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How to Use Google Co-op  (View post)

Niraj Sanghvi [PersonRank 10]

Thursday, May 11, 2006
18 years ago11,759 views

That's a nice write-up! It really clarifies the developers' role and subscribed feeds, which had me confused. You make it look so easy :)

Garett Rogers [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

nice!

thanks Philipp. This coop thing reminded me of google base the first time i saw it :) I didn't knwo what i was looking at

Kirby Witmer [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Very good post!! You cleared a lot of things up in my mind of what Google Co-op is supposed to be.

Sam Davyson [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Yeah thank you Philipp. I am still not 100% sure how useful this is. It seems almost as if it is getting more results from your favourite sources in the way that personalised search was supposed to do. Does personalised search still have a future? Or do you see some sort of merger?

Niraj Sanghvi [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Sam, I think personalized search is different in how it makes suggestions tailored to your search history. That's something coop doesn't do. I wonder how useful the new subscribed links boxes will be, and how easy it will be to find ones that are interesting. It's nice that there's a bit of a learning curve to it, as it should reduce the amount of noise (i.e. simple and not very useful links).

Michael Fagan [PersonRank 3]

18 years ago #

Thanks for the summary. I've been trying to really get a grasp of what coop is (have only skimmed the docs so far) and I have a much better understanding now.

viggen [PersonRank 1]

18 years ago #

nice write up, but since when is digg a content provider? To me it is a link provider...

Stephen [PersonRank 0]

18 years ago #

So labeling is like tagging a webpage as you might a picture in flicker? Except you don't need to label things that are probably on 90%+ of the pages such as Google and Philipp Lenssen? So digg might want to label their page with words web 2.0, news, technology? And labeling is to better help serve your page to searchers?

Hashim [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

i still have no idea what it does

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Hashim, ask away... maybe someone has answers.

And Stephen, the whole labeling thing is still somewhat cloudly to me. In particular I'd like to know:
- Why would anyone want to label a URL?
- What is so bad about analyzing text in backlinks (i might link to a page with the word "review" even tho the page itself doesn't include this word, and Google already follows up on this connection)?
- How do you trigger labels from a profile (person) you subscribed to? (I'm subscribed to Enoch Choi for testing purposes but can't see the labels below URLs he labeled.)

Roger Browne [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Subscribed links are tremendous – a way to get your trusted information providers right to the top of your Google searches.

Now what would be REALLY cool is for the subscribed link feature to be dynamic, i.e. it executes a query on the contributor's computer and displays the output of THAT! At the moment, as I see it, you can regenerate your XML file and have it re-crawled as often as you like, but then the subscribed links are static until you again revise your XML file and have it re-crawled.

Although Google's site shows subscribed links for fairly dynamic things like transit timetables, you presumably can't do something like a calculator where there are too many inputs to enumerate.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Thanks to Breezy for digging the article, and thanks to Alek for letting me know!
http://digg.com/technology/How_to_Use_Google_Co-op

Stephen [PersonRank 0]

18 years ago #

Does labeling only come into play if a user clicks on the more boxes? And whats to stop those damn v1agra sellers from getting into "erectile dysfunction more:condition_treatment". Couldn't the v1agra sellers label their pages with treatment and I'm sure their content is litered with words erectile disfuntion, treatment already.

Elias KAI [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Labeling is essential for Health infromation websites

dpneal [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

A great post Philipp. It's made how it works much clearer to me. Thanks! :)

Stephen [PersonRank 0]

18 years ago #

They have official google groups dedicated to certain areas of expertise. Such as camera, auto, health etc... Go to http://www.google.com/coop and click on one of the areas. Also you get to search in those areas.

Haochi [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Phillip is using PNG images.
I checked out Co-op yesterday, not really useful for me.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

> Couldn't the v1agra sellers label their pages with
> treatment and I'm sure their content is litered with
> words erectile disfuntion, treatment already.

They can, but in order for people to see it they need to either make people subscribe their feed (which most probably won't), or make their feed really popular so it'll be added as default (which probably can be tricked, but maybe not easily).

Art-One [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Let's face this case: if you do a google search on my name, you find two kinds of url's (in fact three kinds if you consider non relevant links too): urls pointing to pages with information on myself & urls pointing to information with information on an other guy. Could the labelling system be helpfull for this?

or [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Thanks Philipp, that was an awesome write up. I was too tired yesterday to figure out Co-op. You did the hard work for me. Well, that's what the web is for – learn from others who have already done the hard work. :-)

I think Co-op is interesting because it seems to have a strong trust system incorporated. And I think it has a better potential to take off over Yahoo's MyWeb(another good concept), because it gives something that contributors want -traffic, and because users have to subscribe, contributors will want to promote their subscribed links. Thus, Co-op can be viral google feature.

Of course it's not perfect, but we all know that with feedback google will make the necessary improvement. (Isn't it frustrating how google releases half baked products with a promise of improvement from user feedback, but at least they have a track record of incorporating feedback.)

Dam [PersonRank 1]

18 years ago #

this thing seems kinda useless to me and i think the trends is kind of useless too without actual figures.

Tristan [PersonRank 0]

18 years ago #

I just dont get it .....

Alberto [PersonRank 0]

18 years ago #

So, now people will be adding "co-op me" buttons to their websites, besides all the "digg this"/"add to del.icio.us" buttons?

[put at-character here]Roger Browne
You could always generate your XML dynamically. So whenever Google recrawls it updates the contents based on whatever script you have running underneath it.

Alberto [PersonRank 0]

18 years ago #

And I think the next question on evrybody's mind is... Philip, where can we subscribe to your co-op feed & links?

Rich Hodge [PersonRank 6]

18 years ago #

Maybe they'll put a "Subscribe" link next to each result...

Cached – Similar pages – Subscribe

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

> Philip, where can we subscribe to your co-op feed & links?

I'm still figuring out how to add something useful to Co-op...

Steve [PersonRank 0]

18 years ago #

Hi Philip, I think you've done a great job of explaining the complex Co-op product, but there are some distinctions I feel could be made clearer:

First, Co-Op is basically two components -
1) the ability to build a OneBox element, and
2) the ability to label URLs in support of clusters
But when it comes down to it, these are really the same thing... (more in a bit)

Second, Co-Op is visible in two ways -
1) What you will see out of the box, and
2) What you get after subscribing
It's important to make this distinction because frankly, it will be a very tiny % of Google users who will ever be subscribing to CoOp templates, given its current form.

The ability to make a new OneBox is really powerful and will be very helpful to sites with lots of content – you can basically expose your entire site through an element at the top of Google! But there are two huge limitations that will keep this from popular use: #1 – it's not really search federation, since as you've demonstrated in your example you basically have to send over your entire entity list in the template XML file. This means you have to do scheduled updates, etc. #2 – No one benefits without subscribing, and I suspect only very techy people will subscribe to things for now. There are some things they can do to make this easier for end users and I'm sure it will improve over time, but right now it's targeted squarely at high-volume sites.

Clustering and labeling is just junk right now. It's basically a specialized type of OneBox which allows you to define a topic & vocabulary, and then support it with XML labeling files. This isn't "tagging" in the popular sense, as again is not targeted at end users. Rather it is done this way so that the OneBox "moderator" (whoever created the cluster) can distribute his work among many publishers. It also faces the #2 problem above – no one will benefit from clusters until they subscribe. (At least in this case they can automatically enable certain clusters for all users after they've been reviewed for quality)

So I guess I would have chosen different words than your bullet list, explaining how this will help publishers build OneBoxes & specialized clusters, rather than mentioning the masses, who won't yet benefit much. (I do think the feature will improve over time of course!)

I published more thoughts on this stuff at: http://www.ihol.org/blog

Cheers,
Steve

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Good follow-up explanations Steve.

Mike Henry [PersonRank 0]

18 years ago #

Thanks for the great instructions.

I have started a google coop forum if anyone is interested in participating.

http://www.co-opforum.com/

Niraj Sanghvi [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

It seems that the Onebox would be a lot more useful if it let you search content (kind of like a site-search, except you could search a specific subset of your site – i.e. just search stories you've posted or comments others posted) rather than requiring you to define a finite set of queries through XML. Essentially you would still define the content in the XML, but the queries could cover anything contained in that content.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

I think Google won't do this at the time due to speed issues. If they can't cache it, it would be tough to deliver fast oneboxes, which would reflect bad on Google's services...

TOMHTML [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Did you know that Google Co-op made links to your article and Barry's articles?
http://www.google.com/coop/docs/other_resources.html

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Yep, the author of the second article linked there told me... Reto Meier!

James Lowrance [PersonRank 1]

18 years ago #

How did you get your code to work? whenever I upload code onto google I get error message:

Subscribed Link Feeds Submitted
   Name Last crawled Status
   Appraisers of Las Vegas 11:31:51 on 06/08/06 Error Remove
URL: http://www.google.com/coop/profile?user=010793257703071678348
Log: XML parsing errors:
Wrong toplevel element-- should be Results
Line: 3
  
   Appraisers of Las Vegas 11:31:51 on 06/08/06 Error Remove
URL: www.AppraisersofLasVegas.com
Log: Feed data could not be read
  
   Google Subscribed Links API 11:31:51 on 06/08/06 Error Remove
URL: http://google.com/coop/trust/add?user=010793257703071678348
Log: XML parsing errors:
Badly formed XML
Line: 1

Here is our XML coding:
   Version one
<?xml version="1.0" standalone="no" ?>
<Results>
<ResultSpec id="AppraisersofLasVegas">
<Query>my subscribed links</Query>
<Response>
<Output name="title">Appraisers of Las Vegas</Output>
<Output name="more_url">http://www.google.com/coop/profile?user=010793257703071678348</Output>
<Output name="text1">From home to High Rise</Output>
<Output name="text2">Everything you need in RE Appraisal!</Output>
<Output name="text3">Appraisers of Las Vegas.com is the #1 appraisal firm in Las Vegas</Output>

</Response>
</ResultSpec>
</Results>

   version 2:

<?xml version="1.0" standalone="no" ?>
<Results>
   <ResultSpec id="Appraisers of Las Vegas">
   <Query> subscribed links</Query>
   <Response>
   <Output name="title">Appraisers of Las Vegas</Output>
   <Output name="more_url">http://www.google.com/coop/profile?user=010793257703071678348</Output>
   <Output name="text1">From home to High Rise</Output>
   <Output name="text2">Everything you need in RE Appraisal!</Output>
   </Response>
   </ResultSpec>
   </Results>
   Version three:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1" ?>
<Results>
   <ResultSpec id="Las Vegas">
   <Query>google</Query>
   <Response>
   <Output name="title">Appraisers of Las Vegas</Output>
   <Output name="more_url">http://www.google.com/coop/profile?user=010793257703071678348</Output>
   <Output name="text1">Everything you need in RE Appraisal</Output>
   <Output name="text2">That's what we want to be for you</Output>
   <Output name="text3">Appraisers of Las Vegas.com is the #1 appraisal firm in Las Vegas</Output>
   </Response>
   </ResultSpec>
</Results>

Version four:
<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<Results>
<ResultSpec id="google">
   <Query>subscribed-links</Query>
   <Response>

What am I doing wrong? Please tell me!

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Can you upload the XML somewhere?

Sam Davyson [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

There is something dodgy going on for me with Co-op. I have Philipp's XML installed and also the digg one. A search for [google] gives:

http://img95.imageshack.us/img95/2508/picture30er.png

Who is Joe?

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

I don't know Joe Lenssen! What's that? :)

/pd [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

"Contact Joe Lenssen Ph 07 849 4807. The Chemist Shop Po Box 992 Palmerston North, Elizabeth Arden, NZ"

:)-

James Lowrance [PersonRank 1]

18 years ago #

To Mr. Lessen,

   I have been uploading to my geocities free website: the file manager will
load XML files but not DTD's I really would like to know what I am missing here?

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