Google Search by Title, Author or Subject
An excellent idea from Greg Storey:
I understand the plight of Google needing to make the search results relevant to what the user may be looking for. But instead of searching for an airbag why can’t a person search for the title airbag?
Why don’t search engines provide a way to search by title, author, or subject?
A few thoughts:
- Is search by subject already available?
- Google would have to come up with some killer algorithms in order to make search by title or author work well.
- Google probably wouldn’t want to clutter their homepage or add any decision points to their dead simple interface. One idea that would help to avoid these issues is to use Yahooesque search shortcuts. For example, to search for the title “unraveled,” you would type “title unraveled.”
- 17 Nov 03
- google, information architecture, interface, search
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Comments
The directory isn’t really comprehensive enough to really be search by subject - this would require some metadata and is hard.
Search by title is easy, as Google have lots of nifty operators, which are a bit like Yahoo shortcuts.
http://www.google.com/help/operators.html
Here, the intitle and allintitle operators may help (Google currently places a high relevancy score for being in the title anyway).
Chris on 17 Nov 03
There is an intitle: operator
Ev. on 19 Nov 03