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Google Experimental Search

Tony Ruscoe [PersonRank 10]

Wednesday, May 16, 2007
17 years ago3,954 views

I think this is a great addition but why does Google always release things before they're ready?

Check this page: http://www.google.com/webhp?esrch=RefinementBarLhsGradientPreview

<< You can exit experimental search at any time and return to regular Google web search. >>

...which links to http://labs.google.com/search/exit.html – i.e. a 404.

BTW a lot of the pages link to http://labs.google.com/search/ which redirects to http://www.google.com/experimental/ – I wonder if the "Experimental" branding was a last minute decision...

TOMHTML [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

When you search for "Napoleon battles view:map", Google found Waterloo... in Canada ;-)

photoactive [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

There's quite a lot of that sort of thing, not to be helped at this stage; it'll need some pretty swizzy algorithms.

Try [che guevara view:map] and wonder what Che was doing in Cordoba in Spain. The snippet it relies on says clearly enough "He spends his leave on motorcycle tours with his friend Alberto Granado, who runs a dispensary at the leper colony of San Francisco del Chanar near Cordoba in Argentina" but that's a relatively easy one to fix. Most of the time it'll be extremely difficult for Google to know which Newtown is referred to.

David Hetfield [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

<< why does Google always release things before they're ready? >>

This is how Google can collect anonymous information about the specific service they release.

Tony Ruscoe [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

David, you think that link is dead because Google wants to collect anonymous information about the service? Hmm... ;-)

Martin Porcheron [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

"BTW a lot of the pages link to labs.google.com/search/ which redirects to google.com/experimental/ – I wonder if the "Experimental" branding was a last minute decision..."

Sounds like it could have been initially called Google Labs Search, but I guess to the average person they may not understand the Labs part and assume it makes no difference. Google Experimental sounds good anyway.

Conor Cleary [PersonRank 8]

17 years ago #

Is this part of the new searching? Cleaning up Wikipedia...

Mike Gravel – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Hyperlinked encyclopedia article about the former US Senator for Alaska and current candidate for President.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Gravel – 86k – 16 May 2007 – Cached – Similar pages

Basicly it just tells the user that it is an encyclopedia.

Tony Ruscoe [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Conor, if I understand what you're asking, no.

That's just the description of that particular Wikipedia article taken from the Open Directory Project – http://dmoz.org – and it displays because Google automatically shows ODP descriptions unless you opt out using this META tag:

<meta name="robots" content="noodp" />

Conor Cleary [PersonRank 8]

17 years ago #

oohh... that's neat I didn't kno that :)

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