This is the blog of Adam Kalsey. Unusual depth and complexity. Rich, full body with a hint of nutty earthiness.
This is the blog of Adam Kalsey. Unusual depth and complexity. Rich, full body with a hint of nutty earthiness.
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29 Mar 2004
Google’s released two new features and tweaked their UI. The results pages are a bit more streamlined (still uses tables and font tags though) and do a better job of highlighting the ads on the page. The ads no longer look like they were stuck on the page as an afterthought. The Google News teasers at the top of the page now flow better with the search results.
Google’s Web Alerts allows a searcher to save a search and when Google indexes new pages with those terms, an alert is sent be email. This is an apparent extension of their News Alerts service. What I’d like to know is where the RSS feeds are? I’d love to be able to save a search and have the results stored in an RSS feed, a la Feedster.
Just to come full circle, we just added email delivery of our searches — Feedster Email Alerts — http://www.feedster.com/alerts.php
Let us know if you like them.
I’ve been using Google Alert (www.googlealert.com) for the past few months - it is a Google-based web alerting service with RSS feeds, and a lot more features than Google’s service.
The Wired magazine issue that was all about Google said they would have RSS-feed news alerts. And I can’t find anything on their site about that, either.
My suspicion is that you will not see RSS on Google any time soon—specifically, unless and until there is a good, widely used method for delivering RSS feeds other than using an HTTP GET to poll a URI at set intervals. Think of how many people use Google and Google News; who can blame Google for not wanting those bajillions of people to start doing automatic polling every 30 minutes because they didn’t bother to adjust the settings on their crappy feed reader?
Overall, I like the new Google look. But one thing that really bugs me is the “New!” next to the Froogle link. Just looks tacky…
It also seems they got rid of the directory structure on the results page…
I’ll miss it because I found it to be a lot more usefull than the “similar pages” option in finding related material..
You can still find the directory under the “more” option, but thats the only reference to it. I wonder if there trying to phase it out (maybe because dmoz never updates)…
I’ve also noticed the click tracking appearing a lot more frequently on google, they use quite a nice layer of abstraction to make it difficult to see that they are really doing it aswell. I wonder if this click tracking is being used to optimise results, either way I think it should be made obvious when you are on the google page that they have chosen you as there latest person to spy on … er… monitor.. errrr.. offer an improved user experience to in exchange for a slight privacy reduction.
Adam Kalsey
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Jamie Kirkpatrick
March 29, 2004 10:59 AM
Feedster eh?
I recently found PubSub (thanks to Brad Choate). As you say…this to me seems to be the missing feature to google nowadays. Sort that out and things would be ner near perfect!