Search Engine Musings

Google announce the end of the supplemental index

In a curiously timed announcement, just when many people are turning to thoughts of Xmas rather than SEO, Google have said that from now on all search queries will access the full index for relevant results, effectively ending the problem of good quality pages being ignored because they’ve been relegated to the supplemental index.

Supplementals have been a serious problem for the last few years for many sites which have either a deep navigation structure or insufficient inbound links - both situations that result in pages with a low PageRank; which is known to have been a trigger for dropping out of the main index and into the supplemental one. Because Google was only employing the supplemental index when there were insufficient relevant pages in the main index for a query, any pages with rich content but poor PageRank were effectively being excluded from achieving good search results.

Some commentators have suggested that the supplemental index goes hand in hand with PageRank to enable a fast enough response time to queries - Dan Theis has a blog posting on the subject which makes interesting reading and it’s intruiging to wonder what Google have been doing under the hood if his theory was right and how they’ve overcome the performance problems it suggests.

So far I haven’t seen any evidence of change in search results, but that may be because I’ve been used to designing with a view to avoiding the problem. However I’ll be revisiting a number of sites which I know have suffered in the past to see if matters improve for them.

It has to be said that a number of SEO commentators are sceptical about whether there will be any real benefit or if it’s just window-dressing. Andy Beard is one of those who also isn’t seeing any change in the SERPS. However to be fair there may be a delay in getting any changes rolled out through the vast number of data centres that Google uses. One thing I’ll be watching closely is the listing of internal links in Webmaster Tools, because I’ve long suspected that this only lists pages that come from the main index. If that is true then we should see all the pages in a site appearing in that listing. I’ll keep watching this and return to it in a few weeks time.

Earlier this week over at AltSearchEngines the title of alternative search engine of the year was awarded to Quintura. Strictly speaking it doesn’t seem to be a search engine in its own right but rather a search interface, and that’s where its value lies.

Quintura is of Russian origin, and it makes use of that design feature beloved of Web 2.0 bloggers - the cloud. But instead of the static and to my mind fairly pointless version we’re used to seeing, it uses the cloud idea in a dynamic way, interfacing it with the search box via some fairly heavyweight artificial intelligence algorithms. It currently uses a Yahoo xml feed for its main web and image search, plus Blinx for video search and there is also an Amazon search facility, but from the description of the associated desktop search it looks as if it can work with others too. They have a Russian language version which works with Yandex results.

Searching by Clouds

Basically you enter an initial search as normal and the usual results list appears in the right half of the screen. On the left (or optionally above if you reposition it from the settings menu) the cloud appears with your initial search terms in bold red in the centre. Around it are clustered some other related terms and if you hover over one of them that word is temporarily added to your base search phrase (you’ll see this happen in the search input box) and the search results update accordingly; as does the cloud. Hover over another word and that one replaces the first addition, while if you click on it the word is added to the search query as a persistent addition so you can then refine further without losing it. Hovering over a word also causes a red x to appear beside it and by clicking the x you can exclude that word in the same way as using a minus sign would in the search box. Double-click in a blank area of the cloud and a text box appears so you can add a word that doesn’t appear in the cloud.

All this takes longer to describe than to do - once you get used to using the cloud you find it’s a fast way of refining results without taking your hand off the mouse.

Because the cloud interface is so intuitive for children there is a separate childrens version and the founders of the company are apparently planning a version specifically aimed at mothers.

Although the cloud interface takes up a fair bit of screen space, given that most search results leave a lot of white space anyway it is less intrusive than you might expect, and all in all this seems like a useful progression in search interface design and it’s one I’ll be investigating further.

I certainly find it more useful than the various attempts at ‘universal search’ that we’ve seen so far - most of those seem to get in the way of seeing normal results by cluttering the space up with other media or somewhat doubtful local results. Quintura’s beauty is that, like all the best ideas, it is essentially simple in operation for the user. At the moment it’s still sporting a Beta tag so I look forward to seeing whatever future developments they can come up with.