Tag Archives: parameters

Google's Matt Cutts, as you may know, frequently appears in videos for Google's Webmaster Central YouTube channel . In these videos he answers questions submitted by Google users. One of the latest ones features a different kind of (and perhaps more fun) question: If you could improve one thing or add a feature to Google Search right now, what would it be? ( Talk to ArisYulianta and Friends... what your answer would be . ) Every Google user probably has an answer for this question, and the differences among those answers are limitless. It is interesting to hear what Cutts himself has to say on the subject though, considering he has kind of become the unofficial posterboy for giving webmasters information about the inner-workings of the world's most popular search engine. Matt says there are actually a lot of things he would like to see added to Google Search, but one thing comes immediately to mind for him. When you do a search on Google (for example for "flowers"), the URL you get for the results is not just www.google.com/search?q=flowers. There are always other parameters such as "hl=en" and others. Cutts finds this annoying because he emails search results a lot, and English is the only language he speaks. He says he has even considered writing a Greasemonkey script that would eliminate the extra parameters. He also says he's tried to get some people at Google to consider changing it, but nobody is very exited about the idea because not that many people email search result URLs around. "But who knows? Maybe some day I will prevail," Cutts proclaims with a smile on his face. It's interesting to look at the comments for Matt's video . Other people have made suggestions for what they would change about Google search. Suggestions include more control over regular expressions, a date limiting factor on search results beside the search box, and Google Alerts recognizing hyphens in searches. What would you change about Google Search? Is there a feature you would add? Is there one you would like to see removed? Comment here . Continue reading →