Example searches (song):
Sample in a Jar,
Waiting for the World to Change,
When Doves Cry,
All I Want for Christmas is You,
Walking on SunshineExample searches (album):
Dark Side of the Moon,
Achtung Baby,
Aqualung,
Evil UrgesExample searches (lyrics):
gonna be a good night tonight,
can feel the hand of fate,
lucky we're in love in every way,
take away this ball and chainSocial SearchOn Monday, we introduced
Social Search on Google Labs and Google Experimental. Social Search finds relevant content that your social circle has published and returns that content with your web search results. What defines your social circle? To use Social Search, you need to be logged in to your Google Account and opted in to the Social Search experiment. We then analyze your Gmail contacts (if you have a Gmail account) and the connections on your social networks (if you have a Google Profile and have listed public social networks like Twitter and FriendFeed). What kind of results do we find? Our Social Search results include blogs, photo albums, web pages, and reviews. This way, you not only seeing the most relevant content on the web globally, but you also see the content most relevant and personal to you.
To try Google Social Search, go to Google Experimental and click the "Join the experiment" button pertaining to social search. Then try searching on Google for something your friends may have written about. Example searches like 'restaurant' or 'vacation' tend to occur in people's personal writings. Social Search results always occur at the bottom of the page, so scroll to the end of the page to see these results. You can also trigger Social Search results explicitly by opening the Search Options panel and clicking on 'Social'. This will cause all of your results to be from your social circle.
Similar Images on Image SearchIn addition to our new features on core web search this week, we introduced a new and revolutionary way to refine image searches to our main image search functionality this week. The feature is called "Similar Images". We've had it for a while as a separate site, but it has proved so useful and interesting that we decided to make it part of our core image search. The idea here is to find an image that you like and then click the "Find similar images" link below it. This may seem simple, but think about all the complicated things you can express. For example, if I wanted a picture of a single turtle swimming, and I wanted the turtle to be headed to the left rather than the right, it would be almost impossible to express as a keyword search. Now with "Similar Images" features, I can simply do an image search for
turtles, then find an image that meets my requirements, like the seventh image on that results page, and by clicking the "Find similar images" underneath it, I get a
page composed of solo turtles actively swimming.
Example search:
jack-o-lanterns, then click on "Find similar images" under the fifth image to get
jack-o-lanterns lit from within in night-time settingsExample search:
birthday hat, then click on "Find similar images" under the second image to get
multi-colored birthday hatsExample search:
peacock, then select "Find similar images" on the third image to get
white peacocks with their feathers displayedPersonalized Search on MobileThis week we also introduced personalized search for the mobile phone. Personalized search has been available on our website for some time. Now, when you are logged in on your phone, you get the same personalized search results on your mobile phone as well.
Google Suggest now globalInternationally, we also rolled out Google Suggest on our search results pages. Now, the helpful suggestions that you see when you begin typing on our homepage and results page are available on 156 country domains and in 52 more languages.
And to wish you a Happy Halloween, trick-or-treat us by visiting the homepage (
www.google.com) today and clicking on the Google logo.
Hope you enjoyed this week's features. Stay tuned for what's next!
Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products & User Experience
Personalized ranking - Only have a 10-minute coffee break and want to see the best items first? All feeds now have a new sort option called "magic" that re-orders items in the feed based on your personal usage, and overall activity in Reader, instead of default chronological order. Click "Sort by magic" under the Folder Settings menu of your feed to switch to personalized ranking. Unlike the old "auto" ranking, this new ranking is personalized for you, and gets better with time as we learn what you like best — the more you "like" and "share" stuff, the better your magic sort will be. Give it a try on a high-volume feed folder or All items and see for yourself!
The goal of personalization at Google remains the same as ever: to help you find the best content on the web. We hope these new features help you do just that — go Explore for yourself.
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