SiteLines - Ideas About Web Searching

Google's Synonym Operator

Google recently announced that it has introduced a synonym operator using the tilde ~ character. Google provides some very brief information on the feature . Greg Notess has a useful description and some examples.

Of course, Google is silent on how the synonym function actually works. Clearly it is algorithymically based: no human has coded the contents of Roget's Thesaurus! However, Marydee Ojala ran some tests and reported them in a recent news alert, "Google Introduces Synonym Searching, News Alerting Features", part of the Information Today web site. Ojala concluded that the influence of Googles PageRank is obviously present, which of course skews results toward popularity, particularly technology, business and entertainment.

Andrew Baio of Waxy.org came up with a neat way of identifying which synonyms Google is using. Search for your synonym keyword and then exclude the same keyword from results. For example, searching ~help -help will result in search results that lack the keyword help but include the synonyms (in bold type).

Latest Search Engine Gizmos - Toolbars with Popup Blockers

Both Google and Altavista have recently released new improved downloadable free toolbars that contain pop-up blockers. Pop-up blockers are designed to prevent those annoying pop-up advertisements that serious searchers loathe. This hook is a good one and will likely compel many searchers to download the new toolbars, since prior to the availability of free search toolbars the only option to prevent pop-ups was fairly rudimentary shareware that often blocked things that you wanted to see as well as things you didn't.

I'm not a big fan of free search engine toolbars, mainly because I think they just reinforce our ever-increasing over-reliance on search engines, by making them even easier to use without first considering if they are appropriate to the task.

Nevertheless, I checked out the FAQ for the new Google toolbar and the Google folks provide some explanation of how their pop-up blockers work -- the blockers should allow at least one popup window IF YOU CLICK ON A LINK (so that legitimate web sites that have coded their links to open in new windows will continue to function). The blocker tries to target pop-ups that are coded to open without clicking or other deliberate choice by the user. However, if you find that, after installing one of these new toolbars, you're having trouble opening windows with a click, try uninstalling the toolbar and see if the problem resolves itself.

What are your thoughts on the new toolbars? I welcome your comments and reviews!

Workplace Internet abuse isn't as sexy as you think

Spotted in the August 19 issue of the Toronto Star: a study by Paul Mastrangelo of Genesee Survey Services -- presented at last week's American Psychological Association meeting held in Toronto -- estimates that office workers use the Internet -- a LOT. Mastrangelo estimates that "between 80-85% of employees use work computers for personal use" and that much of this use is for daily tasks like paying bills or shopping or looking up something on Google. He goes on to suggest that the answer for employers isn't simple, since some things (like banking) take way less time online than jumping into your car and leaving the office. A more rational approach is recommended, like training employees to use the Internet more efficiently.

If you're interested in reading beyond the headlines, Genesse Survey Services produced an interesting and far more detailed white paper (in WORD format) on the same topic.

Tips and Tricks for Google Geeks

In the April 21 2003 issue of the International Herald Tribune (but just noticed this week!) Lee Dembart reviews a few great Google "hacks" covered by Tara Calashain in her book Google Hacks: 100 Industrial-Strength Tips & Tools. Tara also has a spot on the web where you can find all the hacks that she has devised. Many of the hacks are either odd (Do I want Google to generate poetry?) or useless (Who needs another random URL generator?) but there are a couple of notable ones for serious searchers.

• Google Alert allows you to enter your search terms, and the site, which is not affiliated with Google, automatically runs a Google search every day and e-mails the new results to you.
• Goofresh lets you search for pages that were indexed today, yesterday, in the last seven days or the last 30 days. A good one for web collection developers to try out.
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The Experts Declare "Nothing New" on Google Proximity Searching

In the June 20 issue of SiteLines, I wondered in print on whether Google could conduct a proximity search. I had tested a search using wildcards without the "double quotations" required for phrase searching and noticed that the search seemed to return results that suggested that proximity might actually be at work here.

Well, I was wrong. To my rescue came colleagues and web search experts Gary Price, Genie Tyburski, and Greg Notess, along with a couple of able readers who contributed comments to the posting. All confirmed that while Google is capable of “sort of” doing a proximity search, it’s very limited and there is certainly nothing new on the topic since it was originally reported in 2002.

Genie Tyburski of the Virtual Chase pointed me to Greg Notess’s succinct discussion of Google’s limited proximity possibilities in his excellent search engine roundup site called Search Engine Showdown. In this feature article, Greg notes that although Google does not directly support proximity searching, there is a trick which can be used for a wildcard word within a phrase placed within “double quotes”. I won’t repeat the entire explanation here: Greg’s description above has excellent examples.

Kevin Shay has produced a very unofficial Google API Proximity Search tool that can reproduce proximity searching up to a distance of 3 words in just one step. Serious searchers may want to bookmark this site for reference should proximity searching ever be called for in a Google search. Shay’s proximity search tool is one of a number of applications built with Google’s API Developers Kit, which provides information on Google’s search syntax and functions so that developers can design programs to query Google’s database in precise ways without having to go to Google directly.

Greg Notess also pondered what might have happened to make me think that the asterisks might be producing true proximity searching without encasing the search in “double quotes”. He tried my original search on bush * * * iran without the quotes and noticed that although you get different results for the two searches, you don’t get a different number than for the search "bush * * * iran", which suggests that the same results are retrieved for both searches but just ranked differently in each.

Greg continues: "Because one of Google’s standard ranking algorithms is to rank phrase matches higher, a search on bush * * * iran finds the [bush AND iran] results and then ranks any matches for “bush * * * iran” at the top or closer to the top. Each search is still finding [bush AND iran] but the ranking changes due to the location of the asterisks." Bingo. I think he's absolutely right with this explanation.

And my friend Gary Price of Resource Shelf emailed me with much the same information, reminding me that he had penned a note about this very topic a year and half ago when Kevin Shay's proximity search tool first became available.

Thank you to everyone who contributed to solving the mystery of proximity searching.

5 Favorites for FreePint

FreePint, a British web zine for librarians and other serious business researchers, has a monthly feature called "My Favorite Tipples" where guest writers contribute 5 of their favorite web search resources. Read my list in the latest issue of FreePint.