Query Refinement @ Google
Notice the "See results for: flora margarine" line.
So, this was a completely useless refinement proposal for me (I was looking for the flora inference engine) but - since when does Google offer such refinement proposals? I knew the "Did you mean" proposals - but hadn't seen this kind of offer to restrict the number of search results.
On a second thought this is probably build on the same basis as the "Did you mean" things - they have a list of very common multiword phrases and just propose these when someone enters a part of it ... but still.
2 Comments:
Google does this for a while now. Actually, when searching for highly ambiguous terms, ask.com is a bit nicer than Google (but take the international version!). They first cluster the results and then they show the highest ranking results of each cluster, instead of showing the highest ranking results for your terms. And they actually show you the clusters in a column. The inference engine was not among the results, though.
By the way, I am using personalized Google, and when I searched for Flora, I actually did get the inference engine on the first page with Google. I am not sure if this was due to the personalization, or if you had the same result (it was under the margarine).
Hmm, I seem to have missed that (I was, however, aware that other search engines are doing it, in particular clusty).
And no - I don't have the Flora inference engine on the first page. Nice to hear that Google's personalized search actually works - but I have to say that I'm too paranoid to use it. The way it was implemented the last time I tried it, it meant that anyone able to obtain my Google password would be able to see all my past Google searches ... I think that's just too much information too easily available.
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