ResearchBuzz

Recently at work we whiled away a coffee break discussing the controversy over writing famous people’s obituaries in advance. While we were having the discussion Anna Nicole Smith came up. Not her name; nobody could remember her name. We were totally stumped. We knew she had passed away shortly after her son, but that’s all we could remember.

Eventually someone went to Google and typed:

that woman who died after her son died

… and Anna Nicole Smith in a CNN story was the second result, and had her Wikipedia page on the first page of results.

I was rather surprised. After all, I do a lot of talking about how people should get as specific as possible. And while the query above presents a couple of facts, it was very generic.

A few days later we were discussing the NFL combine. (I promise, we do get more interesting in our discussions. We had a very spirited argument on whether hosting the Olympics would bring “real capitalism” to China. But nothing funny happened.) I knew there was some kind of intelligence test that NFL players have to take, but I couldn’t remember what it was called. So I told Google:

that test NFL players have to take

… and it pointed me, in the first result, to the Wonderlic test, which is what I was trying to remember.

I thought about it for a while and then went back to Google. “You’re fine at telling me what I can barely remember,” I said to it, “But how are you at naming what I don’t even know?” And with that I busted out a whole bunch of basic-level people searches, wondering which person Google would first place in each of my generic geists.

That man who went to France — Major Clarence Fahnestock
That lady on TV — Mary Birdsong
That group which couldn’t wait — The NPD Group
That guy who quotes Shakespeare — Julian Harris
That guy who played football — Guy Chamberlin
The lady who counted sheep — The Lady of the Lake, OR Elbert Hubbard. Your call.

Of course, you can get too meta for Google. I tried that guy who did this thing this one time and got MySpace Videos by, you guessed it, “The Guy Who Did That Thing That One Time”.

I think I will stick to very specific searching. On the other hand, this is a fun way to get completely 8-ball on Google and see what it identifies with a generic phrase.

Hey! Check Amazon for books on Search Engines.

Zuula is a metasearch tool that I quite like. It’s available at http://www.zuula.com/. I noticed last week that there are a few new search options.

First Zuula has a new toolbar available. I’m not really into that, but if you are and want more details you can get ‘em at http://www.zuula.com/help/ZuulaToolbar.html. Zuula has also helpfully made code available if you want to put a Zuula search form on your own Web page.

Now for the improvements on the site itself. The blog search engine has a new search engine available; BlogDimension stood up pretty well to a sample test (“strawberry shortcake”) though now I’ve found several new cooking blogs to read AND I’m hungry.

There’s also a whole new search type on Zuula; video search now offers searching of video sites, including Google Video, YouTube, iFilm, MetaCafe, and DailyMotion. Zuula’s tabbed metasearch now includes Web Search, Images, Video, News, Blog Search, and Jobs.

When I think of search engines that cluster results, I don’t think of root vegetables. But I like Carrot. I like its clusters. Some of them make me laugh. You may like it too if you try it; it’s at http://demo.carrot2.org/demo-stable/main . (Carrot.org is apparently some anti-spam thing that’s launching in January 2008.)

Clustering search engines, if you don’t remember, gather search engine results into different topics instead of providing them in one huge pile. Searching for chips, for example, might give you topics for chocolate chips, poker chips, computer chips, wood chips, etc.

I searched Carrot for carrot. I got the expected Carrot Cake and Carrot Juice, but also results for Carrot Museum and Carrot Top Records, which is apparently a record label in Chicago. Only 98 results were returned, as Carrot appears to metasearch five search engines and provide the top 20 results from each. A third tab shows you the sources from Carrot’s search, and an additional tab shows the site suffixes that the results are coming from. My carrot search grabbed a surprising number of results from .uk and .gov.

I did find some of Carrot’s clusterings not particularly useful; “Easy” and “News” aren’t much in the way of topics. Carrot however does offer different clustering options. Click on the “Show Search Options” and you’ll get a dropdown menu with six different ways to cluster your search results. “Lingo” appears to be the default, but I liked STC as an option as well (it’s the last item on the drop-down menu.)

Are you less interested in HOW Carrot is clustering than WHAT it’s clustering? In addition to Web searches, Carrot also clusters Yahoo News search, Wikipedia, and PubMed, among others. I am intrigued by the ability to try different clusterings on the fly; I’m going to use this site again.