Google Pesonalizes Search Results More with Star Feature

Google today introduced yet another way it is personalizing search results (we talked about social search with the company at SMX). Now Google is letting users "star" search results that they like, just like the star feature in other Google products like Gmail, Reader, and Google News.

This almost seems like an obvious move for SERPs now that it is there, but it has not been present until now. Essentially, when you star results you like, you will get them at the top of your results the next time you search a query relevant to them. 

"With stars, you can simply click the star marker on any search result or map and the next time you perform a search, that item will appear in a special list right at the top of your results when relevant," the company explains. "That means if you star the official websites for your favorite football teams, you might see those results right at the top of your next search for [nfl]."

"The great thing about stars is that you don't have to keep track of them," the company continues. "You don't even have to remember whether or not you starred something. Simply perform a search and you'll rediscover your starred items right when you need them. Stars sync with your Google Bookmarks and the Google Toolbar, so you can always see your list of starred items in one place and easily organize them. Even beyond the results page, while browsing the web you can quickly click the star icon in Toolbar to create a bookmark, and those pages will start showing up in the new stars feature."

Interestingly, the feature replaces Google's existing SearchWiki feature, which apparently didn't catch on too much. According to Google, people don't much care for rearranging the order of search results. I can't say I blame them. The annotation feature that came along with that is pretty much what you get from Google's other product - SideWiki, anyway, and Google suggests using that if you want to leave a comment on a particular result.

The new star interface will be rolling out over the next couple days. It will only work if you are signed in of course. Do you like the result starring concept? Share your thoughts.

Google Buzz Draws New Content-Scraping Controversy

Update 2:  Google offered the following statement: "Buzz can only expand to show whatever was in the underlying feed. For example, if an item is truncated in the feed to only include 200 characters, then Buzz will only show 200 characters."

So, in other words, Bloggers can prevent their full content from showing in Buzz just like in a reader, depending on how they set up their feed.

Update: So far, Google has referred me to the same response they gave Stay, but I've inquired further. We'll keep you posted.

Original Article: If you were under the impression that the controversy surrounding Google Buzz was starting to die down, think again. So far, we've mostly heard about privacy issues, which Google has publicly addressed. They've also made changes based on user feedback. Now, we're hearing about possible copyright issues. Google appears to be republishing full articles without permission, and stripping out any ads that may be in those articles.

One can easily see why any blogger or publisher wouldn't be very pleased with this scenario. Not only are they serving up full articles that others have written without sending authors the traffic or even ad clicks, but if a user reads the article through Buzz within their Gmail account, they will likely see the ads Google itself serves.

Blogger Jesse Stay of Stay N' Alive brings the subject up in a post, claiming that this is exactly what is happening to his content. However, Google did respond to him, saying they would "have the ad scraping issue fixed by next week." That would solve one problem, but presumably, this doesn't change the fact that they are showing full article text, which is an interesting choice on Google's part, considering the controversy surrounding how Google News aggregates publishers' content.

That is a different situation entirely, because Google News does not publish full articles (unless they come from one of their partners). They simply provide a title, small snippet, and link to the original source, hence driving traffic to that source. Based on Stay's story, Google will not likely be driving much traffic by showing full articles in Buzz. We've contacted Google for comment on this (we'll post when we receive it).

One might compare reading an article through Buzz to reading one through a feed reader, like Google Reader. Sometimes you can read a feed in its full text, but the author has the ability to prevent this. With Buzz, the full-text articles appear to be coming simply from people sharing the articles, which is out of the author's control (we asked Google if their is a way authors can prevent this...again, we'll post a response when we receive it).

Google Looking to Split Print Pages into Individual Web Articles?

Back in 2008, Google filed a patent, which was recently published for public viewing. The patent is called "Segmenting Printed Media Pages Into Articles," and appears to imply that the company wants to take individual articles from print publications and turn them into individual articles on the web. The abstract says:

Methods and systems for segmenting printed media pages into individual articles quickly and efficiently. A printed media based image that may include a variety of columns, headlines, images, and text is input into the system which comprises a block segmenter and a article segmenter system. The block segmenter identifies and produces blocks of textual content from a printed media image while the article segmenter system determines which blocks of textual content belong to one or more articles in the printed media image based on a classifier algorithm. A method for segmenting printed media pages into individual articles is also presented.

An archived newspaper page in Google News (content not separated)

A hat tip goes to Erik Sherman writing for Bnet, who says, "Although this could allow Google to convert stacks of periodicals into electronic archives, it potentially sends the company headlong into conflict with a famous Supreme Court ruling on media law."

"There’s just one legal problem: New York Times Co. , et. al. v. Jonathan Tasini et. al. Usually called the Tasini case, freelance writers sued the New York Times and other print publications for licensing individual articles to database companies without permission from the writers, who retained the copyright on the articles," he explains. "One of the main turning points was that the publishers had explicit permission only to include the articles in the print publication. However, copyright law did not allow the publishers to break their publications up and make the articles accessible to readers out of the original context."

He goes on to note that Google could go back far enough into old print archives before rights were such an issue, and would be dealing with freelance writers who mostly didn't copyright their articles. The technology could certainly be used in any future partnerships the company could make with print publishers, should the publications ever wish to go that route.

What do you make of the patent? You can read the entire patent application here, in patent application-speak.

Google Looking to Split Print Pages into Individual Web Articles?

Back in 2008, Google filed a patent, which was recently published for public viewing. The patent is called "Segmenting Printed Media Pages Into Articles," and appears to imply that the company wants to take individual articles from print publications and turn them into individual articles on the web. The abstract says:

Methods and systems for segmenting printed media pages into individual articles quickly and efficiently. A printed media based image that may include a variety of columns, headlines, images, and text is input into the system which comprises a block segmenter and a article segmenter system. The block segmenter identifies and produces blocks of textual content from a printed media image while the article segmenter system determines which blocks of textual content belong to one or more articles in the printed media image based on a classifier algorithm. A method for segmenting printed media pages into individual articles is also presented.

An archived newspaper page in Google News (content not separated)

A hat tip goes to Erik Sherman writing for Bnet, who says, "Although this could allow Google to convert stacks of periodicals into electronic archives, it potentially sends the company headlong into conflict with a famous Supreme Court ruling on media law."

"There’s just one legal problem: New York Times Co. , et. al. v. Jonathan Tasini et. al. Usually called the Tasini case, freelance writers sued the New York Times and other print publications for licensing individual articles to database companies without permission from the writers, who retained the copyright on the articles," he explains. "One of the main turning points was that the publishers had explicit permission only to include the articles in the print publication. However, copyright law did not allow the publishers to break their publications up and make the articles accessible to readers out of the original context."

He goes on to note that Google could go back far enough into old print archives before rights were such an issue, and would be dealing with freelance writers who mostly didn't copyright their articles. The technology could certainly be used in any future partnerships the company could make with print publishers, should the publications ever wish to go that route.

What do you make of the patent? You can read the entire patent application here, in patent application-speak.

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