Omgili blog

Did you ever want to know what’s happening on the internet in real-time? Yes you say, I use Twitter! Well good for you, I guess I can’t teach you anything new since you already know everything… So go on and don’t read the rest of the post because you are so smart and successful…

OK, you are still here. Good! By now you probably know about the “Search Options” feature Google introduced in May.  One of its features is to limit the search results by time frame. By default the available time frames are: Any time, Past year, Past week, Recent results and Past 24 hours. Past 24 hours is nice but still far away from Real-time. What Google isn’t telling you is that you can search in the past minute and even in the past second. The trick is to change a parameter in the URL that will narrow down the time frames. Let take a look at a simple example:

Search for Barack Obama in the past 24 hours:

http://www.google.com/search?q=barack%20obama&hl=en&output=search&tbs=qdr:d&tbo=1

Notice the URL parameter qdr:d. I assume qdr stands for Query Date Range (sounds about right). All you have to do to search for the query in the past minute is to change the parameter to qdr:n, and for the past second to qdr:s.

Past Minute:

http://www.google.com/search?q=barack%20obama&hl=en&output=search&tbs=qdr:n&tbo=1

Search results from the past minute

Past second:

http://www.google.com/search?q=barack%20obama&hl=en&output=search&tbs=qdr:s&tbo=1

Couldn’t find any result – but hey it’s in the past second, how cool is that?

Oh and of course there is also “Past hour” – but that’s old news:

http://www.google.com/search?q=omgili&hl=en&tbo=1&tbs=qdr:h

UPDATE:

You can also set a time frame in minutes like past 10 minutes:

http://www.google.com/search?q=barack%20obama&hl=en&output=search&tbs=qdr:n10&tbo=1

or past 30 seconds:

http://www.google.com/search?q=barack%20obama&hl=en&output=search&tbs=qdr:s30&tbo=1

Just add a number after the appropriate time frame (h = hours, n = minutes, s = seconds). For example: qdr:n10 will return results from the past 10 minutes.

“Netcraft confirms it – Twitter is dying”

Ran Geva,

Omgili CEO

I am happy to let you know about a new Firefox extension we released. Omgili Opinions is a very unobtrusive addition to your Firefox browser. It will look for discussions and opinions about the current page you are browsing and if it found them, it will show you a small button near the address bar. To view those discussions, simply click on that button.

If you want to find deeper conversations & insights about a product you found on Amazon, if you want to see what people think about a certain movie on IMDB or a video clip on Youtube, and the comments aren’t very insightful – let Omgili find the most interesting discussions and communities about any page you are browsing.

So check it out: http://opinions.omgili.com/

Here are some screenshots:

As usual we welcome your feedback….

Thank you,

Ran Geva

Omgili CEO

@ the beginning of the week, Google@Omgili was reviews on ReadWriteWeb – since then, we received many feedbacks (that we love). The most noticeable input was to incorporate a real-time factor into the service. Now, real-time is very trendy today  (where real-time is a synonym for Twitter) and it is mostly used for checking out the buzz about a brand, or a service. I use Twitter search to see if someone wrote something interesting about Omgili, or if Gmail is down for everyone. We wanted to create a service that will appeal to a wider audience, and we think we did.

Yes, it was fast (about 3 days of development), but we created a section on Google@Omgili that is utilizing the real-time factor into a useful service for everyone. On the left of the screen you can see an ongoing update of Tweets about your query, but on the right, you get the current popular links everybody is talking about. The score of the link is determined by the number of users that tweeted about this link and the time lapse between Tweets. Links that are being tweeted very fast will rise fast even higher than a link with more tweets. The time-frame of the calculation changes according to the query popularity. If the topic is “hot” then the time frame we take into consideration may be the past minute. If the topic isn’t very hot right now the time-frame will grow wider. Keeping the page open will automatically update the links and tweets continually in real-time with the latest tweets, trends and hot links.

The service will give you an indication of the hottest sites about the topic you were searching, in real-time as they are being propagated among internet users. So if you want to know what’s going on with North Korea, you will get the latest sources that people are recommending on their tweets.

As usual we would love to get your feedback, and add/remove features accordingly. We hope you will find this new feature useful.
Ran Geva,
Omgili CEO

In the past two weeks since the last post about Google@Omgili we have been getting a lot of great feedback about how to make Google@Omgili better. We implemented the best ideas we got and made the service a lot better. We liked it so much, that we decided it deserves its own domain name. From now on you can reach Google@Omgili by going to GOmgili.com

Please keep sending us ideas and feedback – we strive on making our services better.

Thank you,

Ran Geva
Omgili CEO

This post is not a desperate call for you to start using Omgili as the title might suggest. This post is about an experiment we are conducting. As most of you are searching Google to find information, we created a new service, named Google@Omgili, that integrates Omgili into Google in a manner that should make searching Google even better. The look & feel of the search engine should look very similar to Google’s, but it also includes some unobtrusive useful features.

The first and most noticeable feature is the ability to find forum discussions about the results Google returns. This way you can find more people that are interested in the same topics as you, and also provide more in-depth discussions about the topic you are researching.

The second feature is the integration of most of the services Omgili provides into the interface. You can easily search for Discussions, Q&A or Reviews by clicking on the appropriate menu link.

We also made it much easier to access results from other Google services such as Blogs, News, Videos search and even Newsgroups (Remember Dejanews) search. Notice the ability to sort the results by Date or Relevancy from the top menu link.

OK, back to the opening line. We know that moving from your default search provider (Google) is almost an impossible mission – everyone uses Google because the service is a synonym to information search.  I personally found that if I don’t see the Google color scheme and logo on the results page, I just don’t trust those results. The question is why?

That’s the reason we are providing you with an interface very similar to Google’s with search results from Google itself. We made searching other services a breeze and we provide more information without really cluttering the user interface. The experiment asks why then won’t you change your default search engine to Google@Omgili? We want your feedback as we will continue to change the interface accordingly and share our insights about the process.

We created a Feedback & Suggestion page on Crowdsound.com so you are encouraged to participate, share your ideas and spread the word about this initiative.

So, why won’t you use me?