shouting loudly

Making Google Results More Useful

If you’ve ever tried to systematically study Google search results, you’ve probably grown frustrated with the lack of choices for customizing Google using the site’s preferences. I just discovered two tools that make these results eminently more usable.

Both tools are scripts for Greasemonkey, a plugin that lets you deploy small Java scripts in Firefox. This all sounds very imposing, but Firefox and Greasemonkey developers have made all this very painless.

First, I’ve spent the last several months annotating PDFs (using the Mac’s default application for reading PDFs, Preview) with search ranks. Now, thanks to Results Numbers, these numbers are automatically listed alongside each document.

Second, I installed the (underwhelming) Google Toolbar in order to be able to see a page’s Google PageRank without navigating to a separate page. The design of that feature of the toolbar is particularly infuriating; it shows a more-or-less-full green bar, but not the 0-to-10 number (which would actually be easier to render), forcing one to hover the mouse pointer over the bar until the number shows up in a little helper popup. Now, thanks to the Google PageRank script, PageRank is also listed next to every website in search results.

Firefox and Greasemonkey are excellent illustrations of decentralized, gift economy creativity. For academic researchers who use, let alone study, the internet, I suspect there is a gold mine of plugins and Greasemonkey scripts still to be discovered–or written.