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Google Taking Blog Comments Searching Real-Time?

By Pamela Jones et al.

A reader sent me an article about something intriguing he noticed in Google results. He was wondering if any of you have noticed it too. I contacted Google to see what they might say, and here's what they told me: "We crawl the web continuously and schedule visits to each page intelligently to maximize freshness." Of course, to maximize intelligently, one has to experiment. In fact, Google has a blog post about their various experiments:

From time to time, we run live experiments on Google — tests visible to a relatively few people -- to discover better ways to search. We do this because there’s no good substitute for understanding how real people, in real-world situations, actually operate. Theories are fine, but “improving the user experience” really happens best when we understand what people do online.

So to learn more, we sometimes randomly select a group of people to see a possible improvement to search options. Or we may select a group of people and try out a new element while they're searching. If you ever wonder why your Google site looks slightly different from that of the person sitting next to you, this is why.

He seems to have hit on one. So, take a look and see what you think.

Full post as published by Groklaw on January 22, 2008 (boomark / email).