Its been a few days since Google has made its new search engine architecture open to public. It’s codenamed ‘Caffeine’. There are already a couple of posts about Google Caffeine on DW. One was posted by Akshay and the other by your’s truly 🙂
Yesterday I started to fool around with Google Caffeine again trying to see what are the differences. I typed in to search information about ‘Pune’ and came up with some results as always. Clicked on the ‘Show Options’ right at the top above from to see if that had anything different than the usual Google Search options. Sure enough there was a difference in the view section. A new option of Wonderwheel was present. Here is a screenshot to show you how it looks.
Google Search’s Wonder Wheel
Before you search you need to create a cookie with your browser to let google know you intend take part in its prototype. Just copy and past this code I found on a website into the address bar of your browser.
javascript:void(document.cookie=”PREF=ID=4a609673baf685b5:TB=2:LD=en:CR=2:TM=1227543998:LM=1233568652:DV=AA:GM=1:IG=3:S=yFGqYec2D7L0wgxW;path=/; domain=.google.com”);
I searched for ‘Pune’ and then it showed me links in a flash interface circle labelled ‘Pune’ with many links out of that circle. I clicked on ‘Pune Map’ and that opened another wheel named ‘Pune Map’ with again different links. The next link I clicked was ‘India Map’ and another wonderwheel opened. I think this is a great tool for people who are using the search engine in a investigative way. No need to remember where you started the search from as you can keep going back to where you began with a click.
I dont think this will be very useful for search queries which dont go beyond the first 20 results that pop up. Wonderwheel seems to be for web searches which go into trying to look for something unique and will need a lot of options. Might also need the lay man not to learn how to use search queries and search tips.
The search wars are heating up with the buzz being created by Microsofts and with ‘Caffeine’ the industry leader Google seems to be ready for battle!
Links: Google Caffeine | Blogoscoped
3 Comments
Great post! When is this due to roll out?
Also its interesting to see that the new google relies on keywords more!!
I dont know when its due to roll out. No official or unofficial announcement made as yet by google. Personal opinion is that there wont be any specific roll out date, they will move to caffiene sometime without much fanfare. majority of the people who search dont really want to know much about the finer aspects and features for their search tools and hence i suspect they wont try to send a message with too much publicity where people might look for a excuse to change over to bing as their prefered search engine