![]() ![]() ![]() I will reserve final judgement until I have used it more but after only 2 hours of experimentation I am already finding that some searches are dominated by results from Twitter, Google Reader and Flickr. The only way you can shut this off completely is to log out of your Google account. Remember, this is not just the direct connections that you have chosen to make but others who are connected to them and over which you have no control. I do not always want Google unilaterally deciding to add opinions from all and sundry in my network. I frequently use social media to search for information and advice but I much prefer to choose when and how to do it. Hover over this and it tell you how you are connected. Underneath the social search entry it will say something like “Joe Bloggs shared this on Twitter”. So if you are using and are logged into your Google account you will now start seeing results automatically from your social circle. Until now the Social option has been kept separate but Google has started integrating all of these results with the rest of your search starting with (see Official Google Blog: An update to Google Social Search In addition to your direct connections Google also searches the content of secondary connections that are publicly associated with your direct connections. This not only tells you which of your social networks Google is using but also lists who.Īny social networks that you have mentioned in, for example, your Blogger profile or your general Google profile such as Twitter will be included as will contacts in Google Reader, Google Buzz, Google Contacts and Picasa. Want to know who is in your social circle? Head straight to your Google dashboard at and scroll down to Social Circle. If you are using and open up the search options in the side bar to the left of your results there is a “Social” option that will do exactly the same thing. If you are logged in to a Google account it sometimes includes a box either at the bottom or in the middle of your search results page with a couple of “Results from people in your social circle”:Ĭlick on the link and it will show you more from your circle. Google has been including search results from your social circle for quite a while. Now move one of the ‘coots’ to the end of the strategy and Google asks “Did you mean lions mating behaviour coots”: ![]() The first is repeating coots at the start of the strategy. I have two final variations on our search to confuse you even further. Surely coyotes or goats would be nearer when it comes to typographical errors? What puzzles me, though, is how Google arrived at cats from coots. What probably happened with our search is, as Susanna said, that Google first assumed a typo and then did a synonym search on cats. Susanna’s next tweet suggests what is going on ( ): Perhaps there is a search frequency algorithm coming into play? Are there more searches for lions mating behaviour than for coots, but not lions feeding behaviour? I am not convinced that this explains Google’s insistence on looking for lions rather than our animal of choice. Susanna’s search strategy ‘coots feeding behaviour’, which came up with an exact match, muddied the waters even more. ![]() Moving coots from the beginning to the end of the strategy resulted in an exact match and not a single lion in sight:Ĭhanging the order of the search terms is a trick I often use to change the order of my results or bring up pages that might be buried in the hundreds or thousands, but I have never seen such a dramatic change such as this. I then had two comments in quick succession from Susanna Winter via Twitter The first is at ( ): I thought that was pushing synonyms too far even for Google. He suggested that Google was treating coots and lions as synonyms (both are living creatures). The first response to my posting was a comment from Arthur Weiss ( ). It has nothing to do with sporting activities unless you count trying to work out what Google is doing with your search! The original post was about how and why Google decided that a search on coots mating behaviour should really have been lions mating behaviour. If you have landed on this page thinking that this is a post about your favourite football or rugby team, please note that this is an update on my earlier article ‘Google decides that coots are really lions’ ( ). ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |