The tech blogosphere is excited by the findings of Andy Boyd. He has a screen shot of a Google search that shows the search results giving up space for a separate section of blog results (see picture below). Among others, Techcrunch and Google Blogoscoped have their own take on what this means and where it could go.
Here’s my question: Why hasn’t Google done this already? And not only for blog searches but perhaps even for news, pictures, and/or video. The big three, for me at least, would be regular search results, blog posts, and news. I’d say that over half of my searches I do three times. Why not put in my search query once and get the top 10 results from each category on the same page?
O.k., sure, Google is unlikely to make a world-wide, across-the-board change like that for everyone (though the picture below is proof that the company is at least testing the idea). But for those of us who feel so inclined to take advantage of such a service, why not have it as an option listed under “preferences” or “advanced search?”
For having a personalized search initiative, Google is seriously lacking in this area. Here’s how I’d see it working, under preferences you’d see something like: “Find everything you’re looking for with one search! Place a check in the box next to each item for which you’d like to see categorized results from your search. Next, check what you’d like your default number of results to be per category per page.”
And the list would include: regular search, blogs, news, images, videos, etc. Just like how you setup any other preference with Google search, you’d set this up one time and it’d be saved for all your future searches. For me, at least, this would be the easiest (for Google), most efficient and effective way to improve search.
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