Live Search gains in simplicity over Google Search

The Live Search design team has been playing around with a new interface for both the main Live Search page and the Live Search results page, and I must say that they're not doing a bad job. While Google always primed over MSN (now Live) and Yahoo in terms of a simple interface, I must say that Live Search is better - at least from this point of view. See below a comparison between the main Google Search interface and the Live Search interface:

I told you, while the Live Search page shows you only the search box and a link here and there way at the top (or bottom) of the main page, Google Search shows way too many links closer to the search box giving you the impression of a crowded place. As for the search results page, Live Search wins again:

Live Search results page

Google Search results page

While the Live Search page is still undergoing design changes (sometimes you can see a Change setting checkbox) I must say that I like the direction they're going. Unlike Google that seems to want to make you use iGoogle more than the main search page, Live Search chooses simplicity.

Google News offers related news searches

When searching for a keyword in Google News you'll see (if you scroll all the way down) a list of related news searches. This is a new feature that will suggest other search terms based on some automated algorithms, making sometimes connections between specific stories. Example, searching for guns will show the following related searches:

This related news searches feature also shows connections where you wouldn't think there would be any. For instance one of the suggested related searches for guns is OJ Simpson - because he was accused of robbery with a firearm - so Google News already made a connection between guns and the robbery. Plus, Las Vegas hotel is mentioned there too, because that's where the assumed robbery took place. Smart isn't it.

Doing another search for Obama, Google News shows these related searches:

The related searches seem somehow normal, however only 2 of the six related searches actually contain the keyword Obama. I know that people searching for Obama are interested in news about Hillary and McCain, but why do these related searches on the Google News page are so different from those displayed on the normal Google Search page (see image below)?

On the normal Google Search page the related searches are actually popular keywords but closely related to the original keyword you used - however on the Google News page the related searches are keywords that are somehow related with the original keyword, but popular in the Google News search.
Here's an example, when doing a Google Search for Obama you see Obama Muslim as a related search. When doing a Google News search for Obama you don't see Obama Muslim as a related news search, mainly because the other related news searches are more popular than this one. So on Google News related searches primes the popularity in the News section, while on Google Search primes the connection with your original keyword.

GoogleDNA, a new service that indexes DNA?

A recent BusinessWeek article talks about the investments Google started making into genetic screening.
The facts:

• In 2007 Google invested $4.4 million (BusinessWeek.com, 11/29/07) in a genetic screening company called 23andMe. The company was started by Anne Wojcicki (wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin), and her business partner. 23andMe, for a price of $1000 will "help you read and understand your DNA. After providing a saliva sample using an at-home kit, you can use our interactive tools to shed new light on your distant ancestors, your close family and most of all, yourself." So they're taking the fun approach of the DNA analysis, that of getting to know your ancestors.
• Google recently invested (amount not disclosed) in Navigenics too, a company that takes a different approach for DNA testing. You send them a sample of your saliva and they will test it against several possible diseases and send you results that you can share with your physician to see what caution measures could be taken.


• While their investment in these companies is declared to be purely financial, a Google spokesman told that they wanted to invest in these companies because they have a common mission statement with Google's, which is to organize world's information and to make it universally accessible. So, through DNA analysis there will be a lot of information gathered, which seems would fit into the "organizing and sharing" mission statement.

You can read the article for full details, but the basic idea remains: Google started to show interest into the DNA analysis/organizing/sharing field. I wonder what will Microsoft do, because for sure they're not going to be left out of an expanding industry.

Google Search insight from Udi Manber

Udi Manber is a VP of Engineering at Google. Started as a professor at the University of Arizona, after that he was senior VP at Amazon and before he started to work for Google he was Yahoo's chief scientist. Popular Mechanics asked him in an interview 20 questions regarding Google Web Search (how it works, future improvement plans), so if you want to know a little more about how search works and what plans they've got it's a worthy reading. I've extracted below some of the affirmations I consider more interesting from this inteview:

• "Last year the Google research team did over 450 improvements" to the Google Web Search algorithm. Impressive, though by improvements I'm not sure if they mean bug fixes too or simply optimizations they did to make search better.
• "We make the decisions solely based on how good it is for search, how good it is for users not how this affects ads". Pretty self-explanatory, he was asked if when proposing new features or optimizations for the web search algorithm they take into account what impact this will have on the ad revenue - obviously not.
• "At Google we do not manually change results". This is one interesting affirmation, given when asked if they interfere manually on the search results - they don't, every change they make they do it on the overall algorithm rather than handling the exceptions manually (except, of course, in some cases when they deal with spammy websites).
• "The results we show you are based not only on what we know of the Web, but also what other people have searched for". This is interesting too, at least for website owners. It's not clear if he refers specifically to the suggestions Google does via the OneBox results (the Related Searches he mentions in the interview), or if he says that Google will rank certain results better just because those specific results were what other users (searching for similar keywords) were looking for. For instance, you do a search for photofiddle and you click on the second page in the search results, than a different user does the same thing, and another and so on - his affirmation might be interpreted that when a new user will search for photofiddle, Google will show on the first position the result that had the best click-through rate.
• "I can imagine if you give us permission to [fold the context of your social network into search results], and we find that that’s useful for some queries". Showing search results in Google not only from the regular web search index and based on your web history, but also from your other stored information in different social networks (myspace, facebook, digg, delicious)
• One of his favorite features recently introduced in Google Translate is CLIR. How this works: you enter a word in English for instance, and select as an output search Spanish. What Google will do is translate your query into Spanish, search for that translated Spanish word, and return the results to you translated back into English (with the possibility to see the Spanish results too). Currently supported languages: Arabic, Chinese (Traditional, Simplified), Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish

As mentioned above, it's an interesting read, so if you have some time and willing to learn more about Google, take a look here: 20 (Rare) Questions for Google Search Guru Udi Manber