Moogle

In Google Hacks we take a couple of separate looks at how a regular Google search for can be customized to do specific types of searching. GooCookin', which searches for recipes, is a good example of this type of hack. However, there's no need to stop at the main Google search engine when it comes to customizing a search box.

For Moogle, we're going to customize a Google News search interface to find movie reviews, using a bit of specialized vocabulary. We'll add a couple of modifier options whether we want to tip the review toward positive or negative results. And just to make this page as useful as possible we'll toss in a customized general Web search form to find movie and actor information from a variety of sites.

Movie Review Moogle -- Reviews on Google News

Please enter the name of a movie:

Do you want a movie slant?

No Thanks
Negative Review
Positive Review

Moogle!

In Google Hacks we take a couple of separate looks at how a regular Google search for can be customized to do specific types of searching. GooCookin', which searches for recipes, is a good example of this type of hack. However, there's no need to stop at the main Google search engine when it comes to customizing a search box.

For Moogle, we're going to customize a Google News search interface to find movie reviews, using a bit of specialized vocabulary. We'll add a couple of modifier options whether we want to tip the review toward positive or negative results. And just to make this page as useful as possible we'll toss in a customized general Web search form to find movie and actor information from a variety of sites.

Movie Reviews From Google News

When you set up a form to find customized information, you've got to do it one of two ways. You've either got to restrict the search to large collections of data (using the site: syntax, for example), or you've got to use specialized vocabulary to tilt the results towards the kind of content you want. For finding movie reviews we're going to use specialized vocabulary.

As with Google's Web search, the Google News search is restricted to ten query words. So we can't just throw all the words we can think of at the search engine. Thankfully, a nice three-word modifier brings up a lot of movie reviews:

(review (film | movie))

The parentheses group the words together, and the | symbol acts as an OR. So what this modifier is saying is "find the word review and either the word "film" or "movie" in the pages that are returned." This is not perfect, but it does cut down a search for "Daredevil" from over 1,300 results at this writing to just under 70.

All very well and good. But what if we want to find a particular kind of review? A review, perhaps, that is less than enamored of the movie? This is a little harder to do. Movie critics all have unique vocabularies that they enjoy deploying when it comes to beating up on a film. After reading a lot of reviews I picked out three words that were pretty negative but weren't so unique that they might show up only occasionally.

(boring | insipid | worst)

This query specifies that one of those words must be found in the search. "Worst" is kind of iffy -- a reviewer might have the worst popcorn ever or sit behind someone with the worst hairstyle on the planet, but we'll let it set for now.

Superlatives are a little bit easier. Here's a sample of three that we can use to see how they narrow down our search results.

(inspiring | oscar | "best film")

This isn't perfect -- you may find your own superlatives that work better -- but when you're confronted with zillions of movie reviews, adding a slant can narrow them down a lot.

Movie and Actor Information from Google

Google News only maintains about a months' worth of news at a time, so unless you're searching for fairly recent movies, you're not going to have much luck. And in addition, sometimes you want to know more about a movie than some reviews. Maybe you want to find out what year a movie came out, or get information on an actor.

With that in mind this page also includes a quick custom interface for the Google general search engine. There are two search options. The first one is for general information about movies and actors, using a few of the movie data collections online. The second one is for movie reviews, using the always-lovely RottenTomatoes.com and a couple of other review sites.

Posted in the following categories: Google Hacks | TrackBack
Take this title and: Google It | Yahoo It | Teoma It | Gigablast It | Amazon It