Comments on: Nice “News quote” feature

By: Lee Odden

Lee Odden — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 15:37:29 +0000

I’ve used the flight status search feature before but I didn’t know about the whois. That’s convenient.

Just how famous do you have to be for the news quote feature though?

I tried, Matt Cutts, Danny Sullivan, John Battelle, Sergey Brin and Larry Page - nada.

However, I did get quotes for Steve Ballmer (but not Bill Gates) and Barack Obama. Very interesting - would love to see it grow.

By: Chilli

Chilli — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 12:37:15 +0000

I think that it’s innovation like this that has kept Google on top, yet another feature for me to add to my ‘just-cant-spend-a-day-without’ list! Thanks for highlighting it Matt.

By: Erick

Erick — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 23:51:12 +0000

Matt,

I agree with you 100% as far as Google “Serving up something intelligent.” I remember the old days of hot bot, and lycos. The queries you would have to enter to get even the smallest piece of relevant info was ludicrous.

Over the years Google has created some very subtle and proficient changes to better the results set acheived from any query. It still amazes me that, “Google knows what I am talking about.”

Also, please thank whoever is responsible for Google Suggest Australia. Invaluable Tool.

Claudiu, People Rank! Noooooo not something else to optimise for! Do NOT give Google any ideas

By: Multi-Worded Adam

Multi-Worded Adam — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 16:02:27 +0000

I’m sort of with Dave on this one, but from a different angle.

This would be a cool feature IF print news sources (and let’s face it, Internet news in text format is a print extension) could be trusted to report stories accurately and in context. Neither has been the case for quite some time, and there is nothing to suggest it will be.

Not only that, what happens when a bunch of spammers get a hold of this feature and start “quoting” you?

I can see it now: Matt Cutts, in an interview with BBC News, was quoted as saying, “Link exchange is highly effective as an SEO technique if it is topically relevant and at least three-way.”

This is an okay idea in principle, but at least two groups of people will ruin it in practice.

By: Farrhad

Farrhad — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 09:59:27 +0000

Nice and innovative feature!
Google rocks!

By: Dave (original)

Dave (original) — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 03:06:22 +0000

Quotes from Arnold Schwarzenegger should be;

1) I’ll be back.

2) Hasta la vista baby.

3) If it bleeds, we can kill it.

Unless he ever said something else that has valid meaning ?

By: Roger

Roger — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 23:03:44 +0000

And I HATE the new whois feature.

Apart from making spammers’ lives much easier (to harvest email addresses), there seems to be only one provider of whois data at the moment, and if you go to that provider’s whois page (e.g. http://whois.domaintools.com/google.com) you can see an EXACT copy of all your HTML in the source code of that page, probably due to their use of the SEO Text Browser tool.

Isn’t that flouting the copyright laws?

By: Roger

Roger — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 22:51:40 +0000

[quote]you enter whatever interests you in the search box, and we’ll try to do something smart to help[/quote]

I really like the [what is the time] feature of Google and often use it to make sure my computer clock is OK, but I’m sure you could expand on that concept and answer other similar questions such as (many of them based on the questioner’s IP of course):-

- [what is the date]
- [where am I]
- [what's the weather like]
- [where's the nearest hotel]
- [where can I get pizza]
- [how many days until] keyword
etc., etc.

By: Andy Keeler

Andy Keeler — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 19:06:51 +0000

As a small-time webmaster, I was shocked to see some results for my own name (thanks to a few press releases I’ve submitted over the past few years). This kind of thing is incredibly helpful, kudos to Google.

By: Matt Cutts

Matt Cutts — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 15:26:57 +0000

Harith, I’ll pass that feedback on. I think a non-English version of newsquotes in several languages would be very cool.

Claudiu, I think it’s mostly just people that show up in Google News. I’ve had a few mentions in Google News sources in the last month or so, but I don’t think any of them had a direct quote from me. I agree that the ability to search for a company and get quotes by people in that company would be very neat.