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The Google search engine
Google
- a look at this search engine
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Google is currently the most popular search engine, and is trusted more than any other search engine by web users to deliver the results they want. Because Google delivers huge amounts of traffic to any site which can get on to the first page of results for any given search term, it is the main target of spammers, and of black hat and white hat search engine optimizers - individuals or companies who promote web sites for a living. This means that in addition to ranking sites by relevance and delivering the best results possible, Google has to strip out thousands, possibly millions of 'middle man' or affiliate sites whose only purpose is to redirect the user to a commercial merchant site so that the affiliate can get a cut of any ensuing sale. In addition, the success of Google's Adsense program has meant that another class of 'spam' has arisen - sites whose only purpose is to display Adsense ads, with very little useful original content. Google's ranking algorithm is of course kept secret, but they have been increasingly successful at removing poor or low quality pages from their results listings. These are noticable 'cleaner' than other search engines can provide. Much more significant are their problems in keeping up with the indexing of the flood of new web sites which constantly appear, and webmasters complain that new, legitimate sites can take months to be spidered by Google. Despite these issues Google's popularity shows no signs of diminishing, and their dominance in the search engine world continues. It is also the only web property so far whose name has become a verb. So lets Google some words in their search engine.
1. Commercial product - digital cameras Google's layout for its search results consists of sponsored links at the top and right, clearly identified as ads. This layout is being imitated by other search engines. We think that a factor in the success of Google as a search engine is due to its uncluttered appearance - there usually are no graphics at all on their results pages apart from the Google logo itself. In addition, they are very successful in presenting useful information extracted from the target pages themselves, in their reuslts listings. They give a nice long section of the page's title in the listings, plus a double snippet from the target page, both of which display the keyword or keyphrase in context. This enables the user to judge quickly if a page is one they want to visit. For this particular search, digital cameras, the results were excellent, though there was a strong emphasis on general 'name' sites like cnet, wkipedia and howstuffworks.
2. Commercial product actual model - a product brand + model name We used the term Canon Powershot G7. This triggered the Google product search, and three merchants, with their prices for the camera, appeared at the top of the listings. The rest of the results consisted of reviews, blogs and sites with product information.
3. Commercial purchase - buy CDs The top online retailers were all featured at the top, but as in all other search engines the farther down you go in the listings (we looked at 100 results) the stranger the results become, with sites dedicated to particular artists or bands, 'We are unable to find iTunes on your computer' or 'Product is no longer available' snippets, music demo sites, irrelevant news articles from the BBC and Slashdot, and so on.
4. Entertainment - Naomi Campbell Google offered some of the latest news at the top of the listings, and the pure results themselves were fine.
5. Entertainment - games cheats Apart from the fact that the same site, ign.com appeared at both position 1 an position 6, the results were good.
6. Precise requirement - Berkeley sociology The required page was at the top of the listings, with a good subsidiary listing of faculty, staff, and the graduate program. This was the most useful result of all the search engines.
7. Precise requirement - Dublin Ireland hotel All the pure results here were useful, and the sponsored results were accurate.
8. Precise / Travel - New York London airfare All results were accurate and worth exploring.
9. Research - asthma information Here Google's automatic results refinement came into play, offering results for asthma treatment, symptoms, risk factors, tests, patient information and health professional information. No other search engine we tested was this sophisticated.
10. Research - Iraq maps Though Google has a prominent maps search option, we did what a naive user would do and simply typed the search terms into the normal search field. The search gave a good range of government, educational, military and news sites with Iraq maps in them, plus three thumbnails of likely maps from different sites. This was easily the best result of all search engines tested.
11. Searching - Dogpile.com The results featured the expected site at the top of the listings.
12. Searching - Ask Jeeves This gave us the site we wanted, but again we could have done without the eBay ad: "Looking for Ask Jeeves? Find exactly what you want today." This sort of moronic advertising pollutes all engines, not just Google though.
Summary: There is no doubt Google delivers superb search results. In addition, it has developed sophisticated touches which are all designed to improve the search experience for the user, such as results refinement. Google has many advanced search options with the usual features like file types, phrase searching, page update time, and 'similar site' matching. We tried this latter search with a very specialized web site as the matching target, and it worked well. But for most users the advanced search will not be necessary as the result matching for any basic search is so good. From our survey of the search engines, nothing really comes close to Google yet, unless you want more of a 'web portal' type experience as provided by Yahoo or MSN, or a more visual way of searching such as Snap. Our only quibble is with a factor which is not under Google's control: due to this search engine's success, other seem driven to copy its presentation and formatting to such an extent that most other search engines appear imitative of Google in an attempt to emulate it.
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