Has anyone else started seeing what looks to be faceted topical headings at the top of Google searches? This past weekend I was the groomsman at my brother’s wedding and had the unfortunate timing to catch a case of conjunctivitis in both eyes the day before the ceremony. (”Does your camera have red-eye reduction setting?” I asked the photographer. She seemed confused, so I continued: “How about pink-eye reduction?” She looked a little closer at my eyes, laughed, and said “That’s what Photoshop is for.”) Wanting to know more, I did what any self-respecting information-finder would do — I asked Google. And here’s what came up.
![[Image. Google Search Results for "Conjunctivitis"]](http://dltj.org/wp-content/uploads/2006/07/google.png)
Google Search Results for "Conjunctivitis" showing a “Refine results” heading
“Refine results”? Where did that come from?
We’re used to Google showing us refined search results for things like street addresses (giving us maps), telephone numbers (offering reverse number lookup) and certainly cross-links into Google’s Images, Froogle, and Scholar services, but this is the first time I’ve seen the main Google search index suggest a refined search back into the main Google search index.
![[Image. Google Search Results for "Conjunctivitis" refined by "Treatment"]](http://dltj.org/wp-content/uploads/2006/07/google2.png)
Google Search Results for "Conjunctivitis" refined by the “Treatment” link.
Here we see a “more:” modifier in the single search box. So where did this “Labeled” metadata coming from? Is Google running algorithms against the search index (similar to Amazon’s Statistically Improbable Phrases) to pull out this kind of faceted information?
Can anyone help sort this out?
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It’s been around for a couple of months, I think, but only for health and medical terms.
…
Well, I did a little investigation, and found that actually, it’s also there for some other topics: “Google Coop”. It’s a human-intelligence-harnessing indexing thingy to augment search results. Hmmm…. There are several topics listed, and I got it to show up in search results for several medical-related things and also for travel information (try “Honolulu” and you get dining guides, etc.), but I tried a few searches around the other topics and got nothing. It seems to be very much in-progress.
It displays for some health topics but not for others - but the syntax seems to work whether or not the ‘refine results’ text appears (e.g. for “asthma” there is no ‘refine results’ option, but the “more:…” operator still works, and “asthma more:condition_treatment” gives you different results from a search on just “asthma”.
Good spotting, thanks
I’ve seen posts on searchenginewatch.com suggesting this is a forthcoming feature of the forthcoming Google Health, which is why you found it for a medical search. Similar facets display for “diabetes”, “tuberculosis”, or even just “kidney” (but not “knee injuries” or “health effects of diet”).
It’s coming out of Google Co-op Health.
http://www.google.com/coop/topic?cx=health_devel
Thanks for the sleuthing, everyone. I had visions of “No humans were harmed or even used in the creation of this [taxonomy]” (a play on the early tag line at the bottom of Google News pages) with a new batch of computers and algorithms scanning the pages of the web for common terms.
Looks like they discontinued this feature for destination searches like ‘bahamas’ (http://www.wolf-howl.com/seo/google-refine-results/)
But if you type in generic phrases like ‘nursery’ it provides suggestions like this:
“See results for: baby nursery”
Although I just now discovered that they do offer local refine results on some random words: http://webdesign.verangomedia.com/new-google-refine-feature-looking-for-local-results-for/
@Ecommere : Thanks for updating the examples — particularly the one for nursery. I had not seen the “Looking for local results for …?” prompt yet.
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[...] Can we do it? As the lead (and perhaps only) cheerleader for the Out-Google Google thesis, I’m starting to have my doubts. First came what looked like automated faceted analysis in Google. That turned out to be Google Co-op Health — a human-driven effort to add metadata to selected websites that appear in the search engine results. (By the way…why didn’t we [the library profession] think of that? And now that it has been thought of why aren’t we doing more with enlisting the aid of experts from their own field in categorizing their segment of the world of information?) ¶ [...]
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