inter:digital strategies

I can’t help it; I’m still calling Google Webmaster Central "Google Sitemaps". What can I say? It’s more defining of the function to me. Webmaster Central theoretically encompasses a broader set of functions than just the Sitemaps - however, most of the issues I ever address have more to do the Sitemap functionality.

However, that’s off the topic for this post. What I actually intend to write about it Google’s recent changes to the preferred domain feature in Sitemaps. Previously, they automatically added the "non-preferred" domain to your listing of sites owned when you set a preference. They will no longer be doing this, do to complaints of confusion from users.

I don’t know how widespread these complaints were, but it certainly came up in a Cre8asiteForums thread in August, where Vanessa Fox actually responded to a member’s complaints about the preferred domain system.

It’s nice seeing Google explicitly responding to problems - and in a reasonably efficient manner, as well. The complaints were initially posted on August 20th at Cre8asite, and the changes were announced today - September 12th. Three weeks isn’t a bad turnaround.

That said, it’s important to keep in mind that your www and non-www versions of a domain are, technically speaking, different web addresses. Like any subdomain, the "www" domain represents a subset of what can be present on your domain name. Although having this automatically added is confusing, given that many people don’t differentiate between the two addresses, maintaining the ability to register separate Sitemaps will still be possible.

If there’s any one thing which I really wish Google provided, it would be search refinement. Their option to "search within results" is OK…but not exactly user-friendly. The link is buried at the bottom of the search results page, first of all. The number of times, early on, that I filled in my refining terms at the bottom of the page and then clicked the "search within results" link expecting the refinement to be performed is just ridiculous!

But, assuming you’ve understood what this tool is meant to do, you’ll click the link and head off to the search box. And once you’ve reached it, you’ve got no beautiful suggested refinements, no suggestions of ways you might refine your search, and no clue.

Of course, that last bit might be your own fault…

However, the lack of a simple, user-friendly, and one-click solution to search refinement is a big lack. They do keep playing with various ideas along these lines, however - today, Michael Martinez takes note of an integration with Google Base which has some neat features.

Specifically, this example currently comes up for a search on cheese dip recipe, and provides drop down menus which allow you to examine recipes which use a specific main ingredient, in a chosen cuisine, and using a specific keyword. In this case, the main ingredient and keyword fields are prefilled from your search query.

It appears that "recipe" is the particular keyword which is triggering this additional search, although that actual behavior is a bit more complex. The drop down menus were triggered by a search on "artichoke recipe", but without providing an additional keywords field. I thought this might have been because of the lack of a third word in the query; but experimenting with a variety of third terms in the query simply caused the menus not to appear.

Generally speaking, however, most searches (all that I tried) for a food item and the word "recipe" bring up these drop down menus, although I have been unable to reproduce the extra keyword field.

So, if you’ve got a weird lump of kohlrabi and you don’t know what to do with it, Google will gladly help you figure out a solution!

It’s pretty cool. The sad thing is that I was unable to find myself in any recent news. Of course, given that it appears I was murdered in the late 19th century (according to the Olean Democrat on Tuesday, May 2, 1893,) this is hardly surprising.

Moved and carried that the attorney be instructed to look after the interests of ths city as pertains to the inquest about be held to inquire into the cause of death of Joseph Dolson in the sewer ditch on Laurens street April 28th, 1893.

Yuck! In the sewer ditch? Not too happy about that.

But, my death aside, the whole service is really pretty neat. You can view results in a timeline format, defaulting to sort from oldest to newest. If you’re trying to research, for example, the first mention of a particular technology or first use of a phrase, this could be a fantastic way to delve into the records. If you want to see an overview of a topic and how it was treated differently over time, this is a great resource.

It’s not perfect yet. The biggest hole, which is applicable to any news archive query, is completeness. Although the search is performed across a wide range of historical archives, it’s still missing a lot of information. This is undoubtedly a licensing issue - despite the fact that Google is providing easy access to purchasable content (not giving it away for free; an important distinction), I’m sure many companies see this service as a challenge to their control of information.

That is undoubtedly the reason I didn’t find myself in any recent archives. I know that I appeared in the newspaper in Missoula, Montana, where I grew up, in the 1990’s. No references, however, were in the results to be found. It would appear that my home town paper is not indexed.

This isn’t exactly a surprise. Small Montana papers are hardly one of the first sources Google would be likely to get involved, and, similarly, are a source which it’s unlikely that many of the major newspaper archive indexes they’re searching would have necessarily contracted with. Nonetheless, this leaves a big hole in the archives for small-town history. Local search is left in the lurch, for now.

Of course, your paper might very well be included - there’s no list of sources available, so it’s a bit of a crap shoot.

There are, perhaps, some duplicate content issues to be worked out. The results for this search are a little bit strange. Since these results could well change, I’m providing a screen capture as well so I can point out the fact that the 10 results on this page are all exactly the same.

Thanks to Phillip Lenssen and Barry Schwartz.