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Google News To Get Quality Update
By David
Utter - Article Date: 2005-05-03
A patent application by Google aims to improve the results of its news searches
by creating a news source credibility database.
Google's patent filing will let stories be ranked in quality and not just relevance
to a topic. The new technology would assess the track record and quality of
the news source, consider the length of a story, and include other variables
like number of staff and web site traffic.
Currently, more recent stories rank highest, which means lesser-known sources
on a story can outrank sites like the BBC in Google's News listings.
"Google is constantly thriving for better relevance in its searching and
anything that improves the user experience is a good thing," said Julian
Smith, an analyst with Jupiter Research.
The patent was filed in September of 2003 and has not been awarded yet. It is
unclear whether some or all of the formulas in the patent application have already
been implemented within Google News.
Personalization: Google's Search History vs. Yahoo's MyWeb
By Lars Våge, InternetBrus
Google recently launched its personal search feature Search
History. Yahoo!, possibly its hardest competitor, replied by launching a
similar service called MyWeb.
It should be noted that MyWeb has been available for more than
half a year; however, this test version of the service has been hidden away
in the deep recesses of the Yahoo! site. Now there is a link to it on the Yahoo!
Search start page.
Both services ask you to register as a user, making it possible for you to save
your search history on their servers, making these data available from any computer
anywhere in the world.
With Google's Search History you can find out what you searched for on a particular
day and the relevant click throughs. Moreover, you can search the content of
the pages you have visited earlier. And that's about it.
However, Google's Search History does not have the same functionality as MyWeb.
Yahoo's MyWeb will add special links to the search engine result pages, allowing
you to save good results, and exclude web pages you find uninteresting from
future searches.
If you click on Save you will be presented with a dialog box where you can select
a folder for safekeeping and add a comment regarding the content of the particular
page. If you do not have a folder for this use, you can make one.
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