purely to encourage people to experiment with and test out some of the hundreds of Google competitors; maybe even catch a glimpse of the future dominant search engine.

Agreed. This isn’t a boycott Google exercise. It’s an attempt to help people open their eyes to alternatives. In fact, the days might even help Google itself. Ever tried a particular product, such as a toothpaste, then wonder if you perhaps should be using something else? This often happens to me. Then I try the alternative and decide I’m happy with my original choice.

If you’re the biggest Google fan, using an alternative might help reassure you that you’ve got ever reason to continue loving Google. If you’re nervous about Google, trying an alternative might help you discover that if they are a dominant search player, this might be down to having earned that dominance through satisfaction. And, of course, you might discover that there’s something else out there you like better — a particular feature, a particular vertical search or perhaps an entire new service. Time to check things out!

Finally, I said earlier that I was resurrecting this idea. I was thinking about the name "Google-Free Friday" yesterday, then decided to check today and make sure it was original. It wasn’t. Back in 2003, Pete Prodoehl of RasterWeb wrote a short Google-Free Friday post, saying:

I was considering trying an experiment. Switching search engines for a day. I mean, we used to have Microsoft-Free Fridays, right? What about a Google-Free Friday? Will you still find what you’re looking for? Let’s find out!

Is AlltheWeb the successor to Google? I dunno, but there’s some interesting stuff in FAST News…

Oh, if you don’t want to use AlltheWeb, there’s always Teoma, or Yahoo! or… Hmmm, I suppose you could search Google for other search engines – wait, don’t do that…

I’m sure I must have seen mention of Pete’s post those years ago (probably via Dave Winer, who himself proposed Microsoft-Free Fridays in 2001), so the name and idea must have percolated back up in my mind. It was fun to think about then, and it remains as relevant if not more so today.

As promised at its “Searchology” event last week, Google has launched cross-language information retrieval (CLIR). It’s now been added as a new feature to Google Translate and went live yesterday.

As Chris Sherman previously wrote, Google is playing a bit of catch-up with this initiative; Yahoo has been doing this on a more limited basis since 2005. Regardless, it appears to be a useful service, chiefly for non-English speakers seeking information from English-language sites.

As Google Engineering VP Udi Manber said, when he introduced the service last week, the goal is to open up the Web “universally to the whole world.” And although it works from 12 non-English languages into English, there’s also reciprocal functionality allowing English speakers to translate non-English pages.

In other words, I can now search for hotels in Paris on French-language pages or bars in Moscow from Russian sources.

The languages currently supported are: English, Arabic, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese (Traditional), Chinese (Simplified). The service is based on automated (machine) language translation and native speakers or those conversant enough in the non-English tongue will undoubtedly find awkward translations. But it’s a helpful tool (especial the side-by-side presentation of results) to compare pages.

In addition to the new Search Results translation feature, Google Translate continues to offer its long-standing Text and Web translation (again like Yahoo’s Babelfish), so it can equally be used as a foreign-language dictionary.

Here’s the official Google Blog Post explaining the service, Search without Boundaries.

In my story about Google’s new content removal tools, I highlighted the fact that anyone can potentially wipe out the cached copy of a page, even if they aren’t the page’s author. To illustrate this, I was going to use as an example how the official George W. Bush page’s cached copy could get nixed. To my amazement, I found the cached copy was gone already. Had the White House decided to wipe out the cache, perhaps as damage control after the page started ranking for "failure" again recently? And why were Yahoo, Live.com and Ask still showing cached versions of that page? Was the White House — gasp! – cloaking only Google with a noarchive command?

Not at all! But it was a real mystery. As it turns out, some pages that Google revisits on a super-fast basis — pages that have dates next to them in the listings — might no longer have cached pages showing even when they should. Google says this is due to a bug they’re now checking on.

To illustrate this, look below:

Notice how any pages from the whitehouse.gov site with dates next to them do NOT have cached copies? And pages with dates DO have cached copies?

I see the same thing with other sites (site:searchengineland.com, for example) but I can also see it NOT happening in some cases (site:cnn.com, for example).

As I said, Google’s now aware of the issue and looking into it. And why do some pages get dates? Squeezing The Search Loaf: Finding Search Engine Freshness & Crawl Dates from me earlier this year explains that in much more depth.