Google minus Google shortlisted in GrandOne
My little search engine that removes Google content when searching with Google got into the final at GrandOne, the biggest digital marketing competition in Finland. I submitted Google minus Google into the best results for an online campaign -category.
Check out my campaign submission (in Finnish) or all of the finalists.
100000 Visits To Google Minus Google
Six weeks ago I read an article in the NYT about Google becoming a media company. I wanted to contribute to the discussion about Google emphasizing their own sites in search results. So I created Google minus Google, a search engine that uses Google to get the search results, but filters out all links to Google-owned sites.
The site has found quite an audience and yesterday Google minus Google reached 100000 visits, which is a whole lot more than I thought of when creating the service.
The visits come from around 80 thousand or so unique users and in total there has been more than 128 thousand searches. After all of the huge PR the service got (NYT, Lifehacker, CNET, the Register, Nu.nl and more than 300 blogs), the daily number of visitors has declined, but the usage per user has been increasing all the way.
It’s not a surprise that many people who enter the site for the first time have tried it if the service really works, therefore most of the top searches relate to Google. In total there have been 55 000 different queries. It’s interesting that a huge portion of those are names, which could mean that people are really interested only in themselves.
20 most popular queries on Google minus Google
| 3652 | |
| youtube | 3182 |
| test | 1140 |
| knol | 615 |
| lol | 325 |
| gmail | 231 |
| porn | 211 |
| you tube | 164 |
| orkut | 163 |
| riemurasia | 155 |
| video | 126 |
| sex | 124 |
| diet coke and mentos | 120 |
| blogger | 119 |
| novophone | 106 |
| miseta.net | 91 |
| nu | 87 |
| “armeense genocide” | 86 |
| maps | 83 |
| asd | 80 |
Please try Google minus Google, if you haven’t tried it before.
Google minus Google v2 launched
Google minus Google, a search engine that lets you Search with Google without getting results from Google sites such as Knol, Blogger and YouTube has become an unexpected hit. After the launch on Monday thousands of people from all over the world have used the tool and it has been a topic in numerous blog posts and discussions on Friendfeed.
After the launch, several people have suggested that I should have used Google Custom Search (cse) to do the job. After some hard detective work I have swithed to CSE. Detective work - you ask? Yes, the reason for my initial solution to just use the basic Google search engine and remove the google sites in the query (using “-site:google.com etc”) was not technical. I needed to gather all the domains Google owns before I could use cse.** The list of Google domains in the exclude list of Google minus Google contains more than 2500 domain names. And it needed some work to compile. I’m sure I have missed something, though.
Enjoy the new and more useful version two of Google minus Google.
** For you techies out there: cse doesn’t allow wildcard usage in the top level domain (like google.*), but it can be used in the normal query.
Google Minus Google: Google Search Results Without Content From Google
Inspired by an article in NYT about Google becoming a media company, I decided that something had to be done. So I created a way to Search with Google without getting results from Google sites such as Knol, Blogger and YouTube.
The result is Google minus Google.
UPDATE: Google minus Google has gotten a huge start: 3000 visitors in the first day! The visitors came mainly through a few Finnish IT news sites: Digitoday, that interviewed me this morning, IT-Viikko and Tietoviikko. I’ve also updated the filters to include some Google domains: Jaiku, Gmail and Blogspot
UPDATE 2: Version 2 of the launched. Now built with Google Custom Search Engine.
UPDATE 3: Miguel Helft continued the original story in the New York Times blog with an article about Google minus Google. He had received a statement from Google: “For years, users have been able to customize their experience via the advanced search feature within web search, and we welcome all efforts that help deliver useful information and expand user choice.” So I guess I’m of the hook for now.
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