ResearchBuzz

Catching up .. Google has launched the ability to do businesses searches via voice with just a phone call. You can get a writeup of how it’s done at http://labs.google.com/goog411/ , but this is more about phone numbers than Web sites.

And the phone number to know is 1-800-466-4411 . Dial that number and first you’ll get the message that the call is being recorded. Um, okay. After that you’ll get a notice of “Goog 411 Experimental.” A nice male droid will ask you for the city and state, and then the category or business that you’re looking for. I gave it a city and state, and then, hoping to mess with it, gave the word “Thai.” Googdroid correctly started reading off Thai restaurants. As it reads results, you can use voice commands to choose certain listings. Sometimes the droid seems to have a bit of a hearing problem. As it ran down a list, I decided I wanted number five. It took several times of me repeating, “Number five… NUMBER FIVE!” to get the point across.

For each listing you can get additional details. You can also tell Googdroid “Text message” and it’ll text your phone with a business name, phone number, and address. (When I tested this I got the text messages just seconds after disconnecting.) One thing to note: Googdroid is extremely eager — in my opinion too eager — to connect your call. Sometimes all you want is the phone number, but he’s always ready with, “I’ll connect you.” I had to hang up on him when I wanted just the phone number.

This number’s going in my phone’s address book. I’m very thrilled with the number of free ways you can do business lookups now. Take that, 99 cent 411 calls!

Amazon has been adding community-type features to its Web site for a long time, as one can see from its product pages — users can add tags to products, start discussions, and even add information to a product wiki. Now however Amazon is offering a catalog-wide wiki called Amapedia. It’s not called a wiki, but it’s sure what it looks like to me. Amapedia’s in beta at http://amapedia.amazon.com/ . Upon further inspection it looks like an aggregation of all the wiki’d products from the main Amazon Web site.

The front page doesn’t mention “wiki”, it mentions community. And it has an example article and a tag cloud for you to browse through as well as a simple keyword search. Active big tags at the moment include things like camera, fictional character, and strategy game. I did a simple keyword search for licorice, which gave me a list of products from Amazon’s site. None of them had articles. From each item in the search results you could create an article yourself or “watch” for the article. You’ll have to be logged in to be able to watch for the article.

You used to be able to get keyword alerts from Amazon when products matching those keywords became available. It was a lovely idea and then it was pulled. So lemme get this straight. You can get alerts for an article about a product but no longer for a product itself, right? Grrrr…Unfortunately you can’t just do a search for a keyword and then watch that keyword; searches that don’t match a product or article give you only the option to create an article. (My search for tapdancing butterball gave me only the option to create an article. Amusingly, the first real product result for that search was the DVD of Gone With the Wind.)

Back to regular search. A search for Harry Potter brought several results of items that did have articles, both books, video games, and one parody. Though the pages had Amazon product shots and what I’ve come to think of as “Amazon tabs”, every page has both a link to its history and a link to edit. Looks like a wiki to me. Unfortunately most of the articles I looked at just had a tab of product information and a product shot. (The parody article was extensive.)

In addition to the tag cloud searching and the simple keyword search, there’s an advanced search that allows you to do a general search (like DVD or game) and get a series of filters you can apply. For example if you did a search for dvd you might get filters allowing you to narrow down your search to cartoons or TV shows. The Amapedia also has a “random article” function, which I found was the best way to get populated article pages and examples of what people were using Amapedia for (product descriptions and reviews, manuals, and occasionally scholarly discussion of an author/subject.)

Like the watch feature. Like the idea of a wiki for Amazon’s products, but it needs populating!

I find that searching for product names and model numbers on a general Web search engine can sometimes be useful. But I also find that it can bring up a lot of comparison shopping sites and affiliate plays that are not useful to my research. Give Me Back My Google, at http://www.givemebackmygoogle.com/ (Here’s hoping they don’t get C&D’d) is an attempt to eliminate those kinds of search results.

I went to the regular Google and did a search for “Coolpix S7c”. I got about 676,000 results. Most of the results on the front page were either from Nikon or they were review sites. Some of them looked iffy. I did the same search on GMBMG. I got over 100,000 less results, and only one or two iffy results on the front page. Looking at the search result page it’s pretty clear what’s happening — some serious use of inurl: syntax to eliminate results. Nice!

If I did a search for “Coolpix S7c” price the results were more dramatic. That search gets about 175K results on Google, while on GMBMG it gets only about 150K. Unfortunately it didn’t eliminate all shopping results — shop.cnet.com was very high on the search results list.

This is an interesting idea, and I’d like to do further experimenting where I searched for several product models at a time — I’ll sometimes do that when I’m looking for product roundups and end up finding too many shopping comparison sites.

I’m also wondering if something like this might be more effective if it was including instead of excluding — specifying large databases of reviews, maybe product archives. Perhaps a framed site that shows results from the regular Google Web search and the Google News archives at the same time?