I hate bookmarks. I really do. I always find way more things to bookmark than I can possibly keep organized. And though I will bookmark things (you kind of have to after a while) I despair out of getting any proper use out of what I’ve saved.
Google, last week, announced a compromise between creating lots of bookmarks and saying the heck with it. Now, searchers can mark interesting search results with a star. And the starred results will show up at the top of your search results the next time you do a search that leads to those pages.
Sadly, I did not get to test this myself. Google announced the new feature on March 3, but as I’m writing this a few days later the new feature has not yet rolled out to me. It will be available for all logged-in users eventually, though, so I’ll keep looking.
In the meantime you can see how it works with Google’s blog post. Search results and maps will have stars. Click the stars and the next time you do a search result that you’ve starred, it’ll show up again at the top of your results. Clear enough. The items you star will also sync with your Google Bookmarks and the Google Toolbar.
I like this level of favoriting results as I don’t have to try to keep anything organized. Furthermore I like it better than Google’s SearchWiki, which it is replacing, as I didn’t like the idea of reorganizing Google’s regular search results. With this the starred results are separated out at the top, and it’s easier to see what’s going on.
But there was one very important question I didn’t see answered in Google’s announcement, and I don’t think it’s a question that it’ll answer. Will starring search results change a Web site’s pagerank, or whatever Google is calling it now? If one person stars a page I doubt that will make a difference, but how about if ten thousand people do? Will it change? What if ten thousand people star and page and then suddenly a tenth of them unstar it?
I think I was about five years off. Several years ago I was thinking about the potential for location-based searching, and I thought it would be a big deal Real Soon Now. But it’s only really taken off in the last couple of years, and it’s only now that Google’s overtly introducing it into the main Web search. Remind me not to try to time any stock purchases.
Anyway, Google announced Friday morning that there’s now an option to refine your searches by location. But you’ll have to make sure your “Show Options” nav is open, or you’re gonna miss it.
I did a Google search for pizza then opened the Show Options nav on the left. All results included “Social” and “Nearby” links, and opening the Nearby link refreshed the search results so they did, indeed, show pizza places near my location. And most of them were actual business Web pages, with only a couple of directory results (one from Yellow Pages, one from Yahoo.) In the middle of the results is a large Google Map with a list of businesses picked out by the usual red pin markers.
There were also options to change the location or change the scope of the locality (either city, region, or state, and it defaults to region.) I changed the region to Boston (except why would I eat pizza in Boston when all that awesome seafood is available?) and got an instantly-refreshed list of results.
Combining this search filter with other ones was kind of hit and miss. I was certainly able to combine this local search to limit it to only pages I had visited before. On the other hand when I tried to get the latest results for pizza in Boston it seemed to fail, as did an effort to limit my results to a certain kind of content.
When I’m looking for local business information on Google I’ll usually start with a Google Maps search and then use the information gleaned from that search to expand into regular Web searching. This handy search filter is going to let me skip a step.
Rafe Needleman had an article on CNET about a new search engine, Buzzzy (note the three z’s), which searches Google Buzz. But it searches other sources, too, and divides them out in interesting ways.
Buzzzy lives at http://buzzzy.com/ with a simple keyword search on its front page. I did a search for Toyota.
You might notice from the first results that Buzzzy is denoting different content sources. Take a look at the left nav; you’ll see links to get results from places familiar like Friendfeed, Twitter, and Google Reader, and places less familiar (at least to me) like AutoSavant.
There are also some timeline options, as well as the ability to limit your results to certain types of media or to links only. For example, I can do a search for Toyota, specify Twitter as a search, and then limit my results further to just links. And even better than that, you can get the results as an RSS feed.
I’m still not deeply into Google Buzz but I like how Buzzzy lets you divide up and filter the results. Worth a look.
