ResearchBuzz

Sunmee Huh took a Google Custom Search engine and tweaked it to make it more ergonomic for older users and a little less confusing to novice searchers. The result is called Good50 and it’s available at http://www.good50.com. While it’s not quite perfect — some of the functionality doesn’t work for me — it’s a good start.

Good50 was designed to be help users who might have eye fatigue and strain while searching. You can see that from the home page, which has both a logo and a search box that might be considered larger than usual. Good50’s search results are Safesearch-enabled, so adult-oriented search results will theoretically not show up on Good50 (I don’t trust machine filtering completely.) Search results are set so that sponsored ads are only on the right (instead of on the right and on top) and there’s a setting on the top so you can enlarge search results to up to 200% of the default size.

… at least that’s what supposed to happen. It didn’t work for me so I contacted Ms. Huh, who said that this setting only works with Internet Explorer (yuck!) She did say that she’s going to get it working with Firefox.

If you want to search something besides the regular Web you might want to check out the “Shopping” tag, which applies the same large-font features to a search of over 700 shopping/brand sites.

Of course this site is of limited use as long as you can only enlarge the font with Internet Explorer and not Firefox, but when that’s fixed I do know a few people with whom I’m going to share Good50. How about some additional tools that will assist in making pages more readable? It’s great to be able to get a large page of search results, but then you still might be confronted with a Web site that has a black background, white text, and a six-point font…

Google announced last week that its social search experiment, which it opened up for limited use last year, is now more widely available. You can read the initial October 2009 announcement at http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/introducing-google-social-search-i.html and get more details on social search at http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=165228.

Google’s Social Search features are basically built around what Google considers to be your “social circle.” Your social circle includes both your Google contacts and their friends, as well as contacts you have through your Google Profile (assuming you have a Google Profile.) The Social Search feature basically means that your the content of materials that your friends publish in their Google Profiles becomes another category of search result.

So you do a search for, say, search engines. You’ll get Web results, news results… and over halfway down your page you’ll get results from your social circle under a heading marked “Results from people in your social circle for search engines” That heading is clickable so you can get all the results on the same page. The results include an image of your social circle contact’s avatar in case their name isn’t ringing a bell.

I did several searches for various, mostly tech topics and didn’t see a lot of content from my social circle people. I did notice that I had to get fairly general in my searches to get results from my social circle, something that I don’t like to do. I played with this for a little while and didn’t get many results, and didn’t see a lot that will help me or enhance my search results. However, it did make me think of something I would want.

Say there was a way to tag people, in or out of your social circle, as particularly good at a certain topic. For example, I might want to tag Dori Smith as good at JavaScript, or Jeff Barr good at Amazon cloud computing. As more people tagged individuals, their prominence would rise. I could then specify that I want my search to take the context of a certain topic, and the results would weigh heavily in the favor of people who have been tagged as having useful, reputable sites. A search for Javascript tutorial might put Dori’s results up at the top, while mechanical turk might push Jeff Barr’s.

I have wonderful people in my social circle but they don’t know about everything I’d want to search for. If there were some way to crowdsource expertise of people or institutions, then I’d love to see that. I’d probably get a lot more use out of it. As it is, the social search idea is neat, but I don’t think it’s going to turn up a lot in my search results.

It’s not as nifty as a cell phone, or as amazing as street views of businesses all over the world, but to me it is big news — really big news. Google announced yesterday
that Google Reader can now be used to monitor pages for Web changes — whether they have RSS feeds or not.

Ten years after I started using RSS, it’s pretty prevalent but not universal. Google’s announcement means it’s going to be a lot easier to follow those random pages that don’t have RSS feeds for update information.

Are you already using the Google Reader for RSS feeds? Adding non-RSS content is easy. Just click on the “Add a Subscription” button and you’ll get a form into which you can paste an RSS feed URL or a regular HTML page URL. Google will ask you to confirm that you would like to create a feed to monitor based on that page.

Now, HTML pages are not RSS feeds. Their information is harder to isolate and delineate. So while the idea is that Google is going to “provide short snippets of page changes,” it’s not clear what those snippets are going to look like. Is going going to get hung up on a date change or counter change? (This has been a problem in the past with software like WebSite Watcher.) Are the snippets going to be meaningful?

I’ve added some pages to Google Reader and will revisit them in a week or so to see what kind of snippets I’m getting as results.