Google Tests Sort By Date/Sort By Relevance Feature In SERPs
This will only be a short post and many many apologies if this is old news (I’ve been away on holiday for a few days so I’m a little behind with my reading) - judging by a quick search though it appears no-one has reported this yet. That means I’m part of a new Google test - awesome! I love it when that happens.
Right now, any search I run on Google.com shows me a page like this:
On the right I see two options that I’ve never seen before, “sort by relevance” and “top results sorted by date”:
Clicking the “sort by date” shows me a ‘fresh’ results page like this:
The URL changes when I click either of the two options to append a sortbydate parameter:
Sort by relevance (regular Google results):
http://www.google.com/search?q=tom+critchlow&sortbydate=0
Sort by date (fresh Google results):
http://www.google.com/search?q=tom+critchlow&sortbydate=1
Without delving into this too deeply it appears that the ’sort by date’ results are similar to google blogsearch results though the two results pages differ and in fact right now I’m seeing the same “sort by relevance”, “sort by date” options on blogsearch results pages too:
The URL changes in a different way for blogsearch with “sort by relevance” just using the regular URL and “sort by date” using an “&scoring=d” parameter:
http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=tom+critchlow&scoring=d
Interestingly, I don’t get the same option for google images (where I think this feature would be pretty handy - assuming of course that google image search results didn’t suck!)…
Anyone else seeing this? What are your thoughts on this?
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Herb Firestone on Fri (22 Aug) @ 10:54 pm
Great post, especially for a short one! I was planning to write a blog post next Thursday on a similar subject. In fact, I’m still planning to write it so I’ll link to yours in the process. One reason no-one has picked up on the new Google features is probably because they haven’t started in the states yet. No matter how many times I search your name and Facebook in Google, it never gives me dating or relevance options like in your example. Of course Google has many data centers but it looks to me as if someone is AB testing those features in your part of the world. Could be only in England. I’d be interested in learning if you find out anything.
I was planning on suggesting that they do something like dating and relevance because, whenever I search for something as simple as “how to add a YouTube video to Wordpress,” all I get are tutorials and even videos from around 1911!
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Recent Links Tagged With "blogsearch" - JabberTags on Mon (6 Oct) @ 2:34 pm
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