Google Rolls Out A New Look

It's apparently spring cleaning time over at the GooglePlex, and they have a lovely new front page and search results to show for it. As you'll see on their front page, they now list Froogle as one of their search tabs. (Visit the front page of Froogle for giggles; it includes a set of "A few of the items recently found with Froogle" which is as lovely a stream of consumerism consciousness as I've ever seen. The tiara! The potato peeler! The mullet wig! Hit refresh and you'll get a new set of items.)

They've also changed some other pages, too. The result page has a slightly cleaner look, with links to definitions on the far right instead of closer to under the query box. The Google Services page is now this thing filled with icons that -- sorry, Google -- I really hate. It looks like one of those push and listen kid's books. "The penguin goes trrrrrrllllllt!" Actually in this case the penguin is representing Google's special services, which also includes a Microsoft search. Therefore I suspect the penguin is actually going pppllllllbbbbbt.

And, as I'm sure you've heard, Google's also offering two new services. There's the Web Alerts, and the Personalization service. Unfortunately the first one shocked me -- in a bad way -- and the second one befuddled me until I figured out it didn't like Opera. It wasn't fun today playing on the Google Playground.

If you're using the news alerts, then the Web alerts ( http://www.google.com/webalerts ) are not going to look unfamiliar to you. You enter a query, specify how often you want updates (once a week or once a day) and specify your e-mail address. Google will monitor the top ten news searches and the top twenty Web searches, and e-mail you when new materials match your search query.

What's shocking to me about this is not the search itself. This is a solid tool. What is shocking to me is that all it is is a solid tool.

Google Alert ( http://www.googlealert.com ) has been offering the same service for something over a year now, and, assuming they can use the daterange: syntax to pull from the same pool of search results that Web alert is using, they're **doing it much better.** Google Alert lets you get your results as RSS feeds or even TrackBack pings. You can search deeper than twenty results. You can filter for capitalization and punctuation. And you can view your archived results. The premium, for pay, service will have even more features (which I'm not going to mention here because I don't know if they're public knowledge yet.)

The people at Google are some of the brainiest, most creative, most chuzpahtic (and I mean that in a nice way) people
doing search technology in the known universe. I would have expected their Web alert service to launch with a bang, implode all
my neurons, and make me forget Google Alert even existed. But they didn't, and they haven't even given me a real reason to switch.

Let's talk about Google Personalized Search, at http://labs.google.com/personalized/ . I couldn't get this to work in Opera but it works fine in IE. What Google asks you to do is specify some preferences via a subject hierarchy listing. Once you do this and run a search, a "Slider" will appear to allow you to adjust your settings, from minimally (not at all) personalized to max personalized.

I went into the profile, checked Hardware, Internet, and Open Source, and searched for perl. Then I turned the slider all the way up. Most of what I got was relevant, but strangely the first page of results also included a couple of whois forms. I didn't quite get that. Search for a term irrelevant to the categories -- football, for example -- and the results are all over the place. I like this idea. I would like to see a set of sliders, allowing you to not only weigh your results by algorithim categories but also by location (should results from Asia sites weigh more?), by site origin (educational,
military, government sites), by query location (title, URL, etc.?) and so on.

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