The importance of being search-savvy
TOM PULLAR-STRECKER
Relevant offers
Digital living
Ten years ago, lots of training establishments had a lucrative sideline running courses for executives and politicians, teaching them how to use search engines such as Google.
Generation Y may laugh, but then-ACT New Zealand MP Stephen Franks and a dozen party staffers were among those to trudge up the Kelburn hill to attend a course that was still offered by Victoria University last year.
Google researcher Dan Russell spends his time watching how people use the search engine, so he can give insights to its engineers. He says while such courses may seem amusing, "people by and largely overestimate their skill level", and almost everyone could still learn a trick or two.
Mr Russell does about 70 "field observations" of people using Google each year. He says about 90 per cent of Americans do not know they can key "control-F" on their computer to find a word on a page. "It's a frighteningly high number."
Few people have fully explored the menu that appears on the left- hand side of computer screens when Google returns search results, he says.
These options let searchers refine their results, for example by returning only results for webpages that have appeared in the past day or year, refer to events at specific times in history which users can specify, relate to New Zealand, or have images attached.
It was widely reported that Google made about 550 refinements to its search engine last year, but Mr Russell says the number was probably closer to 1000, and if anything, the pace of change is likely to accelerate this year.
Some of the changes, such as weighting search-engine results according to the speed with which webpages load, can have quite significant implications for the internet industry, but the vast majority are minor tweaks that would go unnoticed and unreported.
Given the amount of time that people spend searching the internet, he recommends regular users subscribe to a major search engine blog, such as his own, to keep abreast of developments.
"If you are going to be a good searcher, you have to know what is coming and what is possible, because problems that are impossible one week become trivial the next. It is not enough for someone to learn how to search in the ninth grade and never update that knowledge."
Google has an estimated 65 per cent share of the search market in the United States and a higher share in New Zealand, but faces competition from Microsoft's Bing, following its partnership with Yahoo.
A big focus for Google this year will be to further speed up its delivery of search results and to improve its detection of spam webpages, Mr Russell says. "If we can decrease even by one-tenth of a second the amount of a time it takes, that is a huge influence."
He is unsure whether that will necessitate Google building a datacentre in New Zealand or Australia, but acknowledges it needs to provide datacentres in each of the "major" regions.
"We have to find a way to balance our datacentre size, with the speed of delivery, with the amount of time it takes to get the interpretation of the query for your particular region and language group."
Google Tips: Keep search terms simple, avoiding unnecessary words, or try just typing in your question.
Key in "control-F" to search for a term on a page.
Use the "advanced search" feature to search for an exact phrase, or a term within a specific website.
Explore the lefthand panel on the search results page.
Go to "settings" to turn off the "autocomplete" query predictions in the search box, which try to guess your search term before you have finished typing it, or to change the number of search results shown on a page.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/digital-living/4573513/Being-search-savvy
No comments:
Post a Comment