Disambiguation of Search Results? Yup, Google's got that
Just last week, in an email exchange with another search blogger, I wondered when Google would provide options for disambiguation of search results.
When you think about it, that's an obvious requirement for the Results page of any serious search engine. If I query for the search term "Java" - does it mean that I'm looking for results about the programming language, the coffee, or the island in Indonesia?
There's no way for the search engine to be able to tell, although personalization could provide clues. The easiest solution, as I wrote back in 2006, is for the search engine to just ask - which is why Wikipedia offers this page: Java (disambiguation) . Alternatively, the results can be grouped into various categories for the user to choose from, which is another way of doing the same thing.
Until now, Google has been mostly following a third option, which is to simply pick the most popular category regardless of the user's real preference; this can lead to some strange results, as highlighted in my earlier post on deconstructing real Google searches. But this approach doesn't really cut it, since it ignores all the unpopular search results - it's very possible that the long-tail searches can collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few "popular" searches.
There has also been a limited amount of disambiguation offered by Google's "related searches" feature.
Well, no more. Google appears to be experimenting with offering disambiguation directly by grouping search results into categories. See the screen shot below, that shows Google search results for the query: "freebase" . Effectively, the results page seems to be asking: do you mean, the free semantic web database, or the other kind, associated with drugs? Or a third alternative: FreeBase - a free Windows software program to configure the Apple AirPort Base Station.
The use of horizontal ruled lines to separate the sections, is a nice touch!
Obviously this is some type of test; I certainly hope it's successful. I can't wait to see this feature become mainstream among the major search engines. It will be a big step forward in Search!
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