Just Search Labs Just Search Research and Development

Google Labs is an infrequently updated part of Google that showcases new or interesting things that Google are working on. One thing that was of interest to me recently was the Similar Images search feature. This will allow you to search for a term using the normal Google image search, but adds the option to click on a link next an image and view more images that look like this one. For example, lets say you wanted to search for images of London, you can click on images of the London Eye and see different images of the same thing. Here is the official video from Google.

I thought I would have a play with this feature and see what I could do with it. One thing I always have trouble finding is an image of a mouse cursor. When I am writing user manuals I like to have the cursor in the image so that the user can see where they are mean to click. So after a image search for cursor I found the following results.

Google Image Search For Cursor

I then clicked on the similar link for the 6th image along on the second row and got the following page.

Google Image Search Similar Images

As you can see the feature if nearly there. From this page of images quite a few are indeed cursors, but the majority are not at all like the original image. For some reason Google seems to like to display images of cupid for this particular search.

I had more success when I tried searching for logos, which I presume if because they look quite alike. Searching for the logos of Wordpress, BBC, and Microsoft gave some good results.

So the big question is Will this become part of the main image search? I think the answer is probably yes. There are a quite a few products and features developed over the years that have become live, such as Gmail and iGoogle, so I think that we could very well see this feature appearing on normal Google image search results. You can already view images by face and drawing type, so this is probably just another extension of this. I just hope they refine the image recognition before putting it live.

Philip Norton
Lead Developer, Research and Development

Last week I heard that Digg were going to launch a new way of displaying web pages to users and this week I experienced it first hand (I don't use Digg very much). So I thought I was take a quick look and see how it effects different people.

What is it?

The new feature is called DiggBar and this is what you will now see when you visit a link from Digg. As an example I thought I would click on the first link on the Digg home page and take a screenshot. Here is the DiggBar in action on The Man Who Used To Know Everything.

DiggBar In Action

The only problem I have is that the DiggBar is a little flaky in Google Chrome…

DiggBar In Action On Chrome

Oh dear.

The main effect of this DiggBar is that you are viewing the page through Digg via an iframe. The url for the above example is http://digg.com/d1o0tZ, which looks kind of like something tinyurl.com would produce.

Why?

I think this is an attempt by Digg to get more people to use the site. Digg is a popular site and that getting you link on the front page can garner hundreds, if not thousands of page hits, but I think that they would like more people actually using it as a voting service than a kind of news service.

StumbleUpon have done something very similar recently, but this is just for people who don't or can't install the toolbar.

StumbleUpon Bar

Digg have also included a "Random" button on the bar that imitates the way the Stumble! button works.

How will it effect my site?

Well there is where things get a little hasy. Some people have said that this will effectively kill off using Digg for any Internet marketing. The main reason stated is that the page that Digg creates includes a title tag that might out compete the original site for a competitive keyword. Here is the title tag from my previous example.

<title>The Man Who Used to Know Everything (24 Hour Comic)</title>

My only problem with this approach is that it will still generate traffic. Even if the Digg page ranks well for a keyword it will probably be found on the same search result list as the original. However, I have checked a few sites in the last few minutes and these DiggBar pages don't seem to be ranking, it is only the Digg category pages that are in the search results. The reason appears to be with the structure of the link. Here is the link from the above example as found on the Digg home page (minus some tags that aren't needed).

<a href="http://stereotypist.livejournal.com/92575.html" title="http://stereotypist.livejournal.com/92575.html" rel="d1o0tZ" class="offsite ct-entertainment" target="_blank" onclick="gotoLink('11919845', '23d5786701c0c8215688ef30cf05344b');">The Man Who Used to Know Everything (24 Hour Comic)</a>

So the original link goes directly to the site in question, it is only a JavaScript link that opens up the DiggBar. Turning off JavaScript stops the DiggBar from appearing.

The main problem with the DiggBar that I can see (aside from the inherent problems with using frames) is that even if you navigate away from the page in question you are still left with the original DiggBar content and URL. It doesn't change. This is quite poor in terms of usability and accessibility but there is a close button in the top right hand side that will allow you to close. In fact, if you look at it closely it seems to resemble the StumbleUpon bar quite a bit; I wonder if this is the future of social bookmarking sites?

Philip Norton
Lead Developer, Research and Development

A neat little addition that allows users to filter Google image searches by colour has been announced on the Google Operating System Blog.

To enable this you just need to add the parameter imgcolor to the URL and give it a colour as an option. There are currently 12 colours available, which are black, blue, brown, grey, green, orange, pink, purple, red, teal, white and yellow. So to search for red things just put this at the end of your Google image search URL.
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Philip Norton
Lead Developer, Research and Development

Google have been rolling out changes to the way in which search results are displayed. On many searches they are  questioning ambiguous searches with a did you mean:. While this is often helpful for those with poor speeling, such as myself, it has created a stir amongst the SEO community who find that their carefully honed methods for ranking are pushed further down the listings. The did you mean tries to second-guess  the user by adding results for the alternative query on top of the original search query. At present, it only seems to work when using google.com results.

However, as can be seen the additional search results take up two places. This is in addition to universal search which may add additional search results to the mix. The loss in traffic that can be considerable.  In the event that the did you mean search was correct then the top two results are are going to get all the  hits for mis-spellings. This will provide additional traffic for these top two results making them even more important. If the did you mean answer was wrong, it shouldn’t effect the result too much because the first two results are irrelevant. If you were type the query correctly, the results appear as normal.

Sir Pumpkin Longshanks
Programmer, Research and Development