More Google changes

  • The maximum words per query has increased from 10 to 32.
  • If you click a word in your query, it now takes you to answers.com instead of dictionary.com. Answers.com shows not only dictionary definitions but also thesaurus entries, encyclopedia and Wikipedia articles, and several other sources of information.

10 Responses to “More Google changes”

  1. Simon Willison Says:

    I’m still getting links to dictionary.com – maybe I’m seeing a different Google cluster from here.

  2. Joey Says:

    Yea I’m not seeing this (yet, I guess). Hmm… maybe you accidently saw something they are going to publish in a few days.

  3. Neil Paris Says:

    Doesn’t google roll out new changes to random cookies first before going to everyone?

  4. Jesse Ruderman Says:

    Google rolled out their new look to random cookies (http://www.squarefree.com/archives/000369.html), but I can’t think of any other changes they rolled out that way. I don’t think they’re rolling out links to answers.com using cookies. I see links to answers.com rather than dictionary.com in multiple browsers and even after deleting my google.com cookie in one browser.

  5. Michael Says:

    Usually it is by IP address.

  6. Neil Paris Says:

    Well, at first I didn’t see the new changes you talk about, but now I do.

  7. Adam Bliss Says:

    I noticed the direction to Answers.com this weekend…. Didn’t know about the update to 32 words; that’s fantastic! There have been quite a few cases when I’ve wanted to search for more than 10 words.

    However, the real reason I am visiting your weblog is that over on livejournal, a bunch of us want a certain Firefox extension. Basically we want to be able to right-click on a link and select from the context menu an option called “View Link Source”, which will open the link with “http://“ replaced with “view-source:”. I have the impression that this would be easy to hack together for anyone who knows how to write Firefox extensions, but that’s not any of us. Could you throw some light on the situation by either (a) throwing together a quick extension for us, or (b) explaining why it’s harder than it sounds?

  8. Neil Paris Says:

    Adam: Personally I have no idea if it would be easy or hard or impossible, but you could try asking at the MozillaZine Extensions Forum:

    http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewforum.php?f=19

  9. Adam Bliss Says:

    Actually, nevermind… I got off my lazy bum and wrote the extension myself. In case anyone wants it, it can be found here:

    http://www.math.berkeley.edu/~abliss/viewlinksource.xpi

  10. IMS_Blog Says:

    Googley

    Jesse Ruderman notes changes to Google. As best I can tell words in searches still link to dictionary.com rather than answers.com but I have noticed that going directly to google.com seems to be redirecting me to the local version at…