Search Engine Journal

User-Guided Search Refining in Google

Despite the fact that the Google API hasn’t been updated in over two years, people keep doing Cool Things with it. The latest Cool Thing I’ve seen is the very nice MyGoogleSearch ( http://www.mygooglesearch.com ). The idea behind this hack is that you can take the returned search results and use them to further clarify your search results.

Here’s how it works: run a search (note that the top query box is for an API key; leave it alone unless you’ve got a key to enter; you’ll mess up your search otherwise.) You’ll get ten results via the Google API. Results will have a checkbox next to them. Check the results that are *not* relevant (seems counterintuitive; how about having the boxes prechecked and instructing the user to uncheck the ones that aren’t relevant?) and click the “Refine by Example” button at the bottom of the page.

The page will refresh showing a new ten results with notes at the top defining what search terms were added. I tried searching for chips, and then eliminated all results that weren’t technology-oriented. The page refreshed informing me that the keywords search and news had been added. I eliminated all non-tech results again, and got a new page informing me that the keywords Google and Help had been added. Strangely the second page of results were more targeted than the third.

Good idea, could use some tweaking for more words. — maybe weight the words in the title more than the words in the body? Arbitrarily remove the top and bottom tenth of words in a cache in the hope of getting rid of nav? Hmmm.

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Columist Tara Calishain is writer and editor at ResearchBuzz and author of the new book Web Search Garage