Google For Dummies

Breezing Through WebQuotes

WebQuotes (quotations, not stock quotes) is one Labs experiment that might not be worth the effort. A failure? No, saying that would be unfair and untrue. This specialized search engine, which finds and displays text quotations about the sites on your search results list, is an original, ambitious, and even brilliant idea. The problem is that, as a practical application, WebQuotes isn’t very useful.

As I see it, the main problem with WebQuotes is that most search results don’t yield any quotes at all. This is partly because even when quotes exist for an influential site such as the New York Times (www.nytimes.com), quotes are not likely to exist for a certain page within the Times site that appears as a search result.

Finding examples of this insufficiency is easy. In a search for riaa grokster, an article from the Boycott RIAA site (www.boycott-riaa.com) appeared as the top search result, with no quotes. But a search for www.boycott-riaa.com delivered the main site as the first result, with two quotes from other sites.

Go to the WebQuotes home page (see Figure 8-7) to try it:

labs.google.com/cgi-bin/webquotes

Figure 8-7: The WebQuotes home page. You probably won’t get the maximum number of WebQuotes for most search results.

Start a search just as you would from the Google home page. Adjust the maximum number of WebQuotes you want to see for each search result, but don’t count on reaching the maximum (or getting any) for most results.

Figure 8-8 shows a WebQuotes search results page. Two settings are adjustable:

• The maximum number of WebQuotes displayed

• A minimum number of WebQuotes, fewer than which Google resorts to displaying an excerpt from the search result site

  
  Figure 8-8: WebQuotes search results, showing both WebQuotes and site excerpts.

Mixing quotes (from other sites) with excerpts (from the target site) is mixing apples and oranges, and confuses the WebQuotes experience. I keep the second setting at zero to eliminate site excerpts.