To some, this sounds like just another advance in search technologies, while to others it represents a disgusting step into morally shaky grounds.

Google

If you’re logged into Google, it is now impossible not to have some form of personalisation happening on your search results. Even Eric Schmidt himself readily admits this:

It will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not been tailored for them.

Google uses a number of key factors, including but not limited to:

• Your past searches.
• Sites you’ve clicked through to before (and are therefore considered to be the correct result for you).
• Twitter recommendations.
• FriendFeed recommendations.
• Google +1’s of your Google contacts.

If you’re worried about your results, one quick test is to open up an incognito page in your browser (or some other form of do-not-track browser session) and do the same search. In one you’ll be signed in, the other not (which means you’ll get “pure” results).

Here’s an example, when I searched for iPad Board Games.

Logged In Results

1. ipadboardgames.org (my own site)
2. boardgamegeek.com/~
3. makeuseof.com/tag/11-free-ipad-board-games/ (“recommended by Jorge, from FriendFeed”)
4. geek-news.mtv.com
5. appannie.com (Top iPad Board Games)
6. gigaom.com (10 Board Games for the iPad)
7. redmondpie.com
8. iphoneness.com
9. purplepawn.com

Result number 10 was blocked by my own personal blacklist, as it was a spam site with a single game review, able to rank well because of the exact domain match only.

I also see +1 buttons when logged in, and have indeed +1’ned my own site in the hopes it will rank better because of it (not that I can rank any better than number 1 anyway, but it may help with long tail search queries).

Incognito Mode

When browsing privately, the makeuseof.com article has been demoted from 3 to 5 - its natural position with no social input, and result 10 is now shown because my personal block is inactive. However, it’s important to bear in mind I don’t have a Twitter account linked and I’m relatively inactive on any social networks. In fact, I didn’t even know I had a FriendFeed account, but evidently I do. With lots of social contacts and active accounts, you should be able to see how drastically different your results might be.

Facebook

Last year Facebook also started to display customised timelines, filtering out certain users, or what it considers “boring” status updates. To see the difference, log into your Facebook feed and click between the Top News and Most Recent feed. Most Recent will show you everything.

In my own experiments, I certainly can’t figure out the logic behind the filters. On the one hand, it’s placing status updates from people I consider to be my closest friends onto Most Recent, but not Top News, even if they’ve received a lot of comments and are clearly popular updates. Then it places people I really couldn’t care about on Top News, and randomly hides comment threads making me think no one has said anything. What gives Facebook?

How To Turn Off The Personalized Facebook Feed

To turn off the ridiculous Facebook filter while still maintaining your own personal blacklist (everyone has one or two idiot friends who only play FarmVille), head to the bottom of your feed and click the EDIT OPTIONS link. In the pop-up, change the option to read Show Posts From: All of Your Friends and Pages. Anything you’ve specifically blocked will stay blocked, but you won’t have random posts hidden because Facebook deems them unpopular.

Conclusion:

As for Facebook – I can’t figure what they’re playing at – but their feed personalisation seems particularly ineffective and senseless, so best to just turn it off. What do you think?

If you’re an active social user and tweet a lot, it’s quite likely your Google search results could be drastically different, so I’d love to hear from you in the comments if you’ve done some tests. Personally, I’m not of the opinion that personalised search results are a bad thing per se, but I can see how some might consider it to be. As an atheist, what if my search results suddenly started to cut out fundamentalist religious sites? Would that bother me? Or might I be inclined to deliberately block them anyway in the hopes that Google search results would be adjusted globally to exclude them and further my own cause (and is that in itself morally wrong)?

Is giving users a degree of control over what appears higher in search results something that should be applied only to individuals results, or to the global results, or do you think user signals should be ignored completely?

These are all questions that some of us are going to have to address in the coming years as more and more external signals are used to adjust our search-scape of the Internet universe. Or are you one of those that will just skip Google completely, and crowd-source your search needs to your epic Twitter followers?

However you can’t please everyone and we have already shared some tips on improving Google search results including this post on the modified Google search versions that may improve your searching experience. Also, we have already listed some cool tools to highlight your favorite domains in search results. Today’s post is something related but absolutely different.

You might notice some familiar domains that pop up in the top 10 search results again and again. Chances are, you miss some variety and want to get rid of some sites you tend to see often. Here are a few browser-based tools for you to filter out any domains from search results.

1. Google Hit Hider By Domain

Search engines supported: Google

Works in: Firefox 4 (via Greasemonkey).

Google Hit Hider by Domain lets you block domains from Google search results via the “Block” button:

The button lets you:

• Block sites and domains (you can still see them within the results in gray);
• “Perma-ban” (block domains completely without any trace);
• See the list of your blocked domains:

If you choose the first option (just block the domain), the result will still be there but without any clutter:

The script help section, blocked domain list and the options are accessible via a tiny badge to the right:

2. Search Noise Reduction

Search engines supported: Google and Bing

Works in: The script is advertised to work only in Opera but it does also work in Firefox 4 (via Greasemonkey).

Search Noise Reduction is a little userscript that adds a tiny scissors icon next to each search result.

Clicking the icon lets you specify how much from the domain you want to block: a subdirectory, a subdomain or all the domain results:

Note: The script will only work for your first search or for all your searches if you always use your browser search box. If you continue searching using the Google search box, the Google search results URL will look like this:

http://www.google.com/search?q=YOUR+FIRST+SEARCH#sclient=psy&hl=en&source=hp&q=YOUR+SECOND+SEARCH&fp=c8774eba70bd538

- which for some reason disables the script. So if you want the script to always work, you will have to initiate a new search session each time by searching from your browser search box (or from Google Toolbar).

You can access your block list as well as save it locally by using the tiny icon at the top-right:

3. Personal Blocklist (by Google)

Search engines supported: Google

Works in: Google Chrome

Personal Blocklist (see our review of the extension here: Personal Blocklist: Block Unwanted Search Results In Google [Chrome]) is the official Google extension for Google Chrome. According to the description, Google analyzes your blocking patterns to make conclusions about its search engine results page usefulness:

When you choose to block or unblock a pattern, the extension will also transmit to Google the URL of the web page on which the blocked or unblocked search results are displayed. You agree that Google may freely use this information to improve our products and services.

Some Features To Play With

• Hide the browser button by right-clicking on it and selecting “Hide button”.
• Import and export a list of patterns.
• Block host of currently active tab.

Any other fun addons to block domains from Google search results to remove noise? Please let us know your thoughts!

Recipes?! Yes – users of the US-based Google will now notice a new Recipe button in the usual sidebar search buttons, alongside News, Books, Places, Images etc. Clicking on that will give you a special view of search results, which have a small preview image, show user reviews and ingredients too.

What’s so amazingly cool about this? Why should you care?How will this one step change the internet forever? Read on to find out exactly why this matters.

What is Semantic Markup, or Meta-Data?

Meta-data is a difficult concept to grasp, but let me try to explain it simply. Meta-data is that which describes other data. So for example, here is some regular data:

(+44)208 234 5678

Of course, most of us will recognize this as a telephone number, but computer systems have no way of knowing that. They see it as a string of numbers – it could be anything! So that’s where meta-data comes in. For example, how about if I wrote it like this:

<span class=”telephone”>(+44)208 234 5678</span>

Now I’ve surrounded this in meta-data – semantic markup. Any system that knows what the “telephone” tag is can now correctly interpret that the number is indeed a telephone number, and can do with it whatever it wishes.

So…what? What does that have to do with recipes?

Well, as I mentioned – Google now uses pages with semantic markup (or what they like to call Rich Snippets) for the new Recipe view. What this means to you and I is that we can narrow down the search for a perfect recipe much more specifically and accurately by making use of this meta-data. For instance, searching for “thai food” will initially give you a huge list of random Thai recipes, which is nice but you don’t really know much about the recipe until you click through.

Now suppose we really want to make something with Tofu in it. You might add Tofu into the search term, but it’s not ideal. Instead we can simply check off Tofu – Yes from the ingredients list, which will narrow the search to all recipes that include Tofu in their meta-list of ingredients. You can also check off any ingredients you don’t want, like so:

You can also drill the list down by using the “less than preparation time” meta-info. There would simply be no way to do this with regular search, as putting “15 min” in the search would only find pages with that in the text.

In short, having web information marked up with semantic meta-data gives meaning to the information, and allows us to make use of it in new and exciting ways, as well as allowing us to find relevant information more efficiently than simply text matching.

Google IS Good Sometimes:

I’ve been a little harsh on the quality of Google results lately, but this single step is going to change the way internet pages are made forever, and I applaud them for it. In a nutshell, Google has single-handedly forced internet publishers – at least recipes publishers – to use meta-data in their internet documents if they want to be listed in the search results. Sure, it’s only for recipes at the moment, but eventually Google will roll this out to many kinds of search. In fact, they’ve already published guidelines for how to mark up:

• Reviews
• People
• Events

Everyone, meet the Internet v.3 – now there is meaning to all that random data!

Further Reading:

There’s tons to read from Google about Rich Snippets, and they’ve also released a useful little tool to see how your webpage is doing right now in terms of Rich Snippets that will be used in the results. Next week, I hope to be starting a series of WordPress How-To’s where we’ll delve a little into the code behind WordPress themes, and I’ll you specifically how to add some of this rich snippet data into your blog.

You can also read about all the different “microformats” standards that are being developed as you read this over at MicroFormats.Org. Though all of these are not implemented yet, you can be sure that if you make efforts to add them now then you’ll be in good standing when Google does roll out the next changes.

Now might also be a good time to brush up on your search skills by learning special operands that you can put in your searches, or discover 10 more Google services you probably didn’t know about before. Or you could just forget about it all and play some Google games instead.

Have you tried the new recipe search yet? Got any awesome ideas on others ways we can make use of all this information? Share your views in the comments, please!

Image Credit: ShutterStock

So while previously I was sharing mostly tips on getting productive with tabs, today’s tip will hopefully help you to reduce the number of open tabs by showing you how you can split the browser screen and load search results on the same page but in a separate sidebar panel. This way you will able to quickly click through search results without getting distracted by multiple active tabs.

Search Results In A Separate Sidebar Panel: Firefox

All-in-one Sidebar is one of the addons that many Firefox users can’t live without. It lets you open various windows as sidebar panels, and quickly switch between them. The addon is very flexible and can be also used to preview any search results as well.

For Google, you’ll need to do the following:

1. Perform a Google search in the main window;
2. Set the “MultiPanel“ mode (click on “Page“ in the sidebar menus and select “MultiPanel“);
3. Use the icon in the sidebar to load the current tab in the sidebar;
4. Click search results in the sidebar to load them in the main window.

OK, this is really much easier to do than to describe the process:

And now step 4:

The only inconvenience is that because of the new Google search sidebar; you will always have to scroll a bit to see the search results in the sidebar:

If you plan to use All-in-One Sidebar often to load search results in the sidebar panel, you may consider hiding Google’s options using this user script.

Note: another inconvenience is that any link will be loaded in the sidebar: even the paging link. So you will either need to click the All-in-One icon each time (to load the next page of results in the sidebar panel), or you will have to set Google to show at least 100 results per page (in which case you won’t need paging at all). To do the latter, you’ll need to disable Google Instant first.

Search Results In A Separate Sidebar Panel: SweetSearch

Unlike All-in-One Sidebar Sweet Search is designed specifically for Google Search (therefore it has some fun additional options we’ll see below). The extension allows you to keep your Google search results on the left while loading the pages you click on the same page in the right sidebar.

With the extension installed you can do the following:

1. Click search results to open webpages in the right part of the screen;
2. Click an arrow icon next to any search result to open a new separate tab with the webpage;

Also notice that it gets rid of Google’s search options sidebar on its own, so you don’t need any additional tricks.

The extension is easily turned off from the toolbar icon:

Note: Unlike All-in-One Sidebar that loads any links you click in the sidebar panel, this one is designed to work only for Google search result listing titles (linked titles of the pages you normally click to land on the actual page). If you click any other links within search results (like Cached link, Related link, etc), the page will load in the full-screen mode.

Do you think it’s a great way to browse (Google) search results? Please share your thoughts!

These experiments are especially interesting because YouTube has a completely different search platform: it is more entertaining and visual than general “text” search. People use it differently and for different purposes than they do with regular search.

Before we take a look at the existing Youtube Instant attempts, let’s first see how actually Google Instant works.

• Google uses its Suggest algorithm to try to “guess” what the searcher is going to type;
• It auto completes your search term while you are still typing (letters in grey) and instantly shows results for that auto-completed term;
• Search terms and search results are changing while you type;
• If you stop typing and start looking through the results (or just get distracted), Google takes you to the actual results page you were at that moment.

So what could that look like if we tried to transfer similar functionality to YouTube?

1. YouTube Instant

Youtube Instant, a successful start-up by a college student which brought him overnight fame, takes a bit different approach to how it could work:

• It does use YouTube Suggestions to guess the user’s intent. So while you are typing, the tool digs into YouTube-powered search suggestions and performs a search based on the top suggestion.
• Instead of showing search results for the guessed term, it shows the actual video (the video which is ranked #1 for that search term on YouTube).

So, if you managed to type “somew” or “somewhere“, the tool will “guess” that you might be looking for “Somewhere in the rainbow” (as this is probably the most popular search starting with that combination of characters) – then it will instantly search for that term, grab the top video for it and show you the result. How instant is that?

So, if that were Google, it would rather be called “Google I am Feeling Lucky Instant” – because instead of instant search results, you get an instant result.

2. YouTube Instant Greasemonkey Script

This is a Greasemonkey script that attempts to replicate Google Instant behavior (but it works only from the home page).

The huge problem with this one is:

• It does instantly take you to search results but it does NOT take into consideration YouTube’s search suggestions;
• The tool instantly searches for what you managed to type in the search box:

The script does have some potential but with current functionality, it didn’t appear really useful to me.

3. YouTube Loop

YouTube Loop does the best (but still not perfect) job replicating original Google Instant behavior:

• It uses YouTube Suggest to auto-complete the search box query as you type (and it works pretty quickly);
• BUT: It instantly shows search results for what you have managed to type (not what it suggested in the search box).

So which one is the most usable for which purposes? What’s your take on YouTube Instant?

As for the quality of search, the results are comparable if not better than Google’s results in most cases. In any case, you can certainly expect Bing to stay around for quite some time unlike other search engines that have tried to challenge Google.

So while it is around, here are a few tips and tricks that you can use to search even better on the Bing search engine:

Turn Off The Background Image

If for any reason you want to turn off the background image, you can do so by visiting www.bing.com/?rb=0. For convenience you can also bookmark this page so that you are taken to it automatically the next time you want to search on Bing.

Generate An RSS Feed For Search Results

You can easily create an RSS feed for search results of any query by simply appending ‘&format=rss‘ at the end of the search query in the address bar of the browser.

Get A Weather Forecast

You can get weather forecasts from the Bing search box by typing the name of the city followed by weather or forecast. For example, New Delhi forecast would give you the weather forecast for New Delhi.

Additionally you can suffix units of measurement to get the results according to your preference. New Delhi weather celsius for example would give you the same result but in Celsius this time.

Calculations, Units & Currency Conversion

Google does it and now Bing does it as well. Nothing fancy about conversions. You key in the value or equation and the units and the Bing search engine will give you the solution as the result of the search query. 220 km in miles would return 137.76. Similarly currency conversions and mathematical equations work just as well.

Add Your Preference For A Particular Result Type

You can use the prefer:<keyword> option to give additional weightage to results that contain the keyword. Say you are looking for content management systems, but you are interested in PHP CMS(es) all the more. In such a case you can search for content management system prefer:php to refine your search and give more weightage or importance to PHP CMS(es).

Track Flights

Using Bing you can also track flights easily. All that is required is the airline name and the flight number. Enter ‘flight status‘ in the search box and Bing will prompt you for the airline and flight number. Key them in and click on get status to get the status of a flight.

Search Sites With A Specific Filetype

You can add contains:<fileExtension> to any search query to return results only from the sites that contain a file of the said extension. For example, mercurial guide contains:pdf would return results from sites which have a PDF file hosted on them.

Limit Search Results To A Specific Country

Search engines by default provide you with an option to search only pages from your country. Using the local version of Bing, I for example get the option to search only pages from India. But what if you want to search webpages from other countries?

You can use the ‘loc‘ operator to achieve this. archaeology loc:US for example will return pages containing archeology, but limit the results to pages from the US only.

Get Live Stock Quotes

You can enter the ticker symbol along with the word stock to get the stock quotes. AAPL stock for example would return the stock quote for Apple.

See If Your Site Is Indexed & How Many Pages

You can quickly check to see if your site has been indexed by Bing by using the “url” keyword. url:yoursite.com will let you see if your site has been indexed by Bing or not. On the other hand if you want to see how many pages of your site have been indexed you can use the “site” keyword along with your site name. site:yoursite.com would return all the pages from your site that are present in Bing’s index.

Its your turn now. You might have discovered little tricks of your own with the Bing search engine that have not been mentioned in the article. Feel free to share them with us in the comments. We would love to hear about them.

The internet doesn’t contain just a few dozen or hundred relevant sources, no, it contains millions or billions or even more. To make things worse, there is no friendly and intelligent librarian to help you sort through all this information. It’s only you and a stupid search engine. You better act smart.

The challenge when searching online is to find only relevant information or – in other words – avoid irrelevant results on Google search. In this article I will show you 6 ways to reduce these false hits, so that you get better overall search results.

Surprisingly, the most effective way to reduce irrelevant results on Google search, may be not to use Google’s search engine in the first place. Read on to understand why.

1. Use Multiple Keywords

Use multiple keywords to receive more specific results on your first search engine results page (SERP).

2. Use Google Suggest

When you enter the first letters of a keyword into the search bar, Google will suggest popular keywords other people have used in their searches. Follow these suggestions and see whether they can help you gain better results.

3. Use Operators to Properly Connect Keywords

This is a whole article of its own and fortunately it has already been written. Please have a look at my article on Google Operators for an overview. You can use each of these “commands” to improve your search results. Here I will mention only the three most helpful ones.

• Use Negative Keywords

If you’re seeing irrelevant results, identify a keyword that has nothing to do with what you’re looking for and make it your “negative keyword”. Simply add it to your search query with a minus symbol in front of it, for example if you were looking for the band Gossip, you would search for [gossip -celebrity] (without the brackets).

• Use Quotes

This is most commonly used to find an exact match. Since Google already uses the AND operator to connect single keywords per default, you won’t need quotes to find exact matches in most cases.

However, if you find that Google returns results with highlighted keywords that are spelled completely different from what you entered, try to put these single words into quotes and try again. This will prevent Google from “finding” more popular keywords that are only vaguely similar to your search term.

• Search Within a Specific Website

If you don’t want to search the entire internet, but instead a specific URL, this operator is of great help. Type [site:URL "your search query"], for example [site:http://wikipedia.org "brandenburg gate"].

This MakeUseOf Poll compiled by Aibek features some more Best Google Search Tips & Operators.

4. Use Advanced Search

If you can’t be bothered with manually typing operators, you can use Google’s Advanced Search. It allows you to exclude words, search for results in a specific language or specific files, and search within a site or domain. As you enter the details, the search query is automatically composed for you.

5. Use Google Chrome With Quick Scroll

One of the most annoying parts of following a search result is finding the relevant part within the page that opens. The Google Chrome extension Quick Scroll helps you tackle this issue as it provides a quick way to scroll to the parts in that website that are relevant to your query.

We have profiled Quick Scroll in the MakeUseOf Directory.

In Firefox you could simply use Quick Find, i.e. “find in text as you type” to quickly find the keywords again. However, if you’re into Google Chrome, you should check out these 8 Cool Google Chrome Extensions for Google Services, an article written by Tim earlier this month.

6. Ditch Google

Google is the most popular search engine and as such it has a lot of power. Google naturally has full control over its search algorithm. This in turn has a great impact on what results you will see, i.e. those you actually want to see or those that Google wants you to see.

There are two major variables that determine which results are recognized as relevant for your search: Link Authority (a.k.a. PageRank) and Keyword Relevance. Keyword relevance is straight forward. How well do the keywords you entered match the result, how often do they appear throughout the website, are they included in links pointing to that site, etc? Actually, this is all that you’re looking for when using a search engine.

Google, however, is biased towards link authority. The number of links pointing to a certain page determines its “authority” or PageRank. The more, the better. Unfortunately, this means that keywords only remotely related to a high PageRank site may cause this site to appear on your SERP, no matter how relevant it really is. The advantage is that you’ll see a lot of results from reputable high impact pages like Wikipedia or MakeUseOf. On the other hand you may miss out on many more relevant results from smaller pages. That’s not necessarily what you want.

So what can you do? You cannot change Google’s algorithm. However, if you keep seeing irrelevant search results, no matter how well you tune your search, there is one more thing you can do to get better results: don’t use Google’s search engine in the first place.

Yahoo’s search engine, for example, is less biased towards link authority and will thus provide you with much better search results. For a detailed analysis and examples, please see Troy Philis’ article on More Irrelevant Google Search Results.

What are your experiences with Google search and what has helped you to get the most relevant results?

Image credits: garytamin, bizior

Part of the reason behind Firefox’s success is the fact that there is an awesome team of individuals behind it, who work around the clock to make it live up to the stringent quality standards, which are a hallmark of Mozilla.

However, there is a second, almost equally important reason as to why each version of Firefox is a runaway success. There’s virtually no limit to the amount of customization you can apply to Firefox. Most of these come in the form of extensions (small add-ons, which add to the functionality).

However, today we are going to talk about another, more covert way of customizing Firefox. All the different settings of Firefox can be accessed from one convenient location using the Firefox “About Config” hack. By typing about:config in the address bar, one can bring up a page listing all the different options. Once on that page, it’s simply a matter of double-clicking and editing those settings to make your browsing experience even better.

Here’s a list of the best, most useful Firefox about:config hacks. All these hacks can be enabled by going into about:config. In case a setting doesn’t show up in the search, just right-click and select New to create it.

Make Firefox Free Up RAM When Minimized:

Unless you have a RAM behemoth for a rig, you will know that RAM is a precious commodity. Simply put, RAM is like a container into which all applications are thrown when they are first run. The applications carry out all their processing in the RAM and then leave the RAM when they are done.

The problem arises in the way Firefox handles RAM. Most programs return unused RAM when they are minimized. Firefox, on the other hand does not do so. So, the Firefox ninjas around the world found an about:config workaround for it:

• In the “Filter” search, type: config.trim_on_minimize

• Right click on the setting and click “toggle” so that the Value turns to “true“.

From now on, Firefox will act like any other Windows app and return all unused memory when minimized.

Stop Websites From Blinding You With Blinking Text:

Some webmasters have this crazy habit of making text on their pages blink. Maybe it’s their idea of looking cool, but in reality, it’s nothing more than a major irritation. Coupled with that is the fact that it really tires your eyes. Here’s how you can change about:config to disable blinking text:

• In the “Filter” search, type: browser.blink_allowed

• Right click on the setting and click “toggle” so that the Value turns to “false“. This disables the blinking.

Paste Text With The Middle Mouse Button:

Linux users will vouch for how awesome pasting with the middle mouse button is. Now, Windows users can get the same functionality within Firefox. You guessed it! You need to go to about:config to do the following:

• In the “Filter” search, type: middlemouse.paste

• Right click on the setting and click “toggle” so that the Value turns to “true“.

Open Search Results In A New Tab:

Every now and then I come across a term on a website that I really need to research. I quickly hit Ctrl+K (the Search Box shortcut), type the keywords, and hit Return, only to remember at the last instant that the search will take me away from my current page. Using the following about:config hack, I configured Firefox to open all searches in a new tab.

• In the “Filter” search, type: browser.search.openintab

• Right click on the setting and click “toggle” so that the Value turns to “true“.

Make Firefox’s Menus Load Faster:

Sometimes, the delay caused while opening a Menu is just a major headache. Here’s how to do away with it using about:config.

• In the configuration window, right click and choose New -> Integer

• Name it ui.submenuDelay and set it to 0

And that’s all that there is to it! It’s simply amazing how a few configuration changes here and there can make your surfing experience so much smoother. About:config hacks really make Mozilla Firefox all the more awesome. No wonder it is one of the most popular browsers in the world.

What about:config hacks are your favourites?