Tag Archives: Google

Shaving a precious 2-5 seconds off your Internet searches

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Google announced yesterday a new feature of their search engine: Google Instant, which will unveil search results even as you are typing in your search terms. The goal? To shave off a few seconds from the typical search process:

Google says the average web search currently takes about 25 seconds: nine second to type it, less than one second for Google to return a result and 15 seconds to pick the best result.

They say Google Instant will shave two to five seconds off of that time.

Perhaps two to five seconds could make a big difference and the feature will become standard practice. The value of time over the Internet has certainly changed over the years, particularly comparing page loads these days to what was common in the mid 1990s. I’m not sure a couple of seconds will matter to most users – but perhaps I am wrong. We do seem to be impatient  when a page even takes just a few extra seconds to load…it’s like we have wiped from our memories the experiences of loading pages on 56k modems.

The quest to tweak search results to lead readers to news stories

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Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post provides a behind-the-scenes look at how newspapers attempt to position themselves in search engines in order to draw more readers. While these are news organizations with often serious intentions, they have to compete with other popular web topics. Here is what Kurtz suggests this looks like:

If you appease the Google gods with the right keywords, you are blessed with more readers. So carried to a hypothetical extreme, an ideal headline would be, “Sarah Palin rips non-Muslim Obama over mosque while Lady Gaga remains silent.”…

On a recent Wednesday morning, some Post editors were frustrated that the primary election results weren’t garnering many hits — despite the fact that John McCain had just won his party’s nomination and Lisa Murkowski was on the verge of losing hers. What was hot, the traffic directors said, was Elin Nordegren telling People that her life had been “hell” since her husband’s sex scandal, a photo of an alligator in the Chicago River, and a video posted on Gawker of a British woman throwing a feral cat into a dumpster…

Zaleski says such trend research is used mainly to tweak headlines and search terms. But, she adds, “what we’re realizing is that we can’t live in a vacuum, where we decide what people want to read.”

The quest for online eyeballs is one that all online sites are competing in and those who are interested in providing or discussing more serious topics do not seem to be winning the day.

h/t Instapundit

Issues with the world’s largest digital library

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While Google seems cleared to become an important scholarly destination due to its efforts to create the world’s largest digital library, Geoffrey Nunberg argues the system has some critical problems:

But to pose those [scholarly] questions, you need reliable metadata about dates and categories, which is why it’s so disappointing that the book search’s metadata are a train wreck: a mishmash wrapped in a muddle wrapped in a mess…

But I have the sense that a lot of the initial problems are due to Google’s slightly clueless fumbling as it tried master a domain that turned out to be a lot more complex than the company first realized. It’s clear that Google designed the system without giving much thought to the need for reliable metadata. In fact, Google’s great achievement as a Web search engine was to demonstrate how easy it could be to locate useful information without attending to metadata or resorting to Yahoo-like schemes of classification. But books aren’t simply vehicles for communicating information, and managing a vast library collection requires different skills, approaches, and data than those that enabled Google to dominate Web searching.

I’m sure Google is interested in correcting some of these issues – even their famous search algorithm is under constant scrutiny as they search for more optimal ways to present information.

Even as these problems are ironed out, it does seem like having this kind of digital library could transform scholarly research. Just as I can’t imagine a world where all sociology articles are online (and I can access many of them), years from now we may look back and wonder how people operated without a vast online library of digital books.

Google CEO Schmidt talks about its future

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The Wall Street Journal reports on a conversation its editors had with Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Some of the nuggets of information (with some help of this Telegraph piece):

-The world of targeted information is near at hand. Schmidt says, “a generation of powerful handheld devices is just around the corner that will be adept at surprising you with information that you didn’t know you wanted to know.”

-Google might even help plan out what you should be doing: “”I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions,” he elaborates. “They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.””

-From the Telegraph article: “Mr Schmidt said he believed that every young person will one day be allowed to change their name to distance themselves from embarrasssing photographs and material stored on their friends’ social media sites.”

-About privacy regulation: “Mr. Schmidt says regulation is unnecessary because Google faces such strong incentives to treat its users right, since they will walk away the minute Google does anything with their personal information they find “creepy.””

Some fascinating insights into how Google hopes to be part of people’s lives in the future. The piece about young people perhaps needing to change their names once they reach adulthood in order to escape their online past is a reminder of how much information is available on the Internet.

From awe to impatience with machines

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Christine Rosen at InCharacter.org writes about our relationship with machines. Her argument: people in the 1800s and early 1900s were awed by machines while today, “the more personalized and individualized our machines have become, the less humility we feel in using them.” Rosen suggests how this came about:

The awe experienced by earlier generations was part of a different worldview, one that demonstrated greater humility about many things, not least of which concerned their own human limits and frailties. Today we believe our machines allow us to know a lot more, and in many ways they do. What we don’t want to admit – but should – is that they also ensure that we directly experience less.

A thought-provoking essay. Machines are now so common and cheap that I think we often hardly recognize how they have changed our lives. In fact, new machines need to be almost life-altering (or have some new image attached to them) to gain our attention. Many of our common machines, like the automobile or many kitchen appliances, haven’t changed all that much over time as they still perform the same basic functions.

Having a sense of awe about a machine might also help us recognize some of the downsides of using new machines. If we are used to computers, we don’t think much anymore about the implications of joining a site like Facebook. Or we may not consider how having a search engine like Google affects how we think or gather and process information. We tend to accept new machines today as inevitable signs of progress (and we are progressing, right?) rather than stepping back and assessing what they mean.

The strange world of Google Streetview includes “Horseboy”

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The Daily Mail of London reports on another strange find on Google Streetview: “Horseboy,” with the body of a man and head of a horse. The article highlights some of the other strange finds over the years including Samurai warriors, Sherlock Holmes, and others.

There are websites devoted to seeing odd things on Streetview – a quick Google search will lead you to a number of websites.

See no evil

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The Wall Street Journal is reporting a summary judgment ruling in the Viacom vs. YouTube copyright infringment case (link to the opinion here).

For those of you not familiar with the case, Viacom, which owns a host of media outlets, is suing on the theory that YouTube/Google is legally responsible for Viacom clips that YouTube users post.  As Judge Louis Stanton puts it, “the critical question” from a legal perspective is whether the law punishes an online service provider that has “a general awareness that there are infringements” taking place (i.e., the fact that everyone knows there are infringing videos up on YouTube) or whether YouTube is only responsible if it has “actual or constructive knowledge of specific and identifiable infringements of individual items.”  Closely reading the Digital Millennium Copyright Act [text] and its legislative history, Judge Stanton concludes that “[m]ere knowledge of prevalence of [infringing] activity is not enough….To let knowledge of a generalized practice of infringement in the industry, or of a proclivity of users to post infringing materials, impose responsibility on service providers to discover which of their users’ posting infringe a copyright would contravene the structure and operation of the DMCA.”

This one’s virtually certain to be appealed.  Stay tuned…

Chunga – 6/23/10 8:24 PM – The onus now seems to be on the content providers, like Viacom, to monitor which of their products are uploaded and then ask for their removal (which Google appears quite willing to do). If Viacom does not explicitly ask for a removal, YouTube/Google can keep all sorts of of copyrighted material online?

Sagescape – 6/23/10 9:34 PM – Generally speaking, that’s correct.  There’s a very helpful FAQ maintained by ChillingEffects.org that describes the DMCA’s “notice and takedown” process in some detail.