Two Suggestions For Improving Google Universal
Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Saturday, 2 of February , 2008 at 2:40 pm
On Jan. 30, 2008, Danny Sullivan posted a rather long blog post explaining Universal Search. He’s got some great insights there and I won’t tackle everything. But I have a few things to say about Google Universal Search in general (not Danny Sullivan):
First off, I think Google Universal Search is on the right track, but there do need to be some improvements. No. 1 on the list is Image Search. I have no idea how Google indexes its photos. I’ve seen some problems with it such as when I search for certain items and the search index pulls up images that exist on a page where a certain keyword that I’ve search for appears. The image isn’t related to the keyword; it just appeared on the same page as what I was searching for and it’s totally unrelated.
Now I teach people to increase their chances of getting their images indexed properly by placing their keywords in their alt tags, but it seems that Google has other criteria for indexing photos that may over ride the alt tag. If that’s the case, I’d like to know about it. When it comes to search engine optimization, knowing these things are more important than not.
Secondly, I like the blended and comparative search models that Danny is talking about. But I wonder if Google could put radio buttons on its search page and let users pick and choose the verticals that they want searched for their particular keywords. That seems to me to be a better fix for relevancy by letting the user decide.
Category: Search Engines
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Comment by Sebastian Lewis
Made Monday, 4 of February , 2008 at 5:00 am
1. Yeah, I assume Google is working on a way to scan the images themselves for relevancy through an algorithm, but for now they just rely on keywords. Hopefully we’ll see some progress in that (and video search) soon.
2. Because that goes against Google’s philosophy of automating everything for the user, they want to be able to provide the most relevant information no matter what vertical it is in, and really it doesn’t matter. I do wish they would improve it though, such as with videos (when they have a better algorithm for searching videos directly than keywords) where it would jump to the specific spot in the video that is relevant to the search, as long as the user obtains the information they need, it doesn’t matter where it is. But if you’re so picky, there are the links on the top left corner that you can click on, sometimes I like to refine my searches to News and Blog searches as well for example, although I use Inquisitor to do that instead of clicking the links directly.
Sebastian
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Made Monday, 4 of February , 2008 at 3:41 pm
[…] days ago I posted two suggestions for improving Google Universal. Thanks to Sebastian Lewis for bringing up the video search issue. I had pointed out that Image […]
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