Hacking Google: Retro Links Revives Old Google Feature

Google sometimes turns off features. One such feature that I remember fondly is that at the bottom of Google’s search results, we offered nine other search engine suggestions. The idea was if you didn’t find what you were searching for on Google, you could click on the other links and easily run the same search somewhere else. Luckily, due to an April Fool’s joke about the Mentalplex, you can still see what these links looked like:

Many of these search engines consolidated or changed focus over time. Plus I’m guessing that every search engine in the world wanted to be on the list, which must have been really annoying for whichever Google person had to maintain that list of links. I think the list of other search engines dwindled down and eventually Google just turned the feature off.

Recently I was describing this feature to Tiffany Lane, another engineer at Google, and she had a great idea. Why not recreate this search feature on Google with modern search engines and websites? Because of the pain of maintaining an “official” list, we probably couldn’t turn this on for every user (plus not every user wants a lot of extra links added to their search results). But why not provide a completely unofficial option that people could install?

Thus was born Retro Links, which is a Greasemonkey script to add new search options to Google’s search results page. When Retro Links is installed, it looks like this:

Unlike the original feature, Retro Links lets you select which search engines to show from 42 different websites and search engines, then saves those preferences. It’s also very easy to add a new search engine in the JavaScript file.

Installation

Get Retro Links here: http://www.mattcutts.com/retrolinks/retrolinks.user.js

To install Retro Links you will need to be using Firefox and have Greasemonkey installed. Once Greasemonkey is running then you can click on the link above and you will be prompted to install the script. To see that it is working you can do a Google search – the links will be inserted near the bottom of the Google search results page.

Configuration

Configuring Retro Links is really simple. Suppose that you want to change the default Amazon link to search on Yelp. Just click on the [+] link to the right of the search engines and select Yelp from the drop-down box:

When you’re happy with your search engines, click the “Save” button to save your preferences.

Questions

What if the site I want is not one of the 42 options?
You can add more sites to the options by making a simple code change. To edit the code go to Tools -> Greasemonkey -> Manage User Scripts, select Retro Links and click the Edit button. Simply add the name and url of the new site to the RL_LINK_OPTIONS array, following the examples that are already there.

How do I turn on/off the update notification?
The script checks to see if a newer version is available once per day. If an update is available a red box will appear in the bottom right corner of the page with a link to download the latest version. If you want to stop checking for updates go to Tools -> Greasemonkey -> User Script Commands and select Retro Links -> Never check for updates. To start checking again select Retro Links -> Check for updates daily.

Disclaimer

Finally, Tiffany wanted to make sure that I included this quick disclaimer: “Retro Links is not an official Google project. I chose which links to include based on my personal preferences and web surfing habits. These decisions do not represent the opinions of my employer.” Tiffany, thanks for writing this great script!

Local news in more places

Last year we announced the launch of local news in the U.S., and this week we launched this feature of Google News to users in the UK, India, and Canada.

Local news sections let you keep track of current events in your area. We analyze every word in every story to understand what location the news is about and where the source is located. The top stories for a given area will be at the top of your results, and our rankings also take into account a publication’s location to promote local sources for each story.

To get started, look for the local section on your front page and enter your city, state, or postal code in the local search bar, shown here:

If you don’t see this section, you can also set up your local news by clicking “Personalize this page” on the top right of the page. On the menu that comes up, click “Add a local section”:


Once you’ve clicked the link, you’ll see a place to enter a postal code or city. Use the drop-down menu to choose the number of stories you’d like to see. To finish, click “Add Section” and you’ll see this local section on your personalized Google News page.

New Insights for your Search

Some of you may already be familiar with Google Insights for Search, which launched last August.

Much like Google Trends, you can use Insights for Search to analyze search volume patterns over time, as well as related queries and rising searches. You can also compare search trends across multiple search terms, categories, geographic regions, or specific time ranges. Insights for Search can help you can analyze everything from interest levels in rival soccer teams to the relative popularity of politicians.

Today the Insights for Search team launched additional features that allow you to see what the world is searching for beyond Google Web Search, by adding new data sources including Google News, Image Search, and Product Search. The new Insights for Search lets you break down search data in several ways. For starters, you can take a look at the rising News searches over the past 7, 30, or 90 days.

You can also view the popularity of a given query across different geographies, from country-level down to individual metropolitan areas. For journalists and newspapers, this feature could be a useful tool to gauge interest levels in different subjects among a reader base.

For instance, with March Madness in full swing, I was curious to see if interest in basketball runs equally high throughout the U.S. I tried a search for “NCAA” queries on Google News over the past 7 days, and found that interest was predictably high across much of the U.S. yet markedly higher in Kentucky, Iowa, and Kansas, as you can see on the map below:

Of course, Insights for Search can’t quite explain these search asymmetries, but they’re interesting to note nonetheless!

To learn more about this new release of Insights for Search, head over to the Inside Adwords blog, or start exploring right away on the Google Insights for Search homepage.

Wordle for Nancy Grace TV Show

I recently completed a huge “Media and Journalism” project: I transcribed over 500 hours of the Nancy Grace TV show on CNN. It took a long time, but here is an exhaustive Wordle tag cloud of all the words used in those 500+ hours of television:

It appears that all 500+ hours consist of those six words repeated over in different combinations.

I’m not serious and didn’t really watch or transcribe 500 hours of Nancy Grace. In reality, Nancy Grace uses more and different words. It only feels like every sentence is “little Caylee” or something similar.