Google Adds Topic Clusters to Search Results
Posted to Google and the World of Search on 21 March 2006, 9:47 AM EST
Google has been very conservative about changing their search results page. Indeed, the design of the page and the information presented has changed little since the search engine's public introduction in 1998. Innovations have literally been marginal: Google has added helpful spelling corrections ("Did you mean...?"), related search terms, and news items near the top of the page, and of course the ubiquitous text ads to the right. But the primary search results block has remained fairly untouched. Competitors have come and gone (mostly the latter), promoting new—and they say better—ways of browsing masses of information. But Google's clean, relevant list has brushed off these upstarts. So it surprised me when I was doing some fact checking on a book I'm finishing to see the following search results page:
As you can see, Google has evidently introduced a search results page that clusters relevant web pages by subject matter. Google has often disparaged other search engines that do this sort of clustering, like the gratingly named Clusty and Vivisimo, perhaps because Google's engineers must be some of the few geeks who understand that regular human beings don't particularly care for fancier ways of structuring or visualizing search results. Just the text, ma'am.
But while this addition of clustering (based on the information theory of document classification, as I recently discussed in D-Lib and in a popular prior blog post) to Google's search results page is surprising, the way they've done it is typically simple and useful. No little topic folders in a sidebar; no floating circles connected by relationship lines. The page registers the same visually, but it's more helpful. I was looking for the year in which the Victorian artist C.R. Ashbee died, and the first three results are about him. Then, above the fold, there's a block of another three results that are mildly set apart (note the light grey lines), asking if I meant to look up information about the Ashbee Lacrosse League (with a link to the full results for that topic), then back to the artist. The page reads like a conversation, without any annoying, overly fancy technical flourishes: "Here's some info about C.R. Ashbee...oh, did you mean the lacrosse league?...if you didn't here's some more about the artist."
Now I just hope they add this clustering to their Web Search API, which would really help out with H-Bot, my automated historical fact finder.
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