Today when you click on a file link in Google Search that is pointing to MediaFire, you are redirected to the error page http://www.mediafire.com/error.php?errno=381.

It reads:

The indexed link is unavailable.

The link that was indexed is currently set to a non-indexing state and cannot be accessed.

If you copy the link url and paste it directly in your browser’s address bar, you are taken to the download page from where you can download the file normally. It is also interesting to note that downloads are still working if you are using Bing Search instead of Google.

It is not clear at this point if Google Search is the only referrer that has been blocked by Mediafire, or if there are other sites that have been blocked as well by the file hosting service.

Another thing that is unclear is whether this has been an intentional move by the site, or if it is a technical issue that will be resolved at a later point in time. It does not make lots of sense from a legal point of view, unless law enforcement agencies are using Google exclusively for their research.

Users who find files that they cannot download should copy and paste the url into their browser’s address bar to download it. It is alternatively possible to install an extension like Refcontrol to modify the referrer for sites that are blocked by Mediafire.

Lets discuss the move in the comments.

Update: Download links are working again. It seems to have been a technical issue after all.

I moved to Ixquick and liked what I saw in the beginning. It too had the same issues that Bing had unfortunately. Complex search queries usually yielded results pages that would not help me in my research.

I switched to Duck Duck Go about two weeks ago and have not looked back since. Let me start the review by saying that I still have to switch to Google or Bing sometimes to get the results that I want. But that’s true for every search engine. There have been searches where Google could not provide me with results that I was looking for.

What I really like about Duck Duck Go is its simplicity. It is what Google has been a long time ago, a search engine that concentrates on search, and not on shoving advertisement and Google service promotions down the user’s throat.

The search results – often – begin with information at the top that are taken from Wikipedia. It is a quick one-liner that provides you with basic information about the site, service or name. The box links to Wikipedia and the official site, as well as related categories on the Duck Duck Go search engine. You can disable that box in the search settings.

Below the box is either the official site, outlined with a special button for better visibility, or a sponsored link result. This sponsored link is clearly distinguishable from the rest of the results.

Search suggestions on the right can help you redefine the search. For Ghacks, you find suggestions such as software, windows or Google listed there that can be appended to the search phrase with a click.

Search results are not personalized, and users are not tracked when using the search engine.

The search engine offers access to so called !bangs that you can use to redirect your search directly to a supported site.

You can for instance enter !youtube phrase to be redirected to YouTube’s search results page for the phrase you have entered. Hundreds of bangs exist, from searching popular blogs like Arstechnica or Lifehacker over Chrome, Firefox and Opera add-ons and userscripts to software downloads or company websites.

You can furthermore use \ in front of your search term to be taken directly to the first search result.

Interested users can check out the goodies page which highlights some of the advanced capabilities of the search engine. This includes conversions and calculations that you can make directly in the search engine, dates that you can look up and other interesting stuff.
There is also a list of keyboard shortcuts, that include navigating back and forth with j and k, t to go to the top or m to highlight the first result (which you could then open with a tap on the enter key).

Switch To DuckDuckGo in your browser

Google Chrome users need to click on the wrench icon in the upper right corner, and select Settings from the menu that opens.

They then need to locate Search on the first page and click on the Manage search engines button. Locate DuckDuckGo in the list, hover over its entry and click on the Make default button that appears.

Firefox users need to enter about:config into their browser’s address bar. They then need to filter for the term keyword.URL, double click the parameter on the results page and replace the value with http://duckduckgo.com/?q=.

Microsoft Internet Explorer users can head over to the Internet Explorer Gallery to install the Duck Duck go search provider plugin which adds the search engine to Microsoft’s browser.

What’s Missing?

Duck Duck Go does not maintain its own image search engine. If you want to search for images, you can either use a !bang to start the search on Duck Duck Go, or open an image search engine to search there directly.

The search engine does not link to cached versions of a page listed in the results. It is sometimes the only way to access information posted on the site, for instance if it is temporarily or permanently down.

Some searches still require you to switch search engines to find suitable results. My personal experience was that I had to switch engines less often than when I used Bing or Ixquick.

Verdict

I have not looked back yet after switching to Duck Duck Go. It is definitely an improvement over Bing or Ixquick. And while it may not be on pair with Google, it is close enough to justify the switch. I can still switch to Google or Bing if I cannot find a solution or answer in the search engine, which is even easier when using !bangs.

I’d encourage you to try the search engine for a week or so, to see if it meets your expectations. If not, you can still go back to Google or Bing. If it does, congratulations and welcome to the family.

Webstagram is a web viewer and search engine for photos taken by Instragram users. You can just dive into the popular or hot listings on the site, or use the search to find photos taken by a specific user or by tag.

Each photo that you see on the Webstagram website actually links back to the Instagr.am website where you can view it in tiny, medium, large or original size. The Webstagram page itself lists comments and likes directly on the page which are also taken from Instagram.

Users can log into their Instagram account to use part of the functionality on the web viewer’s site as well.

The site serves three main purposes. It first can be used by Instagram users for inspiration. Ever wanted to see what the iPhone app is capable off? Look no further than the popular or hot listings on the site.

The second purpose is as an image search engine and viewer, and the third to use features of the service on the website. Instagram users can for instance view the photos that people they follow have taken. They can furthermore follow and unfollow users, use social faetures such as like and comment, or see their own followers and the people they are following.

The search functionality is available to all users, regardless whether they are just visiting or logged in with their Instagram account.

Bing

Microsoft seems to favor ehow, one particular download site and several other sites in their search engine. Quality of those results is usually not that good. The first ehow article for instance is outdated and not applicable anymore, the four remaining answers either are not about Thunderbird or not about JavaScript.

• How to Enable JavaScript in Thunderbird
• How do I turn tabs OFF in Thunderbird 3? – ANSWERED
• How do i disable archiving in thunderbird 3.0? – Will come in …
• In Internet Explorer, how do I enable or disable Java or JavaScript?
• How to Turn on Javascript in a Mac

Google

Google’s results are better. The second result leads to the information that answers your query (JavaScript is no longer supported for mail and news in the browser, and thus does not need to be turned off anymore). In Google, two of the five results give you the answer for your query. That’s better than in Bing, but not optimal either, especially since the first result leads you into the wrong direction.

I have been testing other search engines, DuckDuckGo and Ixquick in particular, to find out if they provide better results than Bing or Google.

Ixquick calls itself the world’s most private search engine. Unlike other search engines, IxQuick does not record user IP addresses or share personal data with third parties. A full page with privacy related information is available on the service’s website.

I have used Ixquick for the last week as my main search engine. There are things that I like, and things that do not work out that well. IXquick, like Bing, provides solid results for short queries. If you are looking for a particular business, software or product, you usually find it in the top spot on the search results page.

Results begin to deteriorate quickly if you add terms to the query. The first five results for the Thunderbird JavaScript query above for instance do not offer the information that you would need to get your question answered. The first result furthermore links to outdated information, just like they did on Bing (a different web property though).

Results are not always that bad though, but they are often not that great either. I also noticed that Google’s results are not always that better for longer queries, but you find pages with the information you are looking for more often there.

Back to Ixquick. Search results are always opened in new tabs instead of the same tab by default. It happened to me more than once that I clicked multiple times on a search result wondering why it would not open when in fact it was opened multiple times in new tabs in the browser. It takes some getting used to time but it is not really that bad.

You can open any page with a proxy that is provided by the search engine itself. This can be handy if a website is blocked in your country.

Do not get me wrong though, search results are not always that bad or that different from other search engines. A few things need improvement though:

• When I’m looking for something product related, e.g. Swtor PVP, I expect the product developer site in the top 5 results.
• When I’m searching for technology related things I expect recent information in the top 5 result if I do not add a version number to the product.
• When I’m searching for a product or business, I expect it to be the number one result in the search results (you will notice that software searches sometimes list download portals in front of the developer site).

All of this applies to Microsoft’s Bing search engine as well, and probably to the majority of other search engines out there. Google’s results are not really that much better or different, but the company somehow manages to often sneak in at least one result that you find your answer on.

I’d still suggest you give Ixquick, Bing or DuckDuckGo a try to see if these search engines return satisfactory search results for you. I for one will now move on to DuckDuckGo for a week to see how it is holding up.

Have you tried other search engines besides Google? Why do not you share your experience in the comments?

The company basically stated that an algorithmic change was launched that analyzes the ad to content ratio above the fold. Sites that do not have much content above the fold can be affected by this change, according to Google. What does affected mean exactly? They are pushed down in the search results in favor of sites that have a better user experience.

Sites that display ads to a normal degree are not affected by the change.

I personally have two issues with the announcement.

Parameters

Google did not provide information about the parameters that they look at. What’s missing?

• The definition of what the company considers to be an ad
• What Google considers to be a normal ad ratio above the fold
• The screen resolutions they use to calculate that ad to content ratio
• If popup ads or interstitial ads are also considered by the change

This leaves webmasters again with the nagging feeling that they may be affected by the change, even though they are likely not.

Not everyone is equal

The second aspect weights more heavily in my eyes. Take a look at the following screenshot and let me know if you would consider this a bad ad to content ratio on the page.

Please note that this screenshot shows a 1000 to 800 resolution, and that your experience may differ depending on a number of factors.

And now read Matt Cutts’ announcement again:

If you click on a website and the part of the website you see first either doesn’t have a lot of visible content above-the-fold or dedicates a large fraction of the site’s initial screen real estate to ads, that’s not a very good user experience

Is Matt saying that Google Search is not offering a good user experience? I think he does. Lets discuss in the comments.

The biggest issue for many is the fact that the majority of features cannot be disabled if you do not want to use them. It is either an all or nothing deal, unless you happen to run across programs that make the necessary modifications for you.

NoCrap Google Search Bar injects itself on Google Search pages. You will see two search forms on the Google homepage, and only the NoCrap search form on results pages.

You will notice two things right from the start:

• The Google header bar has been removed. A click on the x icon hides the custom search form so that the standard header is again displayed on the screen.
• Menus to customize the search are displayed right beneath the search form. Here you can select the number of results per page, safe or unsafe search, whether you would like to only see specific result types (e.g. images or video), the time span, language and format.

You can configure default parameters in the userscript settings.

You may also notice that searches are always enclosed in double quotes automatically which ensures that those terms need to be on all result pages.

NoCrap Google Search on top of that does away with many of the annoyances that one encounters on Google Search:

• Autocomplete disabled
• Google Instant disabled
• Live Preview disabled
• Personalized web search disabled
• Cache links show up again in the search results
• Links can now be copied directly, Google link manipulations on copy or mouse over are removed.

The search parameters do still work even if you clear all Google cookies. Users who have used custom parameters in the past know that clearing the Google cookies will reset the preferences to their default values.

NoCrap Google Search Bar is a useful userscript for Google users who want more control over their search result pages.

How do they do that? Search engines use a variety of factors, including a user’s search history, likes, browser or location to filter results. While this may seem harmless at first, it has consequences that are hard to detect.

It first means that websites and services may get demoted in the results if the search engine thinks they are less useful to you. This in turn may limit access to information, as results are moved to the back pages. It may also mean that you will see more news and information that you agree with and less that you would disagree with.

Companies like Google are also pushing more of their own content into the results, either by favoring sites such as YouTube or Google+ in the results, or by plastering ads in so many locations that it becomes harder to distinguish them from the search results.

But it is not only the search engines that filter information for users. Facebook does it to, by looking at a user’s likes and links that get clicked on. You may as a consequence see more news that some users post, and less that others post.

This algorithmic approach has its flaws, which many users may not realize immediately. Many may feel confirmed in their believes and ideas when the majority of information they see are tailored to their likes. The danger here is that these users will only see one piece of the puzzle, that they will miss out on information and that this leads to uneducated decisions.

Take a look at this Ted Talk video about the Filter Bubble concept:

Escape

It is not easy to escape the bubble completely. When it comes to search engines, you can move to engines that do not filter or personalize results. This means no Google, no Bing, no Yahoo but search engines like DuckDuckGo. But search engines are not the only ones that filter and personalize results.

Switching to another search engine is one thing, but what about sites like Facebook? You could obviously move to another social networking site or none at all, but most users are likely not willed to make that step. One option would be to contact the site owners or support to let them know how you feel about it, and that you want unfiltered news and information.

The thing is, if you want access to unfiltered information, you need to compromise. And this means letting services and websites know how you feel about the issue, and if nothing changes switching to other services that do not filter data in that extent.

Filters are not that far away from censorship and manipulation. And that’s scary.

What’s your take on the matter?

The link to Ghacks in Google Search for instance should be http://www.ghacks.net/ and not http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=ghacks&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CBwQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ghacks.net%2F&ei=MooNT_vzE5GnsgaegJXbBA&usg=AFQjCNEbVP7B0UnFl1Q9J0q_Vbl9uYoYOw which it is when you copy the link to the clipboard.

Here are two options to display direct website links in Google Search:

Google Search link fix

The Firefox add-on modifies all link targets in the Google search results and all other Google properties where this behavior can be observed, so that they point to the direct web address.

Just install the extension in the Firefox web browser, a restart is not required. If you are on Google Search currently you need to reload the page or run a new search before the extension starts replacing the links.

Firefox users can download the extension from Mozilla’s official Add-ons repository for the browser.

Don’t track me Google

This is a userscript that does the exact same thing the Firefox extension does. It is compatible with Firefox and Google Chrome, and maybe other web browsers as well. The userscript in addition hides the referral link so that sites you visit do not know where you came from.

Chrome users can install the userscript right away, while Firefox users need to install the Greasemonkey or Scriptish add-on first before they can do the same thing.

The userscript can be downloaded and installed over at the official Userscripts website.

You get information about the number of personal results integrated in the search results on top. The right displays Google+ profiles from Facebook employees, and below the Facebook site listing is the first personalized entry that was moved up there.

If you look closer you will realize that almost everything that has been added is related to Google+. The personalized results are taken from Google+, the people and pages listing is taken from that site as well, as are the personal results as they are based on what your Google+ friends have “liked” in the past.

You may also notice that search suggestions will now display Google+ names directly in the window.

All personalized results are highlighted with a blue icon in front of the page title. You can turn off Search plus Your World with a click on the Hide personal results button. There are other options that you can make use of if you thing that personalized search has gone to far.

Log out before running searches on Google or use another search engine like Bing, Duck Duck Go or Ixquick.

Personal results can also be turned off in the Search settings. Click on the options button and select Search Settings there.

Locate Personal results on the new screen and switch from “use personal results” to “do not use personal results”. Click on the save button afterwards.

Google is starting to promote their Google+ service heavily with the integration of results from that social networking service in the results.

Why I do not like it? I think that the majority of information added by personalized results are not telling me anything that I do not already know. And pages favored by friends are not necessarily better than other pages. Say you search for movies to watch on Google, and one of the first results is a personalized result where several of your female friends have voted for the movie Twilight. Does that mean that you will like the movie as well?

You now have to think about the people who voted for the result to make a decision whether this search result is helping you out or not.

Another issue that I have with person.lized search is that I always feel that the search engine is holding back on me. Instead of displaying the “real” results, it displays crippled results on the first page.

I personally have disabled Google Search plus your World right away. What about you? On a related note, all Google Search pages are now making use of HTTPS by default. You can still switch to HTTP search manually though

Internet Explorer 9 users click on the Tools icon in the upper right corner of their browser and select Manage Add-ons from the context menu. This opens the add-on manager that displays all toolbars, extensions and search providers installed in the browser. Switch to search providers to see a list of search engines currently available in the browser.

One of the search providers is listed as the default search engine under Status. If you are lucky enough, the new search provider that you want to use is already in the list. If that is the case select the new provider and click on the Set as default button afterwards to switch the default search engine in Internet Explorer.

It is furthermore possible to select a specific search provider manually for a search query that you enter into Internet Explorer’s address bar.

But what can you do if the search provider is not in the list? Easy; You visit the Internet Explorer add-ons gallery and use the available categories, like travel, search or news, or the built-in search to find the provider you are looking for. Please note that everything is mixed up in the beginning. You can use the pulldown menu at the bottom right to filter for search providers so that all other add-on types are not displayed anymore.

You add a new search provider with a click on the add-ons icon on the add-ons website and the selection of Add to Internet Explorer on the next page.

This opens a small confirmation window. You need to click on Add to install the new search provider. Options are available to make that provider the default search provider of the browser.

The new search provider is available right after it has been added to the web browser.

You can follow the link above to read up on the new search tool. You can access Verbatim with a click on More search tools in the left sidebar of a Google search result’s page, and the selection of Verbatim thereafter. Another possibility is to add the parameter &tbs=li:1 to the end of the query to trigger a verbatim search.

It took less than a day for someone to create a Google Verbatim userscript that places the option more prominently on all Google Search pages. A Yes, really button is added to the Google search form both on the Google homepage and on search result pages. Users can still click on the standard button to perform a search, or they can click on the new Yes, really button to run a verbatim search instead.

The name Yes, really answers the unasked question whether you really want to search for all the words entered in the search form. The userscript works fine under the Firefox web browser with Scriptish installed, and in the Google Chrome web browser. It should run equally fine for users who have the Greasemonkey extension installed instead. I have not tested the Google Verbatim userscript in the Opera browser or other web browsers.

Interested users can download Gooverbatim from the official Userscripts website.

Microsoft has created the Firefox with Bing website to distribute a special version of the Firefox web browser. This particular version of Firefox ships with Bing set as the browser’s homepage, default search engine and search provider in Firefox’s address bar.

Internet users who click on the Get Firefox with Bing button are redirected to a download on the Mozilla website. The download pops up automatically, the download itself is the latest stable Firefox browser version. Users who install the latest stable version of Firefox this way will use Bing instead of Google in the browser.

This does not really change anything else. Firefox versions available for download directly at Mozilla will still ship with Google as the default search provider. And that’s the place where most Firefox downloads happen.

It is up to Microsoft to promote Firefox with Bing, and it remains to be seen if a lot of users will take up Bing’s offer and download the Bing Firefox version from the promo page.

Existing Firefox users can install the Bing add-on for the browser instead to add the same functionality. If you do not want to install and add-on for that, you can head over to the Mycroft Project website instead to pick search providers from the list there.

So, Mozilla is teaming up with Microsoft, and probably rewarded handsomely for it. Some may see the move as a first step to become less dependent on Google, which in my opinion is a path that Mozilla should have taken a long time ago.

You can read the official announced over at the Bing Community blog.

What’s your take on this?

Google first started comparing and later on using the information provided by Personal Blocklist users into their search engine ranking algorithm (which added another weapon to the arsenal of black hats).

A month later Google began to add options to block sites from the search results directly. Users who visited a site from the Google results and clicked on back in the first seconds of visiting that site were greeted with a “block all domain results” link under that site’s search engine listing.

Yesterday Google made the announcement that users of the Personal Blocklist extension for Google Chrome can now export the blocked site data to their personal Google account.

For that they need to click on the red extension icon in the Chrome interface to bring up the list of blocked sites.

A click on Export opens a second window where the data can be copied to the Clipboard or exported to Google. Users who select the second option will see a prompt asking them if they want to disable the Chrome extension after exporting the data to Google. This obviously makes only sense if they stay logged in while searching on Google.

All blocked domains and sites are listed in a review window afterwards. Here it is again possible to unblock some sites so that they won’t be imported into the personal Google account blocklist.

Google users should note that the maximum amount of blocked sites is 500 currently.

The core benefit of moving the blocked sites data from the Chrome extension to the Google account is that the search engine results of the latter will always display ten organic search results.

Google users who do not run Chrome can add domains and sites to their blocked sites list with a click on the Settings icon, selecting Search Settings and clicking on Manage blocked sites in the new window. (thanks Venkat)

Google users who use the + operator nowadays for their searches will see a notification at the top notifying them that the “+ operator has been replaced” and that they now have to use double quotation marks to search for an exact word or phrase in the search engine.

Instead of searching for technology +news in Google, users now have to use the search phrase technology “news” instead for the desired result.

What if you want multiple exact words or phrases included in your search phrase? Then you need to use double quotation marks for all the terms. Say you want to search for technology and both news and blog included on each of the resulting pages. You would then search Google for technology “news” “blog”.

A Google Rep on the official Google Search support forum confirmed the change.

We’ve made the ways you can tell Google exactly what you want more consistent by expanding the functionality of the quotation marks operator. In addition to using this operator to search for an exact phrase, you can now add quotation marks around a single word to tell Google to match that word precisely. So, if in the past you would have searched for [magazine +latina], you should now search for [magazine "latina"].

We’re constantly making changes to Google Search – adding new features, tweaking the look and feel, running experiments, – all to get you the information you need as quickly and as easily as possible. This recent change is another step toward simplifying the search experience to get you to the info you want.

The question here is if the new method simplifies search. Users now have to use two symbols instead of one to include exact single word searches. It simplifies search if an exact search phrase needs to be included on the websites in the results, as users would have used double quotation marks in this case anyway for the desired result.

Some users on Webmaster World have criticized Google for that move as it can now happen that pages appear in the search results that do not include the exact phrase. While the pages are mostly relevant to the search query itself, it can happen that the exact term does not appear on said pages (e.g. some results for the query “new york train timetable” do not contain that exact phrase.

While that is certainly not a issue on most systems, it could lead to issues on some. If you are experiencing pages that do not load, broken applications or other issues you may want to fix or reverse the change.

Before I’m showing you how this is done I’d like to explain what’s happening.

Google recently announced that they would enable https, also known as encrypted, search for all logged in users that visit the main search engine google.com.

Logged in users who load http://www.google.com/ are automatically redirected to https://www.google.com/. Encrypted search can be beneficial as it encrypts the traffic that is send to and received from Google. This means that no one in your computer network (e.g. admins, your boss, your ISP) can see what you are doing on the Google website. They still see that you are on Google, and will see the sites that you click on though.

Using secure connections is an optional feature. On my PC, it is already enabled in the Chrome web browser but not in Firefox. Google has added a preference in the Global Search preferences to enable or disable the secure connection feature.

Google users who notice automatic redirects can prevent this from happening in the search settings. To do that they need to click on the options icon in the upper right corner of the screen (next to the profile name) and select Search Settings from the context menu that opens up.

They then need to scroll down until they find the Secure Connection setting.

Secure connections are enabled if the box is checked. To disable simply remove the check mark and click Save Preferences. This puts an end to redirects to the https version of search.

Update: It appears as if Google has removed the option to disable the redirection to https in the search options. There is no option available anymore to force your Google connections to use http instead of https.

Webmasters know that Google saves information about every web page googlebot, the company’s search engine crawler, visits. While it was not possible to access the cached link of every website in existence as some did not show up, it was a nice way of accessing a site’s content in case that it was temporarily or permanently unavailable.

Users were also able to access a site’s contents without actually visiting that site. Handy in networks where that particular website was blocked. And the similar link feature was interesting to discover new related websites and services.

Google has revamped the design of the results pages noticeably in past years. They introduced a permanent sidebar on the left linking to specialized searches and advanced filters. The company introduced so called instant previews of every site in the search engines.

Two elements that have been removed in the process are the cached link and similar link. If you visit a Google search results page nowadays you will not find the cached or similar link there anymore. The links are still there but in hiding.

Google has moved cached and similar links to the instant preview area. This is not as intuitive as it may sounds. You need to hover your mouse over a search result to display the instant preview arrows on the right of it. If you now move your mouse over that area you will see a screenshot of how the particular site looked on googlebots last visit.

Displayed near the top next to the page’s title are the cached and similar links. A left-click opens the cached or similar pages in the same tab, a middle-click in a new tab in the web browser.

There you have it. Both features are still there, albeit more hidden and less comfortable to access. (via)

While that’s distracting from the search form, it also is something that is highly popular.

Bing today announced an addition to their search engine’s homepage. Users with HTML5 capable browsers may see a video playing instead of the static wallpaper image.

The developers note that this is not something that Bing users should expect to see every day, but that it will be used regularly in the future. Most modern web browsers (e.g. Internet Explorer 9, Google Chrome, Firefox or Opera) should display the video just fine.

It has to be noted that only the US homepage of the search engine is currently showing the HTML5 video on the frontpage. Users from other countries that head over to Bing need to change the country to United States first in the upper right corner to see the HTML5 video in action.

Bing announced that the videos will be rolled out to international markets in the coming months, so that users from all over the world can view the videos on localized versions of the search engine.

I personally have to admit that it looks really well on the homepage, and that loading times do not seem to be longer than before. I was not able to test the connection on a slower machine. It can be that users connecting with low speed Internet connection may have a different experience.

Microsoft has created a video that gives us a look behind the scenes of the Bing homepage.

Have you seen the new HTMl5 video on the Bing homepage? If so, what’s your take on it?

Today Bing announced that they have added a second authoritative feature called Action Buttons. Action button basically suggest common actions performed on the site. The Bing community blog has two examples for that.

First the results page for United Airlines which lists the United Airlines homepage as an authority site. The action buttons for the United Airlines result case are Check in, Flight status and Book a flight. These buttons are displayed on the right of the search result.

The second example is for a car rental company and the action buttons Rent a car, Locations and Contact us relate to that.

The first thing that I noticed was that some of the site links led to the same pages on the site. This resulted in a few follow up questions that I had. For instance, why is it necessary to display actions twice in the results. And as a consequence, if it is not time to revamp the sitelinks part of the algorithm on Bing to make sure that sitelinks and actions are not identical.

There are arguments for the way Microsoft is laying out those information on the page. The action buttons are larger than the sitelinks, which makes them more prominent on the results page. Search engine users on the other hand are used to sitelinks, and some might feel left alone when those links suddenly display different kinds of pages for sites that they visit regularly (do not get me started on why they do not access the sites directly. Many use search engines for everything, even if they visit a site daily).

You will notice some irregularities when it comes to the new feature. Banks for instance return only a log in action button and nothing else. Viable options here would be to link to the bank’s contact and support pages.

Regardless of that I think that it is an interesting idea that works very well for some industries, and not so well for others. What’s your take on Action Buttons.

Bing up until now did not make use of some of those techniques. The company did however announce a new concept called adaptive search yesterday. Adaptive Search basically uses previous searches to determine the best results for a user on Bing. These results are then displayed more prominently on the search engine (they get bonus points so to speak).

The concept is all about ambiguity. Search engines sometimes do not know what you are looking for. Say you enter cars in the search form. You could be looking for automotive information, or the movie cars, or someone with the last name Cars.

Adaptive search looks at a user’s previous searches to determine which results the user is after. Someone who searched for Disney and Cars 2 before may see more information about the movie Cars than about automobiles. The same is true for a user who searched for car brands like Mercedes before, only that this user would see more automotive related results.

Here is a video that demonstrates the concept.

Some users may have privacy concerns. Microsoft notes that the feature can be disabled by turning off the search history on Bing.

Adaptive search has its shortcomings. Lets take the Australia example from the Bing news page. Say you research your next vacation in Australia. You perform a few searches and get all things sorted out. Just before the start of your vacation, you decided to look up the movie Australia to watch it before the trip. If you just enter Australia, you might end up with no movie information whatsoever. You can counter this by searching for Australia movie obviously.

What’s your take on Adaptive Search?

Google today announced that they have modified site links. When you now search for Ghacks in the Google search engine, you will notice that the site links use up a lot of space. On my 1920×1200 resolution and a maximized window, that’s about two thirds of the screen.

Here is a screenshot of Google’s old sitelinks layout for comparison.

Why has Google made the decision to change the sitelinks layout? The Webmaster Central blog lists four reasons: Visibility, Flexibility, Clarity and Quality.

• Visibility: The font size of the link text has been increased. Both the url and the first free words of the description added.
• Flexibility: Sitelinks are now query dependent, and the maximum number of sitelinks has been increased from eight to twelve.
• Clarity: Sitelinks and standard search results are now separated, which means that a sitelink entry will not appear in the general search results and vice verse.
• Quality: Google with the update has “combined the signals” used for “site links and ranking”.

I personally think that Google went a bit overboard with the new sitelinks design. It takes an extreme amount of space. Both the description and url information are more or less useless, considering that you won’t usually see the full url or more than the first five or six words of the description on the search results page.

I’d rather like to see options to customize the layout. For my site, I’d remove the descriptions completely and start the urls after the domain name, as it should be clear that results come from the same domain (with the exception if a subdomain is listed of course).

Another thing that I think is missing is the ability to pick your own links for the sitelinks. Google picks them automatically, and your only option of influencing the listing is by demoting urls in the Webmaster Tools. First, that is no guarantee that the link won’t show up as a sitelink anymore, and second it does not guarantee that a better link is picked by Google’s algorithm.

For my site, I’d really like to add more categories and get rid of the articles that are displayed. That’s however not really possible.

You find more information about Google’s new sitelinks at the Google Webmaster Central blog. Have you encountered the new sitelinks in Google’s search engine yet? If so, what’s your opinion?