Saturday, January 10, 2015

Find In-Depth Articles on Google by editing the URL

Sometimes you want to find more about a topic and you find a lot of superficial news articles and blog posts that keep rehashing the same information. Google shows a list of in-depth articles for some queries, but this feature seems to be restricted to the US and it's only displayed for some queries.
How to manually trigger Google's in-depth section? Just add &tbs=ida:1&gl=us to a Google search URL and you'll see a list of 10 in-depth articles from sites like Wall Street Journal, New York Times‎, Wired, New Yorker, Slate and more. Some examples: [Google], [Daft Punk], [robots], [Russia], [happy].
However, I have noticed that this works only for URLs returned from searches initiated at Google directly. For example, the Daft Punk example above, when searched directly at Google.com gets us the URL https://www.google.com/search?q=daft+punk, which, when adding the suggested text to the end of the URL, the results are as described.

However, when I start the search from Chrome's address bar, the results URL is https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=daft%20punk. If I add the suggested text to the end of this URL I do not receive the in-depth results.

via Google Operating System