9/15 Google Watch

Please add updates@feedmyinbox.com to your address book to make sure you receive these messages in the future. Google Watch Microsoft Bing Visual Search Option Helps Us Become Lazier Searchers September 14, 2009 at 3:24 pm Angling to give Web surfers another, easier way to find what they are looking for, Microsoft's Bing search team introduced a visual search option today, Sept. 14. No, this isn't another take on image search. But it does use images to help users find results. Bing Visual Search lets users type in a query as usual, but instead of returning the customary blue links as results, Bing returns images associated with books, movies, celebrities, sports teams and so on. How can you try this? First, you have to download Microsoft's Silverlight plug-in if you haven't already (How's that for a barrier to entry?) Then go here. See the demo video from Bing here: I just had to try this to see if it's worth the hype. As a big movie buff, I first searched for "movies in theaters" and saw this: Mousing over each image put the title of the film handily in the search box. No typing required! Just mousing. I'm a horror movie fan, so I clicked on "Halloween II" and saw these movie listings and more info: Bing Visual Search categories at the moment are Entertainment, Famous People, Reference, Shopping and Sports. Read more on this on Techmeme here, though Search Engine Land's review is the most thorough. Google moved toward a picture-based search with Similar Images from Google Labs in April. Bing's Visual Search even uses many of the same categories as Google Similar Images: However, when you click the pics, Similar Images helps you find more images, not search links, so it's not quite the same. Bing gets a big kudos for this in my book. Now, what will Google do, particularly now that Bing just notched 10.7 percent of the search queries in August, up from 9 percent in July, according to Nielsen? That's almost 20 percent growth! However, it wasn't at Google's expense (64.6 percent), but Yahoo's, which tallied only 16 percent of the searches in August, a drop of 4.2 percent in July. Here comes Bing, gobbling first Yahoo (even before the Microhoo integration). Next up, Google. Brace yourselves for the search war. How to Search Google in Near Real-Time September 14, 2009 at 10:48 am When Google added its search options feature in May, the company made it possible for users to narrow the time parameters of their search down to the past 24 hours. Of course, some search engine snobs scoffed at this. Why search Google for info in the past 24 hours when you can search real-time search destinations such as Twitter, OneRiot, Collecta, CrowdEye, or Topsy? The blogosphere is abuzz this morning with the discovery of a neat little hack every user can do to get Google results up to the minute. The discovery was made by Ran Geva, CEO of real-time search startup Omgili. When users do a search in the past 24 hours, the results come with the code parameter "qdr.d." Geva deduced that this stood for "query data range" and tested his theory by changing the second "d" to "n" for minute and "s" for second. OK, I don't know why we wouldn't type in "m" instead of "n" to signify minute, but Geva's hack worked! He searched on results for Barack Obama. Since I'm a professional football fan and the NFL kicked off yesterday, I decided to test this with my favorite football team. Here are the results on the New York Giants for the past 24 hours: Then I changed the "d" to "n" (where n=minute) and saw results from the past 54 seconds and sooner: This is awesome! Now, the second test, which if you looked at Geva's blog you know didn't pan out for him. That means Google search isn't doing real-time, yet, but it's got to be close. If it can do under a minute, or even past 30 seconds as Geva shows, it can do up to the second. Here I swapped out the "n" for an "s" (where s=second): To search for results in the past 30 seconds, I added "30" to the end of the "s" to signify 30 seconds. Success! So how close to real-time does this hack come? I next tried 10 seconds with this query: http://www.google.com/search?q=New%20York%20Giants&hl=en&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENUS268&output=search&tbs=qdr:s10&tbo=1 and saw nothing. How about 20 seconds? http://www.google.com/search?q=New%20York%20Giants&hl=en&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENUS268&output=search&tbs=qdr:s20&tbo=1. Nothing, but it could just be that there wasn't anything to find for those parameters. Now the important question: How soon before Google moves this from a cheap hack to a part of Google search for good, and down to the real-time one second goodness? Read more coverage about this on TechMeme here.   This email was sent to excelea@gmail.com.  Create Your Account Don't want to receive this feed any longer? Unsubscribe here.

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