Category: Content Indexing & Navigation

Researching things on the web is an essential part of everyday business – but too often books and other printed sources get left behind.

Google’s aim is possibly one of the the most daring and challenging I’ve seen announced by any company: “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” To bring them another step forward, Larry Sage and Sergey Brin announced Google Print, at the Frankfurt Book Fair this week.

Designed to help people discover books , Google Print allows users to search across the full text of entire books. Sadly, as with Amazon’s own book search facility, users cannot read or download the entire book, but there are links to buy a copy. Printing and image copying is blocked on book pages returned from searches. So you don’t read an entire book for free by doing multiple searches on the same title, Google keeps a watch on the number of pages you’ve viewed from a particular book – though this is not associated with user information, so no one can tell what books you’re looking at online.

Google is encouraging publishers to send copies of their books to Google for scanning and indexing, free of charge – the company hopes that it will make revenue from advertising on the search pages, and from the links to online book sellers. Currently, McGraw-Hill, Scholastic and Penguin are amongst the first publishers to submit titles for inclusion in Google’s new venture.

Handy if you’re looking for something that might be contained in a book that’s in print, but what about the many thousands of books that are out of print? There’s no incentive for publishers to put books they don’t intend to reprint online, as there’s no physical book to sell through Amazon or Barnes and Noble. Making out of print titles available electronically for a fee really would be a step towards making the world’s information universally accessible as they account for millions of pages of text that is currently hidden from any search engine.

Try Google Print

Yahoo have been fine-tuning their portal and search offering of late, as part of an effort to fend off new rivals and reduce the gap with Google. Their new wheeze is personalised searching – allowing users to save results that they find most useful, attach notes to saved searches and share results with other users via email. Yahoo promise not to harvest submitted email addresses for marketing purposes.

Saving search results is quite handy, but then if I’m impressed by a page I generally bookmark it anyway, making the save feature less useful. Being able to attach notes to results makes the feature more relevant, but then again being able to export the notes and results to a word processor would make it even better.

Saved pages go to a MyWeb section in Yahoo, with details on how pages were found in the first place. Users can categorise results to make navigation easier, but as it stands this is just like a slightly more useful version of bookmarking pages. Pages and results that you don’t want can be blocked from future searches, making whittling down answers much easier.

Links and notes can be shared from MyWeb, though I feel that Yahoo have missed a trick – I would like to see what searches and pages other Yahoo users have stored, and would like to share my information with them – almost like Apple’s iMix feature in their music store. As it stands, I can only email links to people I know and can’t publish my search for other people to use. How much time would you save if you could consult someone else’s tailored search, complete with notes?

Yahoo’s MySearch

Search engine company Vivisimo have launched the beta of their new Clusty search engine, and it’s open to the public to try out.

Clusty’s main selling point is that it clusters results into separate categories, hopefully making it easier for users to sift through searches that return hundreds, or hundreds of thousands, of results. For example, a search run today for Kubrick returned 182 initial results – but Clusty split those for me into ten categories, including Film-maker, Space Odyssey and DVD. More categories were available if I wanted them, and could be applied to the entire 200,000+ results returned.

Vivisimo have gone for the current fashion of a simple, uncluttered search page, though there is something about it that says “Ask Jeeves” to me. The search box itself has a a row of tabs across the top, allowing users to search for different formats of information, including News, Images, Shopping and, a new one, Gossip.

As search engine catalogues get bigger and, inevitably, more the same, the big brand search engines need to provide a unique benefit or reason for people to stay loyal. Hence the recent introduction of new features such thumbnail views of web pages, multimedia searching and new ways of navigating the millions of results returned. Whilst Clusty acquires its search results themselves from a number of other engines, Vivisimo’s clustering technology is proprietary and is fully automated – no maintenance is required and the company claims that it can cluster any type of textual information with little or no customisation.

The clustering feature is interesting – but is it really enough to distinguish it from Google? And without patenting the concept, what’s to stop Google from developing its own clustering technology and staying out in front? Or just licensing it? However, Raul Valdes-Perez, CEO of Vivisimo is sure it’s enough to win them new fans.

“The success of today’s search technology has left users awash in information,” he said, “The net result is that users cannot or will not wade through all of the options a search engine offers up. The fast and friendly Clusty.com puts users back in control and ensures that they truly know the full extent of resources that are available to them in the vast online world. Clusty also helps them zero in on what they were looking for and, often, leads them to discover new things along the way.”

Try Clusty for yourself

Yahoo’s homepage has become rather busy of late – in fact the number of sections, links and buttons to click has made it almost as impenetrable as Jacob Neilsen’s own Useit page. The search engine trend, even since Google appeared, has been to make user interfaces simpler – after all, what chance do you have of finding something on the internet if you can’t even find something on the search engine’s home page?

MSN Search has recently had a make over, Google still gets praise for the simplicity of their default home page, so it was time for Yahoo to do something. Visitors to Yahoo get swamped in a choice links and paths – the old-style Yahoo home page currently harbours more than 210 links, making locating tools and information frustrating for the novice user.

Enter the new, simplified Yahoo home page. Whilst not quite the radical culling of links that was needed, the page is much more organised. Links and other things to click are kept at a modest 150 or so (still 100 too many in my opinion), but categorisation is much better.

The new page has been tightened up, with better use of space and font sizes, also separate sections are finally delineated by lines and coloured boxes. The new design makes prominent use of MyYahoo – a personalisation function designed to let visitors further tailor the home page to their needs with localised weather and even, for those of a gullible nature, horoscopes.

Surprise – there’s a music button! Though this just takes the user through to launch.yahoo.com, offering videos and music news. No music store as yet, though you can buy CDs and ringtones. Since Yahoo just forked out US$160 million (€130 million) for MusicMatch, expect this to change soon.

Try the new Yahoo