Jamesq

Is this the future of search?

A possible Twoogle Future?

Just saw a post on the marketing Pilgrim for Google’s Magazine search facility where they aim to provide search results from magazine archives. This got me thinking of a couple of questions which I’ll list just in case Matt Cutts is stuck for something to do with 20% free time at Google!

How long before this covers current magazines and newspapers? Each scanned and tagged by article and image. It would certainly make searching for editorial, brand mentions and column inches a fair bit easier. You could create custom publications with articles only relevant to the sections you choose to read. Perhaps even an opportunity for additional ad revenue through making adverts interactive! I say get scanning Google!

The other question is when do they plan to scan the back catalogue of Isle of Man Portfolio and Manx Tails?

Whilst looking up the new owner of Man City Football Club in Google Images I found this picture of the Sheikh’s Wife. I’m assuming this isn’t his wife (If anybody has met his wife and can confirm this isn’t her let me know) and can only take from this a lesson not to rely on Google Images too heavily when compiling guess the famous person quizes.

Don came home the other day with a couple of Microsoft Excel issues to solve and we had a problem at work that needed a work around for a fairly manual task. As always Google delivered and we found and implemented solutions to all the problems. In the end non particularly hard and ended up being solved by IF, COUNTIF and VLookup functions.

What struck me though was how unhelpful or confusing the built in help functions are. I find them extremely unusable and unfriendly and can only imagine they were written by a programmer or Microsoft Boy Wonder.  It would be far more helpful if the help functions gives a user access to a panel of real user experiences and tutorials rather than a single handbook style instruction manual. Maybe even integrate straight into a search for related sites,  blog posts, videos, audio etc. Perhaps even a Microsoft Office version of Yahoo Answers where contributers get ranked with the best user rated content rising to the top.