TedPage: It's the second search Charlie Brown

I was talking to someone at Google, and that started me think about the idea of improving Google. If you think about it, there are really two searches going on every time you query Google:

1. A computerized search through all the documents on the Internet to find one that matches your key words. Google does very good at this.
2. A search through the results to find the document you're actually looking for. I think that this is someplace that Google can improve.

I think, for me, many times Google doesn't get the relationship between the terms I'm looking for. So, being able to determine the relationship of the terms in a given document while I'm looking through the results would make the second search faster, atleast for me.

I think that one way to do that is provide a 'virtual document' which would represent the document with colorized sections. I've put one of those to the right. Basically I've colorized all of the search terms, and put them inside the document. This way you can see that the blue terms appear very close together, but not close to the red or green term. Depending on the terms, this location may be very important.

Another way would just being able to tell the intensity of the terms in a particular document. I'd do that with some colored icons on the side, each representing the 'intensity' of that search term in the document. Something like this:

I searched for the terms: Inkscape, Ted and Gould. One of the pages that comes up is the Inkscape homepage. Obviously, the Inkscape homepage has a lot to do with Inkscape, but less to do with Ted and Gould. The squares to the right represent that through their intensities of color.

It would be interesting to see how these might help users make faster choices from the pages presented. I don't know that a novice user would gain any benefit, but I wonder if you started to use them if you would start to increase your accuracy of choosing search results.

Interesting ideas -- I wonder if they'd actually help.