At Google Tricks they publish regular advice on how to make the most of Google. Check it out! It’s not affiliated with Google but they certainly seem to have the inside track!
Their most recent post, on 23 December, is about Google’s improving “quick answer results” service. The results are not always reliable (being automated) and they are much more extensive in English than in other languages. This is definitely a work in progress, but perhaps it provides a glimpse into the future.
Here’s how it works. If you want to know some etymology, just type “word origin” (without the inverted commas) after your search term. For example, searching for
- logarithm word origin
brings up
Other language-related searches include:
- define logarithm
- what is logarithm
You can read more about Google quick answers at the Boolean Strings blog.
There is, however, a downside to all this.
In general, these results don’t come from Google itself. They are “scraped” from other websites, in a process that has come to be seen as controversial. Google has been accused by some of misappropriation of proprietory content. Google has refused to pay for publishing search results and the dispute is beginning to have consequences for users. This month of December has seen the closure of Google’s news service for Spanish press sites, as a result of the Spanish government’s insistence (in the new Intellectual Property Law) on Google paying a fee for the publication of this information.
Changes and additions to Google’s search algorithm are often controversial, because the results are uneven, or because, due to Google’s dominant position, they can damage other businesses. For example, Softonic, a software portal based in Barcelona that for many years has been one of Spain’s most successful websites, found its business model undermined this year as a result, among other things, of changes to how Google listed results for software searches.
At Tradiling we hope that 2015 will be satisfactory for all, and that we will not be squeezed out by Google or anybody else!
