Experiment Confirmed

I noticed these appearing yesterday in my own search results, and Google has confirmed that there’s an experiment happening:

We’re always experimenting with ways to improve search, but we have nothing to announce at this time.

Google does indeed often experiment with new formats, randomly tagging some visitors to see the formats being tested. I apparently was one of those tagged. Most people, however, won’t see some of the examples I’ll share below, as they’re not tagged into the experiment.

I think that will change in the near future, because as I’ll explain at the end, this is one test that I suspect will go fully live soon.

TV Shows

Here’s what I see in a search for Lost:

You can see off to the right-hand side there’s a little summary about the TV show “Lost” that’s drawn from Wikipedia. Cast members are listed, along with a “People also search for” area showing other TV shows that seem related to Lost.

In the previous test last November, this box was called “Sources.” That label is now gone. I’m continuing to call it the “Sources” box for want of a better name.

Actors

Clicking on the links generates a new Google search along with further information. Here’s a close-up of what’s shown for Evangeline Lilly:

Movies

Similar units appear for movies, such as this for in a search for Avengers:

Music & Bands

Musical groups like U2 appear:

People

There’s also extended information about some people, apparently if they are listed in Wikipedia. For example, a search for “dooce” brings up extended information about blogger Heather Armstrong, who is known by that name:

Books

Even books can get a special display:

With Or Without Google+

None of the units are dependent on Google+, nor are they part of Search Plus Your World. They appear whether you’re signed in or not, whether you use Google+ or not. But if you are part of Google+, the units might get additional information.

For example, signed-out, I see this for a search on the TV show New Girl:

Signed-in, since I follow the New Girl page on Google+, information from that appears in a “From your circles” area above the sources box:

New Format For Direct Answers Live For Everyone?

Google is also showing direct answers that come from different sources. Bas van den Beld from State Of Search also appears to be in the test and noted that for a search on “hot fuzz director,” he got a direct answer like this:

This is similar to what you see at Bing for the same search, where the information is disclosed as coming from Freebase, a service that Google owns:

However, these direct answers don’t seem part of the sources experiment. For example, using my Chrome browser in “incognito” mode, which keeps me out of the Google sources test, I can still make these boxes appear, such as this for “avengers cast:”

Is This The “Search Refresh” The WSJ Wrote About?

Direct answers like these have long been part of Google. The formats, however, seem new. The addition of the sources box also suggests that what the Wall Street Journal wrote about earlier this year, about Google offering more direct and semantic answers, is about to happen.

In WSJ Says Big Google Search Changes Coming? Reality Check Time!, I took the WSJ article to task because I thought it overhyped what was likely to happen, which was Google expanding things that it already does.

That still seems to be the case. This will no doubt be a big change to hit Google. But it will also be one of those “evolutionary not revolutionary” type of changes.

If you see these boxes, then you’re one of the few who have also been tagged as part of the experiment. If you don’t, then there’s not much you can do but wait. It seems likely they’ll eventually come for everyone.

Related Articles

• Meet The Google OneBox, Plus Box, Direct Answers & The 10-Pack
• Google Squared Is Now Live
• Up Close With Google Squared & Some Wolfram Alpha Thoughts
• Google Squared Powers Answer Sources & Something Different Refinements
• Google Goes Beyond Answers, Starts Guessing Release Dates
• Google Buys Metaweb To Bolster Answers, Google Squared & Rich Snippets
• Confirmed: Google Testing New “Sources” Display In Search Results
• Google’s Results Get More Personal With “Search Plus Your World”
• Two Weeks In, Google Says “Search Plus Your World” Going Well, Critics Should Give It Time
• WSJ Says Big Google Search Changes Coming? Reality Check Time!

Beyond Blue Links!

From the story, we learn things such as:

Over the next few months, Google’s search engine will begin spitting out more than a list of blue Web links. It will also present more facts and direct answers to queries at the top of the search-results page.

and:

The company is aiming to provide more relevant results by incorporating technology called “semantic search,” which refers to the process of understanding the actual meaning of words.

and:

Amit Singhal, a top Google search executive, said in a recent interview that the search engine will better match search queries with a database containing hundreds of millions of “entities”—people, places and things—which the company has quietly amassed in the past two years. Semantic search can help associate different words with one another, such as a company (Google) with its founders ( Larry Page and Sergey Brin).

Be sure to read the full article. I don’t want to be doing too many extended quotes out of it. But having read it several times myself, I keep trying to understand what’s new here.

Google’s Existing Semantic Search & Direct Answers

Google’s arguably been doing semantic search since 2003, when it began searching for synonyms of the words actually entered. It has increased its understanding of the meaning of words over the years and even did a detailed blog post about this in 2010. Here’s another from 2009:

Starting today, we’re deploying a new technology that can better understand associations and concepts related to your search, and one of its first applications lets us offer you even more useful related searches (the terms found at the bottom, and sometimes at the top, of the search results page).

For example, if you search for [principles of physics], our algorithms understand that “angular momentum,” “special relativity,” “big bang” and “quantum mechanic” are related terms that could help you find what you need.

As for “spitting out” those “facts and direct answers” that the WSJ story talks about, Google’s been doing that for so long that it’s hard for me to even know exactly when it all began.

Meet The Google OneBox, Plus Box, Direct Answers & The 10-Pack from 2009 covers how direct answers were provided in response to a variety of searches, and many of these answers were already integrated into Google for years before that was written.

UPS & FedEx tracking reports, along with flight status updates, a built-in calculator and more. Had it in 2004. Movie information and stock charts? 2005. Music and weather? 2006. Sports scores? 2009.

Here’s Google blogging about “Just the facts, fast” in 2005:

Have you ever needed a piece of info right now? Today we’re excited to introduce Google Q&A.

We’ve pulled together facts from all over the Web to help give you the fastest possible access to the quick bits of information you need every day; just type a query into the search box, and you’ll get back the answer at the top of your search results. Q&A knows about a lot of areas: celebrities, countries of the world, the planets, the elements, electronics, movies, and anything else we’ve thought of so far (including enabling you to get answers on your mobile device).

Try it out, and keep checking back. This is only the beginning.

Google Squared Still Lives

How about extracting facts from pages, to figure out things like the inventor of the telephone or when a movie release will happen. Google touted doing all this using its Google Squared technology in 2010. See here on the Google blog and our own stories:

• Google Squared Powers Answer Sources & Something Different Refinements
• Google Goes Beyond Answers, Starts Guessing Release Dates

By the way, Google even was offering facts like the sexual orientation of celebrities, though this was dropped last year.

Honestly, it sounds like Google is just going to ramp up showing results that come from its Google Squared technology, as well as what’s been built since its Freebase / Metaweb acquistion. The WSJ mentions the latter, but not Google Squared:

But the newest change is expected to go much further, coming as a result of Google’s acquisition in 2010 start-up Metaweb Technologies, which had an index of 12 million entities, such as movies, books, companies and celebrities….

Mr. Singhal said Google and the Metaweb team, which then numbered around 50 software engineers, have since expanded the size of the index to more than 200 million entities, partly by developing “extraction algorithms,” or mathematical formulas that can organize data scattered across the Web.

It also approached organizations and government agencies to obtain access to databases, including the CIA World Factbook, which houses up-to-date encyclopedic information about countries worldwide.

Google Squared was closed as a stand-alone service last year, but the technology has remained a part of Google search. These articles explain more about it:

• Google Squared Is Now Live
• Up Close With Google Squared & Some Wolfram Alpha Thoughts

Why If There’s PR Smoke, There Might Be No Fire

If all this isn’t really new, why’s it getting played up so big with the Wall Street Journal, as well as Mashable last month? Mashable even quoted Google talking about its “knowledge graph” for the first time that I’ve seen.

My take is that Google’s pushing these technologies for some good PR, and they are in turn being blown up out of proportion to what will really happen.

Google’s been under intense pressure in some quarters since rolling out Search Plus Your World, pressure that its results aren’t as good as in the past. It’s helpful to counter that type of bad PR with interviews talking up forward-looking technologies. Heck, it’s right out of Bing’s playbook.

Remember Bing & Powerset?

If you believed all the forward-looking stuff that Bing has pushed, you’d have expected Google to have been a whimpering child of a search engine cowering in the corner, at this point.

Why remember Powerset, with all that amazing semantic technology that Bing later acquired? Here, read up on it:

• Powerset Launches “Understanding Engine” For Wikipedia Content
• Official: Microsoft Buys Powerset

Sure, Powerset is part of Bing. Did you notice it making Bing significantly better than Google? Has Bing drawn tons more people over to it from Google for having that technology?

Nope. But that doesn’t stop Bing from talking it up, though it seems to have done less of that lately. Powerset is good technology to have. It might lead to important future improvements. But no instant revolution is about to pour forth from it, nor has it.

Remember Bing & Wolfram Alpha?

Heck, remember when Wolfram Alpha partnered up with Bing? This was after Wolfram Alpha’s factually-based search engine failed to wipe Google off the map, as some assumed it would. Here are some reminders of that:

• How To Overhype Your Search Engine
• Impressive: The Wolfram Alpha “Fact Engine”
• Bing Launches Wolfram Alpha Collaboration & Several New Search Features

For all that the direct answers were supposed to be important, I can’t even get Bing to trigger some of the examples it touted when linking up with Wolfram Alpha.

Make no mistake. Wolfram Alpha is a cool, useful search engine. In fact, I had a long, excellent conversation with Stephen Wolfram on Monday while at the SXSW conference about how things are going and some interesting things to come. Stay tuned.

But it’s important to distinguish between what’s put out as PR versus what’s likely to happen in reality. Bing’s done a lot of big talk, and when that big talk has done nothing to stall Google’s market share, it still keeps talking big. This past piece from me explains more about that:

• Dear Bing & Yahoo: Pushing Deck Chairs Around Isn’t A Good Plan

Why’s Google Talking Big?

Google’s doing some big talk of its own now, which as I said, is probably being interpreted as even bigger than it really is. But why this specific talk about direct answers and understanding?

For one, Google shot itself in the foot last year. At the D Conference, WSJ tech columnist Walt Mossberg pointed out to Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt that Google didn’t do as good as job as Bing in providing direct answers. And Schmidt agreed! From my coverage then:

Mossberg said that Bing seems to have more direct answers in some cases.

“There’s that in some narrow cases,” Schmidt said.

There you go — one of the top three execs at Google admitting that Bing beats Google, even if it’s in a narrow case. I’m sure there have been some statements like that before, but they’re few and far between.

It was crazy. Mossberg wasn’t right. What the hell is “some” cases supposed to mean. In “some” other cases, Google has more. But overall, no one has any idea who provides more direct answers, much less meaningful direct answers. No one. Mossberg didn’t inventory this himself. There’s no third-party survey out there. It’s not like there’s some “direct answers app store” listing answers that you can count.

That was just Mossberg, in my view, saying what he believed in his gut. It was Schmidt, to me, kind of cowering against Mossberg. He is, after all, Walt Mossberg. You don’t just tell him he’s wrong. Even if he is.

As a result, Google positioned itself as being weak to the leading tech journalist on the planet. How do you pull yourself out of that?

The Siri Problem

I know! Maybe you start talking about all those direct answers you’re going to do? Make sure you do that fairly quickly, because you’ve got another problem brewing.

While your latest Android 4 mobile operating system has arguably made it harder for people to search by voice — and while most Android phones still haven’t been upgraded to it — those iPhone 4S phones all equipped with Siri sold like hotcakes.

What’s Siri doing? Sending some of the searches people do not to you (as you’d think that deal you have with Apple would require) but instead over to Yelp and Wolfram Alpha.

You know, like 25 percent of the voice searches people are doing with Siri. That’s a lot of searches.

The press noticed that. They also noticed when Apple distanced itself from Google Maps in the latest version of iOS. You even had a financial analyst trying to figure if the end of a Google-Apple deal would harm Google’s bottom line. That got press attention, too.

If you’re Google looking at all this, it becomes even more important to start talking about how you have this Wolfram Alpha-like fact engine that you’re churning up. Heck, you even rolled out a Wolfram Alpha-like graphical math calculator last year.

What To Expect

To sum up, Google’s already said several times over the past year or so that it would be providing more and more direct answers. It sounds like that’s the biggest thing that’s likely to be released in the coming months.

Those direct answers potentially take traffic away from a relatively small set of sites that try to serve up direct answers, such as the height of Mount McKinley. That’s sad for those sites, but it’s good for the searcher. And it shouldn’t impact the much larger set of sites out there with broader information.

Indeed, you can already see this now:

You can see the direct answer at the top. The three arrows from that area show how some of the sources also get surfaced as regular results. Below that, the fourth arrow highlights how another site appears.

Having the direct answer might prevent some searchers from clicking through to any of these. But with the answer already in some of the page descriptions, they probably weren’t clicking much already.

There have also been reports that Google’s working on a better version of Google Voice Actions, a version that’s more assistant-like, in the way Siri is. It might even get called Majel. That sounds reasonable, especially given how long various Googlers have talked about wanting to have a Star Trek-like computer (as voiced by Majel Barrett-Roddenberry).

But in the end, for all that the search engines have talked for years about going beyond “10 blue links,” I’d be surprised if the changes the WSJ story today talks about dramatically alter what we see now on Google. More answers, sure. But those 10 blue links will still likely remain the core of what’s shown.

For Google’s part, when I emailed for any comment, it replied with: ”We have nothing specific to announce at this time.”

I’ll be following up to see if I can pry anything more on-the-record about this.

Postscript: Google’s Amit Singhal, who heads Google’s search efforts and who was cited in the WSJ story, has posted to Google+ to say:

Some recent news coverage about Google has sparked interest in where we are and where we’re headed in search.

Let me just say that every day, we’re improving our ability to give you the best answers to your questions as quickly as possible. In doing so, we convert raw data into knowledge for millions of users around the world. But our ability to deliver this experience is a function of our understanding your question and also truly understanding all the data that’s out there. And right now, our understanding is pretty darn limited. Ask us for “the 10 deepest lakes in the U.S,” and we’ll give you decent results based on those keywords, but not necessarily because we understand what depth is or what a lake is.

In 2010, we acquired Freebase, an open-source knowledge graph, and in the time since we’ve grown it from 12 million interconnected entities and attributes to over 200 million. Our vision for this knowledge graph is as a tool to aid the creation of more knowledge — an endless cycle of creativity and insight.

But as I explained in an interview last month [ED note: the Mashable interview I mentioned above], our initial steps towards this virtuous cycle are indeed baby steps. So stay tuned for updates on what will continue to be a long road ahead.

The last part is key in all this: “the long road ahead.” I think that underscores the point of what I’ve written, that you’re unlikely to see a massive change to how Google search looks and operates in the near term.

Related Articles

• Google’s Results Get More Personal With “Search Plus Your World”
• Two Weeks In, Google Says “Search Plus Your World” Going Well, Critics Should Give It Time
• How Siri Patches Up The iPhone’s Voice Search Weakness Vs. Android
• Head To Head: Siri Vs. Google Voice Actions
• Why Siri + Yelp = Useless Google Maps On The iPhone 4S
• Not Just Google: Siri Searches Bing And Yahoo Too
• Google Buys Clever Sense: An Answer To Siri?
• Google Faces “Innovator’s Dilemma” As It Prepares Response To Siri
• US Subpoenas Apple For Details About Default iOS Google Search Deal
• When Everyone Gets The Vote: Social Shares As The New Link Building

Google’s “Best Guess” About Sexual Orientations

Here’s an example of one of the answers that were being shown, in response to a search for is anna paquin gay:

You can see that Google provided a direct answer: “Best guess for Anna Paquin Sexual orientation is Bisexual.” This worked for Paquin and other some other celebrities up until a few hours ago, when Google disabled these types of answers.

Google & Direct Answers

Google has been providing direct answers to questions based on content it finds across the web since May 2010, and it shifted toward saying “Best Guess” as part of the format in March of this year. Our posts below, as well as Google’s own from May 2010, explain more:

• Google Squared Powers Answer Sources & Something Different Refinements
• Google Goes Beyond Answers, Starts Guessing Release Dates

The answers seem to have been most noticed in categories like movie and video game release dates, but they weren’t limited to that. One category of answers had been, for some time Google tells me, the sexual orientation of people.

Sexual Orientation Answers Became More Noticeable

Why has this suddenly stopped? I haven’t gotten a straight (no pun intended) answer to that. Google just gave me this general statement:

Since May 2010, our algorithms analyze the top ranked results for a search and extract best guesses for an answer to fact-seeking queries, such as the [height of the empire state building] or [catherine zeta-jones birth date]. Because we show best guesses for facts that are available throughout the web, there is a “Show sources” link that lists several different sites that help corroborate the answer.

We’re always experimenting with ways to algorithmically provide answers to different queries, and in cases where we’re not confident that the way the answer is presented to our users is helpful, we may change how those results are displayed. We’re constantly looking to improve the quality of our results and the way they’re presented, and we welcome users’ feedback.

However, Google did say it might be that more people had started discovering the sexual orientation responses recently due of a change in how they were triggered.

Before, you were more likely to only get them if you were to search for someone along with the words “sexual orientation.” But recently (exactly how recent, Google wouldn’t say), searching in a question format along with words like “gay” might trigger it.

In other words, relatively few people were searching for “anna paquin sexual orientation” and seeing the direct answer. But many more were searching for “is anna paquin gay” — indeed, so many that Google suggests it as a search term:

It seems that giving direct answers to more common ways to search for sexual orientation questions got them noticed. Indeed, that’s what set me into looking into this story.

Sean Carlos of Antezeta Web Marketing tipped us to an Advocate article from yesterday, which cited a Tulsa marketing blog spotting the answers.

Gawker picked that up, and Manhunt Daily captured a series of responses about actors ranging from Hugh Jackman (Straight) to Angelina Jolie (Bisexual) to Jodie Foster (Lesbian) to Jesse Tyler Ferguson (Gay).

Too Sensitive For Guesses?

Here’s another example, this time for Enrique Iglesias, a screenshot that Sean Carlos captured. It shows you how the answers looked inline with the search query:

As I said, a few hours ago when I started looking into this, I could get these to trigger. But now that no longer happens. As Google won’t say why, I’ll offer my own best guess. It was probably deemed too sensitive.

At a time when the search engine has already been taking heat over what it should or shouldn’t be listing in a search for Rick Santorum, Google probably decided it didn’t want to be the one accused of outing some celebrity, even if it gathered those answers from sources across the web.

Action buttons give you quick links to perform specific actions on specific web sites. IF you are searching for an airline, the Bing action buttons may include items like check flight status, book a flight or check in to a flight. If you are searching for a car rental company, Bing may offer you action links to rent a car, find locations or contact the company. If you are searching for a hotel, Bing may offer you action links to book a room, locations and their reward program.

Here are some pictures:

Deepak Vijaywargi, Program Manager at Bing said:

Based on how people search, our algorithms now determine top actions and corresponding links in the site for a given category with high precision. For instance, with airlines the top 3 tasks are: check-in to a flight, check the status of a flight or book a flight. For software sites, if you are searching for a specific product you likely want to download it. For car rental agencies, you’d like to rent a car, find out locations or contact them.

This news come shortly after Google launched Google Flights with a booking option that is unclear if it is paid or not.

Related Stories:

• Bing Gets More Personal With Adaptive Search
• Bing Maps The Mall
• Confirmed: Bing Tests Ads Within Organic Search Results
• Google Travel Search Takes Flight With First ITA Travel Product
• Microsoft Makes Mobile Bing More Social Too
• Schema.org: Google, Bing & Yahoo Unite To Make Search Listings Richer Through Structured Data

There are lots of different ways to speed up searching. Google, Bing and Yahoo all offer browser toolbars — no need to visit their home pages, just search wherever you are. Google and Yahoo both have their own versions of “instant search,” where search results appear as you type. Google’s Chrome web browser lets you search right from the browser address bar.

And they all fall short of my new favorite search tool: Slashtag.it. If you’re really looking to search faster, this is the way to do it.

Slashtag.it isn’t a search engine; it’s an interface that lets you access several dozen search engines more quickly. It does this via simple slashtag commands – one for each of a couple dozen different search sites. (You might think Blekko coined the term “slashtag,” but the term was actually first used in relation to Twitter in late 2009.)

If you wanted to search for U2, for example, across several different sites, there’s no need to visit them all and type “u2″ into their search boxes. You can do it all via Slashtag.it, like this:

Amazon.com

YouTube:

Bing Images:

Facebook:

There are currently about 60 slashtags supported (including Search Engine Land) and a form to suggest new ones that you’d like added. Slashtag.it supports pretty much all of the main search sites and a few cool ones like Netflix, Evernote and Dropbox. (If you’re logged in to your Dropbox account, typing “somekeyword /db” searches your stored files; too cool.)

Perhaps best of all, you don’t have to visit Slashtag.it to use the service. You can make it the default search tool on your Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer or Opera browser; it can also be added as an extra toolbar on Safari, though it won’t function as part of the main search box there.

And, Slashtag.it doesn’t have to replace your primary search engine; if you use it without typing a slashtag, it’ll send your search term to your preferred search engine. (So, if I just type “u2″ with nothing else, it does that search on Google.)

Example: Searching for Maui, Hawaii Information

I’ve been using Slashtag.it to research a trip later this year to Maui. The first thing I did was install Slashtag.it as my default search engine in Firefox.

The Old Way

Before using Slashtag.it, my process for comparing Google and Bing Maps would’ve been something like this:

1. Type “maui snorkeling” in the search box and click to search Google.
2. Click the “Maps” link in the menu above Google’s search results, or click the big map graphic in the right column to reach Google Maps.
3. Change my search option in Firefox to Bing and repeat the search. (as shown above)
4. Click the “Maps” link in the menu above Bing’s results.

The New Way

After adding Slashtag.it as a search option in Firefox, that process became:

1. Type “maui snorkeling /m” to search directly on Google Maps.
2. Change the “m” to “bmaps” and search directly on Bing Maps.

That’s half the steps, less time using the mouse, and much faster overall.

Final Thoughts

The hardest thing about using Slashtag.it is remembering all the tags that are available, but they’re all pretty self-explanatory and several times I’ve guessed right (/flickr and /itunes, for example).

It’s such a simple and useful tool, I can’t help but wonder why one of the big search engines didn’t think of it first. If you only ever use Google, for example, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to type “maui snorkeling /maps” and Google would know you want to skip Google.com and search Google Maps?

Still, that would only work for Google properties. If you want a faster way to search several dozen different sites, Slashtag.it is the way to go.

Postscript From Danny Sullivan: You can, of course, do these things with Blekko, which debuted the “slashtag” concept back in October (see Blekko: New Search Engine Lets You “Spin” The Web and Blekko, The “Slashtag” Search Engine, Goes Live). For example, you can add the commands below to match any of the same searches above that Slashtag.it does:

• Amazon = /amazon
• YouTube = /youtube
• Bing Images = /images (Blekko image search is Bing Images)

Blekko lacks a /facebook option that I can see, which is very nice in how Slashtag.it provides it. But Blekko provides a huge number of of other slashtags plus provides the ability for anyone to create their own.

If you like the concept at Slashtag.it, then you should love it over at Blekko. As for Blekko, it doesn’t love the idea that Slashtag.it is using the “slashtag” name that it has trademarked. I’d expect that will likely be forced to change.

As for the concept itself, of adding a few things to search words to get focused results — those are generically referred to as search commands. Google offers a number of these itself, some that generate direct answers and some that let you narrow to a particular site (interesting, Google no longer lists some commands that work such as link: and allintitle:).

Search commands have been around for ages, but the idea of “command line” searches got attention back in 2005, when YubNub launched. The service, which still operates, allows people to enter searches preceded by commands to get back particular results. For example:

• am + word = Amazon search for that word

Another service that also came to light in 2005 is Ambedo, which also still operates. As with YubNub, you enter the “tag” of a particular search you want to do (searching Amazon = amazon) followed by the search term.

Postscript from Matt: You can do something similar with Blekko, but there’s a key difference. When you use a slashtag on Blekko, you’re searching the pages from the other site that Blekko has indexed; you’re not searching the actual site.

For example, if I do a search on Blekko for “u2 /amazon,” I get 16 results from Blekko. But Amazon has hundreds of U2 products on sale. If I do the same slashtagged search result on Slashtag.it, I get the full set of matches and I’m on Amazon.com already where I can begin shopping right away — no extra clicks.

Although the concept is similar, Slashtag.it is really a different experience than Blekko — one that I’d argue is much better.

Google & The World Series

Batting first is Google, where I did a search for giants, as a Giants fan might to get the score:

Nice. Just what I wanted, the current score right at the top of the page, where the first arrow is pointing at.

You Got Footballolate In My Baseballbutter!

Notice the second arrow. Baseball’s San Francisco Giants, meet football’s New York Giants. Football fans are looking for standings, too, and there’s a direct answer being provided for them.

Sort of. It doesn’t appear that there was a football game tonight, so I’m not really sure what the 5-2 stands for. But I’m sure football fans know (and are slapping their heads and calling me an idiot, as they read this).

By the way, when I repeated that search on Google, I discovered that the baseball standings oddly moved down the page:

This happened even when I used a different browser, so it wasn’t related to Google perhaps seeing me search again and deciding to change things up. C’mon Google. When the baseball game is on, it should be at the top.

Ranger Danger

Life’s not so happy if you’re a Rangers fan of the baseball variety, who entered rangers to get the score:

Shown at the top is the score for the Atlanta Thrashers versus the New York Rangers, from their hockey game tonight. Scores for the World Series match are nowhere to be seen.

For Baseball & World Series, A Changeup

Both baseball and world series are other searches baseball fans might be doing tonight. What do they see? A new format, a nice one giving the overall World Series standings, plus the score of the current game and time of the next one:

At the end of Google’s inning, I’d call it 3 out of 4.

Bing & The World Series

Time to bring on Bing. Like Google, a search for giants brings up the current score:

I like Bing’s display much better than Google’s. It’s easier to read, plus you get the current pitcher, batter and last play shown.

Rangers Robbed Again

For rangers, Bing strikes out, just like Google. You get New York Rangers hockey standings, no baseball:

Series Standings

For baseball and world series, as with Google, there’s a different format that gives standings for the World Series overall, not the score from the current game:

In this case, I think I prefer Google’s format a bit more. I found it easier to read with all the information listed in one single column.

Bing’s score, like Google’s, is 3 for 4.

Yahoo & The World Series

How are things at Yahoo? For giants, there’s a nicely formatted score box:

I like how you can see which bases are loaded, though I miss the inning-by-inning rundown.

Rangers Finally Win

For rangers, success!

I Got The Accordion Blues

In a search for baseball, there’s one of the new accordion boxes that Yahoo hopes will draw people in. The information shown isn’t what I’d say most people searching right now would want, which is the current score for the Major League Baseball’s World Series:

Another accordion box appears for world series, and it’s similarly disappointing:

Too bad. I thought Yahoo would be 4 for 4. It’s more 2 for 4. But for Rangers fans, I think Yahoo deserves some extra credit.

Google, Bing — Spare Some Love For The Rangers

Rangers fans looking for scores on Google and Bing were pretty much out of luck, if they used their team’s own name. A Silicon Valley bias?

Google’s based in Mountain View, so the SF Giants are their hometown team. Bing’s based near Seattle, so you could argue their not going to favor either team. But they’ve got a Silicon Valley office, and being based on the West Coast, they might be thinking more about the Giants than the Rangers.

I doubt there’s any formal bias in action here, but they both should get it together before game two. And Yahoo, dump those accordion boxes.

Postscript: Checking back at Bing, I noticed there are scores for a search on Rangers that sometimes show, further down on the page:

At first, I thought I’d missed this. But after doing some repeat searches, it wouldn’t always show. Disturbingly, I also found that sometimes when searching for Giants, the display I liked above did NOT appear. But I also searched just after the game ended, so that might have been a factor (though it really shouldn’t, not just minutes after the game). Here’s hoping Bing can make these appear consistently.

Look & Feel

Let’s start with the overall new look and feel that Bing has announced. The biggest change is that search options — or, Quick Tabs in Bing-speak — have been moved from the left-side column to immediately under the search box at the top of the page. Bing calls this the Answer Bar.

Just like before, the tabs will change depending on the query; the U2 search above has tabs for Songs, Albums, and Videos that are obviously query-specific. In order to make the Quick Tabs more visible below the search box, Bing’s background “image of the day” has been cut down in size pretty substantially, and you can barely tell what it is now. (If you care, that is.)

The left-side column, meanwhile, still has Related Searches and links to your recent searches; these are now easier to access because the Quick Tabs don’t take up several hundred vertical pixels above them.

What’s unchanged is the inclusion of categorized results further down the search results page.

But beyond the new Answer Bar at the top of the search results page, Bing has made some pretty substantial additions and changes to the search results for certain verticals, like Autos, Finance, and Health.

Bing: Autos

Consider a search for honda accord specs. On the old Bing interface, you’d get a pretty standard page of search results with a little bit of information about the car in Bing’s standard Instant Answer.

In the new interface, auto-related searches that include the word “specs” (and perhaps other terms; I haven’t been able to trigger it, though) send you directly to a new Quick Tab with what appears to be a pretty complete look at the Honda Accord’s specs.

The data comes from MSN Autos, and each of the orange headings you see above (Pricing & Warranty, Fuel Economy, etc.) links to further information at MSN Autos.

Bing: Finance

Bing has been strong in finance-related searches, and already shows a wealth of company information on searches that involve company stock ticker symbols. Do a search for MSFT and then click the “Finance” Quick Tab on the left, and you would see a page like this:

But, as part of the new interface, Bing has added several new content pages underneath the Finance Quick Tab that give investors faster access to deeper company information. You can see links (below) for Balance sheet, Income statement, and Cash flow — each one is a page of data like this:

Bing: Health

Coming later this week will be a variety of upgrades to Bing’s search results and interface for health-related searches. One is the addition of authoritative Twitter updates to the existing Instant Answer for medical conditions. Here’s a look at what the Instant Answer for prostate cancer will look like:

The tweet above comes from the Prostate Cancer Foundation. Bing says the tweets will only come from authoritative sources and will appear when relevancy and recency standards are met; the tweet above mentions a new discovery related to prostate cancer, which is a piece of information that the Instant Answer might not otherwise have shared with searchers.

More important than that, though, is Bing’s integration of content directly in the search results via partnerships with a variety of well-known health industry sources.

Do a search for diabetes, for example, and the initial search results include Bing’s standard Instant Answer. But there’s a new Health Quick Tab at the top of the page, and under that tab is a detailed article from the Mayo Clinic.

There’s also a box for “related articles,” all of which link to additional articles hosted by Bing.

Bing has had health information from the Mayo Clinic (and others) in its Instant Answers since day one, but this is much more than Instant Answers. This is full content articles acting like a search results page (or tab, in this case). How detailed and lengthy is that Mayo Clinic article on Bing? It’s a collection of the 10 articles that appear on the Mayo Clinic’s diabetes page — mirroring the ten links on the left side of that page (Definition, Symptoms, Causes, etc.). I cut-and-pasted Bing’s version into Microsoft Word: It took up eight pages and shows a word count of 5,264.

Final Thoughts

With this latest round of changes, Bing continues to drive home the idea of being a “decision engine” — getting searchers the information they need to take action right from the search results, or with as few clicks as possible from the search results.

Bing says that the new Answer Bar increased user engagement during its internal testing, and also helped to decrease the number of manual re-queries. Bing says that’s a sign that searchers are getting the information they need.

What’s very important in all of this, I think, is the increase in real information sitting on/in Bing’s search engine — the type of stuff search engines typically just provide links to. Whether it’s full specs for a new car, a company’s complete and current balance sheet, or an 8,000+ word article about diabetes, this is new. Search results are now content.

Note: Some Bing users may not see all of the changes at this time while the updates are rolling out; the Health updates, in particular, aren’t due to go live for a couple days.

Google

Google seems to have been the last to rollout its World Cup information. Earlier today, I wasn’t seeing anything special for searches like world cup schedule, but Google is now showing a list of upcoming matches.

Still, Google is offering far less than Yahoo and Bing (see below) when it comes to World Cup information in search results. Searches such as us vs england and brazil soccer offer nothing new specific to this year’s tournament. Instead, on certain searches involving the term “world cup,” Google has changed the “Gooooooogle” image at the bottom of the search results to “Goooooooal.”

Google also announced earlier this week that there’s new Street View imagery around seven new football stadiums in South Africa, the host country.

Postscript, June 11: Google has announced several online/search features to help fans follow World Cup results.

Yahoo

Yahoo got out in front early on this, announcing a new set of World Cup shortcuts a full month ago. Those shortcuts are all now live. Searches like world cup schedule, us vs england, or germany soccer produce a variety of different shortcuts with World Cup information.

Since announcing these shortcuts last month, Yahoo says it’s already seen a 150% uptick in search volume around the World Cup — and a 25% increase in engagement with the shortcuts.

Bing

Bing wrote about its World Cup plans yesterday, which include a variety of Instant Answers and more. Searches like world cup schedule and germany soccer show similar information as in Yahoo’s shortcuts.

Unlike Yahoo, Bing shows no Instant Answer for individual match searches such as us vs england. But Bing has created separate visual search galleries for World Cup teams and players — but these are only available for users in the US, UK, and Canada. Here’s a look at the Australian team’s page:

Bing has also created an app for Bing Maps that offers live World Cup information, but I’m unable to find that in Bing Maps at the moment.

Twitter

While some are wondering if Twitter is going to be able to survive the global onslaught of World Cup-related tweets, Twitter is pretty much saying “bring it on.” Twitter has announced a special mini-site that features tweet activity around the World Cup in general, with specific pages devoted to individual matches.

Fans can also visit their Twitter settings: design page to get a World Cup-themed Twitter background, and if you tweet with the hashtag of participating countries, Twitter will automatically add a “hash flag” to your tweet, like this:

Twitter has also published a list of suggested accounts that World Cup fans might want to follow directly during the tournament, and created a Top Tweets World Cup account that algorithmically chooses and shares interesting World Cup tweets.

Search Activity

Experian Hitwise has shared some of its data related to World Cup search activity. The press release focuses on the most searched-for players, but I’m more interested in the fact that Yahoo’s World Cup 2010 site received the second-most traffic from World Cup search last week in the U.S. FIFA.com was first at 50%, with Yahoo second at 11% and Wikipedia third at 8%.

Hitwise also says U.S. searches for the term “world cup” have increased 216% in the last two weeks, and the number of terms with “world cup” increased 226% over the same period.

Already in place is a general World Cup shortcut, and once the matches begin, Yahoo will have specific shortcuts for countries, groups, and individual matches, like these examples from Yahoo’s announcement:

These shortcuts will be available on 27 Yahoo sites around the world. Yahoo is also adding World Cup flavor to its toolbar. In addition to tournament coverage, toolbar users can customize the Yahoo toolbar in the colors of their favorite team.

Google and Bing haven’t announced any similar World Cup search coverage yet, but I expect they will in the near future.

The TV shortcut shows the title and a short synopsis of the next episode, along with video clips and links to see photos, the show’s schedule, and an episodes list. All of this content comes from Yahoo TV.

Although my LOST example above doesn’t show it, Yahoo will occasionally show links in the left column for related actors, shows, or movies. I’m guessing the query [lost] was a little too generic to prompt that.

There’s also a new celebrity shortcut that focuses on well-known actors and actresses. It’s fairly similar to Yahoo’s recently announced news shortcut in that it offers tabs to see news, photos, video, and Twitter updates about the celebrity.

If the celebrity has a Twitter account, that third tab will change from “Twitter” to “Official Tweets” and will display his/her Twitter stream.