Archive for the ‘Search Engines-Google’ Category.
14th June 2008, 01:37 pm
Google has announced on its official page that there’s a new version of Google Trends available. If you have a Google Account you can now download trend information in CSV format. Very cool.
You can trend multiple search terms. I was curious about a term that’s been bumping around my radar for the last couple of weeks — “hypermiling”. Hypermiling is using various techniques to get the maximum amount of fuel efficiency out of your vehicle — see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypermiler for details. I was curious to see if hypermiling was a recently coined word.
Searching for both words on Google Trends shows that the term hypermiling was being searched even a year ago, though activity on hypermiler is much more recent (and much less.) (The first Google News mention of the word hypermiling was August 2006.) However, when I went and looked at the 30-day graph of activity for these two words, absolutely no Google News articles were referenced. But there are about 112 Google News results at this moment for the keyword search hypermiling!
When I have used Google Trends before I appreciated how much it was tied into Google News, so I’m kind of surprised that there weren’t many references to Google News articles in this newer Google Trends. If you click on the All Dates link after doing a Google News search, you’ll get a graph across the top of the all results page — it would be nice if I could get that and a Google Trends graph on the same page.
22nd March 2008, 07:31 pm
Google recently announced that you can view all the comments that Google News is offering from expert sources. (There’s not too many so sometimes it’s hard to find them.)
That’s interesting, but what Google doesn’t mention is that it’s using the source: syntax to find the commentary. So using the query source:google_news will find you all the expert commentary.
.. aaaand you can use keywords to search for only particular comments. source:google_news “global warming” hips you to just those experts commenting on global warming (all two of them.) Since these are standard Google News searches, you can use the RSS and Atom links on the left to make RSS feeds for them. Useful, if you’re interested in tracking expert commentary.
19th March 2008, 07:39 pm
Okay, either Google has changed something or I have completely missed this in my several years of using the search engine.
Today I was searching Google for something — I started to put a phrase in quotes and changed my mind about halfway through typing. So I left the quote open. The query looked something like this:
“for better or for worse snowblower
(That might not be exact.)
Image my surprise when I didn’t get any results. I mean, I know it’s an odd query but I thought I’d get SOMETHING.
After a few experiments I noticed that Google was adding a close quote to the end of the entire query. (It looks like Google just goes all the way to the right of the open quote and adds a close quote.) The query
for better or for worse snowblower
Provided results. Not many, but some.
So if you get results that seem oddly limited, make sure you don’t have an open quote in your query somewhere.
