Search

Site Search Analytics for a Better User Experience

Louis Rosenfeld's workshop slides on site search analytics - "During the workshop, I'll also be demoing and leading three hands-on exercises. So I hope you UXers out there will take me at my word; there's something to site search analytics." (Louis Rosenfeld - Bloug)

Posted on March 28, 2008 | Permalink

Findability, Orphan of the Web Design Industry

"Although Findability had a closely knit family, he felt like an orphan, because his siblings always seemed to get the lion's share of time and attention from the folks in the web design agency." (Aarron Walter - A List Apart)

Posted on March 25, 2008 | Permalink

The Externalities of Search 2.0

"Web search engines have emerged as ubiquitous and vital tools for the successful navigation of the growing online informational sphere. As Google puts it, the goal is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” and to create the “perfect search engine” that provides only intuitive, personalized, and relevant results. Meanwhile, the so–called Web 2.0 phenomenon has blossomed based, largely, on the faith in the power of the networked masses to capture, process, and mashup one’s personal information flows in order to make them more useful, social, and meaningful. The (inevitable) combining of Google’s suite of information–seeking products with Web 2.0 infrastructures – what I call Search 2.0 – intends to capture the best of both technical systems for the touted benefit of users. By capturing the information flowing across Web 2.0, search engines can better predict users’ needs and wants, and deliver more relevant and meaningful results. While intended to enhance mobility in the online sphere, this paper argues that the drive for Search 2.0 necessarily requires the widespread monitoring and aggregation of a users’ online personal and intellectual activities, bringing with it particular externalities, such as threats to informational privacy while online." (Michael Zimmer - First Monday 13.3) - courtesy of petermorville

Posted on March 05, 2008 | Permalink

Search Patterns

"A sandbox for collecting search examples, patterns, and anti-patterns. Please add tags, notes, and comments, and suggest new examples. Over time, I hope to add patterns that illustrate user behavior and the information architecture of search." (Peter Morville - Findability)

Posted on February 05, 2008 | Permalink

Better Than Free

"Where as the previous generative qualities reside within creative digital works, findability is an asset that occurs at a higher level in the aggregate of many works. A zero price does not help direct attention to a work, and in fact may sometimes hinder it. But no matter what its price, a work has no value unless it is seen; unfound masterpieces are worthless. When there are millions of books, millions of songs, millions of films, millions of applications, millions of everything requesting our attention -- and most of it free -- being found is valuable." (Kevin Kelly - The Technicum)

Posted on February 04, 2008 | Permalink

Search Behavior Patterns

"Search behavior is the result of interplay among several independent factors the user brings to the search operation, six of which are described (...). Designers have no more control over these than they have over the color of the user's hair." (John Ferrara - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on January 31, 2008 | Permalink

Advancing Advanced Search

"Advanced search is the ugly child of interface design -always included, but never loved. Websites have come to depend on their search engines as the volume of content has increased. Yet advanced search functionality has not significantly developed in years. Poor matches and overwhelming search results remain a problem for users. Perhaps the standard search pattern deserves a new look. A progressive disclosure approach can enable users to use precision advanced search techniques to refine their searches and pinpoint the desired results." (Stephen Turbek - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on January 17, 2008 | Permalink

Google's Marissa Mayer on The Future of Search

"The highlight of the Searchnomics 2007 conference was a keynote, at the very end, by Marissa Mayer, Vice President, Search Products & User Experience at Google. She covered eight areas Google is focusing on now and in the near future." (Nitin Karandikar - Read/WriteWeb)

Posted on June 28, 2007 | Permalink

The Top 100 Alternative Search Engines

"Ask anyone which search engine they use to find information on the Internet and they will almost certainly reply: "Google." Look a little further, and market research shows that people actually use four main search engines for 99.99% of their searches: Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask.com (in that order). But in my travels as a Search Engine Optimizer (SEO), I have discovered that in that .01% lies a vast multitude of the most innovative and creative search engines you have never seen. So many, in fact, that I have had to limit my list of the very best ones to a mere 100." (Charles S. Knight - Read/Write Web)

Posted on January 29, 2007 | Permalink

Ergonosearch: A search engine about usability and accessibility

"Ergonosearch is a vertical search engine about accessibility and usability, indexing only selected quality resources: articles and expert blogs, research papers, specialized lists and forums, official specifications and guidelines." (Sébastien Billard)

Posted on November 14, 2006 | Permalink

Classifying Web Search Results

"Search is a subject that I've always been interested in. Especially internal or enterprise search, within a site. Not web search like Google or Yahoo!. Sure there's lots of search engine optimization (SEO) or marketing (SEM) tricks you can do to improve your ranking in the web search engines. But that's never really held any fascination for me." (Chiara Fox - Adaptive Path)

Posted on September 18, 2006 | Permalink

Use Old Words When Writing for Findability

"Familiar words spring to mind when users create their search queries. If your writing favors made-up terms over legacy words, users won't find your site." (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox)

Posted on August 28, 2006 | Permalink

Findability with tags: Facets, clusters, and pivot browsing

"For a while I have been thinking of different ways of supporting finding information with tags that go beyond tag-clouds. There are three trends that are worth pointing out. The first is faceted browse interfaces, the second is algorithm driven approaches like clustering and recommendations (often driven by collaborative filtering), and the third possibility is one that is native to tag based systems - and can be termed 'pivot browsing'." (Rashmi Sinha)

Posted on July 28, 2006 | Permalink

A re-examination of information seeking behaviour in the context of activity theory

"Activity theory is not a predictive theory but a conceptual framework within which different theoretical perspectives may be employed. Typically, it is suggested that several methods of data collection should be employed and that the time frame for investigation should be long enough for the full range of contextual issues to emerge. Activity theory offers not only a useful conceptual framework, but also a coherent terminology to be shared by researchers, and a rapidly developing body of literature in associated disciplines." (T.D. Wilson - Information Research 11.4)

Posted on July 19, 2006 | Permalink

Free Download: Part I of Found and Lost

Search is a conversation, a marketplace, mostly friction, and not discrete. - "A 'video' by John S. Rhodes revealing the future of search, why failure drives success for Google and Yahoo, and how search ultimately molds the way we act, feel and think. You can download Part I of Found and Lost, 15 minutes long, absolutely free." (John Rhodes - UX Reports)

Posted on June 26, 2006 | Permalink

Peter Morville at the Enterprise Search Summit

"In a world where people have so little attention to give, we must help people find what they want when they want it—when they are interested. We must shift from push to pull so people can pull things when we want it." (Mike Moran - Biznology) - courtesy of keithinstone

Posted on June 19, 2006 | Permalink

Search Analytics for your Site

"Any organization that has a searchable web site or intranet is sitting on top of hugely valuable and usually under-exploited data: logs that capture what users searching for, how often each query was searched, and how many results each query retrieved. Search queries are gold: they are real data that show us exactly what users are searching for in their own words. This book shows you how to use search analytics to carry on a conversation with your customers: listen to and understand their needs, and improve your content, navigation and search performance to meet those needs." (Rosenfeld Media)

Posted on June 09, 2006 | Permalink

Search engine optimization: Beyond search keywords

"The words people type into a search box are not always the words they like to read when they click on the search result." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on April 30, 2006 | Permalink

Information Architecture and Findability

"Peter Morville, co-author of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web with Lou Rosenfeld and author of Ambient Findability, presented a very informative day-long lecture on the subject of information architecture (IA). He discussed many basic concepts as well as best practices, so his presentation would appeal to both beginner and intermediate IAs." (Russell Wilson - UXmatters)

Posted on April 15, 2006 | Permalink

In Google we trust: Information integrity in the digital age

"This paper considers information safety and accuracy in the digital age using Google as an entry point. In doing so, it explores the role media play in shaping the relationship of information, privacy, and trust between Google and the public. This inquiry is undertaken using framing theory to guide a content analysis of the way Google is presented in New York Times articles from a two–year period ending in November, 2005. Analysis of the extensive coverage of Google’s share price and earnings reports leads to the conclusion that trust in Google is fostered in part simply by reports of its fiscal success. To the extent that this is true, meaningful public debate about information policies is inhibited." (Lee Shaker- First Monday 11.4)

Posted on April 04, 2006 | Permalink

SDForum Search SIG

The Search for Search - "The purpose of the SDForum Silicon Valley Search SIG is to offer a communication and collaboration platform to the Search ecosystem: search engines, marketers/advertisers, users and developers. Through a series of monthly events, the SIG will cover a large diversity of topics: from the latest developments in search to the needs of brands and advertisers, through the issues and key learnings of starting, funding, building, and exiting a search company." (About the Search SIG)

Posted on March 21, 2006 | Permalink

Peter Morville Presentation: Ambient Findability

Also, including a conversation with Peter Morville at SXSW 2006 Studio SX - "At the crossroads of ubiquitous computing and the Internet, the user experience is out of control, and findability is the real story. Access changes the game. We can select our sources and choose our news. We can find who and what we need, when and where we want. As society shifts from push to pull, findability shapes who we trust, how we learn, and where we go. In this thought-provoking talk, best-selling author Peter Morville explores the future present in mobile and embedded devices, GPS and RFID technologies, search algorithms, findable objects, evolutionary psychology, and the long tail of the sociosemantic web." (SXSW 2006 Interactive)

Posted on March 17, 2006 | Permalink

Ambient Findability

"Findability is the quality of being locatable or navigable, and 'ambient' means surrounding, encircling, and enveloping." (Bruce Stewart - O'Reilly ETech)

Posted on March 08, 2006 | Permalink

On the Web at Home: Information Seeking and Web Searching in the Home Environment 

The 2005 John Wiley & Sons Best JASIST Paper Award Winner - "This paper reports on a study exploring the environmental factors that influence users' information seeking at home." (Soo Young Rieh)

Posted on March 05, 2006 | Permalink

Designing Your Website to be Search Engine Friendly

"Design on the web has changed a lot since the mid 1990's. Not only has the language used to create pages expanded, but so has the capability of browsers, and the availability of bandwidth. Consequently pages have gradually carried more and more content, and designers, information architects, and HTML developers have faced the challenge of presenting increasingly sophisticated information and marketing messages onto the computer monitors in homes and offices around the world." (Mark Belam - currybetdotnet)

Posted on February 23, 2006 | Permalink

Evolutionary information seeking: A case study of personal development and Internet searching

"This article explores one question: what does Internet searching have to do with personal development? Personal development means that individuals improve their own abilities, skills, knowledge or other qualities by working on them. The paper reports on a qualitative case study, in which a single participant was interviewed and her Web searches observed. Information search strategies seemed to form a spectrum of developmental sophistication. Four major types of relationship were found: a) the Internet in the context of development; b) development in the context of the Internet; c) development affecting Internet use; and, d) Internet use affecting development. There were some informational phenomena which exhibited regression, the converse of development." (Jarkko Kari - First Monday 11.1)

Posted on January 09, 2006 | Permalink

Ambient Findability Slashdotted

Read the Comments - "Read 'Ambient Findability' if: you are interested in expanding your business or nonprofit through its presence on the Internet; you are a librarian and want to grow into the nontraditional environment of the Web; you are a Web designer and want to optimize the findability of your sites on the Internet; you are a user and want to enhance your searching experience. Read this book if you are a teacher, a student, a writer, a parent... in short, if you use a computer or a handheld or a GPS or a smartphone or any type of technology that connects you to the world, then you should read this book. Peter Morville's 'Ambient Findability' will amaze and delight you. It will give you new insight into how ubiquitous computing is affecting how we find and use information and how we, as users, can and will shape the future of how data is stored and retrieved." (Slashdot.org)

Posted on January 03, 2006 | Permalink

Finding information on the free World Wide Web: A specialty meta-search engine for the academic community

"The Web is continuing to grow rapidly and search engine technologies are evolving fast. Despite these developments, some problems still remain, mainly, difficulties in finding relevant, dependable information. This problem is exacerbated in the case of the academic community, which requires reliable scientific materials in various specialized research areas. We propose that a solution for the academic community might be a meta–search engine which would allow search queries to be sent to several specialty search engines that are most relevant for the information needs of the academic community. The basic premise is that since the material indexed in the repositories of specialty search engines is usually controlled, it is more reliable and of better quality." (Yaffa Aharoni et al. - First Monday 10.12)

Posted on December 14, 2005 | Permalink

UFOs: Ubiquitous Findable Objects

"The term ambient findability describes a world at the crossroads of ubiquitous computing and the internet, in which we can find anyone or anything from anywhere at any time. It's not necessarily a goal, and we'll never achieve perfect findability, but we're surely headed in the right direction. A clear sign of progress is the emergence of ubiquitous findable objects. GPS, RFID, UWB, and cellular triangulation enable us, for the first time in history, to tag and track products, possessions, pets, and people as they wander through space and time." - (Peter Morville - O'Reilly Network)

Posted on November 18, 2005 | Permalink

Sandbox Book Review: Ambient Findability

"It's a rollercoaster of concepts. - (...) I'm not sure who coined the term 'findability', but I am sure it wasn't me." - (Peter Merholz - Designing for the Sandbox)

Posted on November 13, 2005 | Permalink

The Search: How Google and its rivals rewrote the rules of business and transformed our culture

Wilson, T.D. (2005). Review of: Battelle, J. The search: How Google and its rivals rewrote the rules of business and transformed our culture. Boston, MA, London: Nicholas Brearley Publishing, 2005. Information Research, 11 (1) - "Perfect search - every single possible bit of information at our fingertips, perfectly contexualised, perfectly personalized - may never be realized. But the journey to find out if it just might be is certainly going to be fun." - (Information Research 11.1)

Posted on November 11, 2005 | Permalink

The Search Lurch: Have We Become Lazy Googlers or Smarter Web Researchers?

"Now that it's so easy for people to search for anything in a fraction of a second and retrieve content buried in deep links thanks to Google and other high-speed tools such as MSN Search, is this creating a kind of laziness on the part of Web users?" (Garth A. Buchholz)

Posted on October 19, 2005 | Permalink

The Psychology of Search: Chapter Three

"You often search because you have poor memory. But, it isn't so poor that you are a blank slate, tabula rasa. No, instead, you have a clue and you are buying more clues with every search you do. Let’s cut to the core of this." (John Rhodes - WebWord)

Posted on August 28, 2005 | Permalink

Less is more in Web search interfaces for older adults

"We have previously found the elderly users to face several usability problems with the current search engines. Thus, we designed an elderly–friendly search interface, Etsin. To evaluate the success of the design, a usability study was conducted for comparing the usability of Etsin and Google. The participants faced fewer usability problems when using Etsin than Google and they valued the clarity of the Etsin interface. In conclusion, elderly users benefit from a simplified search engine interface that is easy to understand and that takes into account age–related issues." (Anne Aula and Mika Käki - First Monday 10.7)

Posted on July 07, 2005 | Permalink

Mental Models For Search Are Getting Firmer

"Users now have precise expectations for the behavior of search. Designs that invoke this mental model but work differently are confusing." (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox)

Posted on May 08, 2005 | Permalink

11 search engine optimization tips

"The title tag is critical. It's important not to overcomplicate your design and technical approach with things such as Flash, Java, frames and dynamically built websites." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on April 10, 2005 | Permalink

Changing the Way People Search for Information, Through Algorithms and User Interfaces

"(...) in 10 years, we will look back on todays search interfaces and recognize them as a simple and limited way to interact with information. After all, she explains, a 5-inch-long rectangle with a long list of text results beneath it doesnt do much to help people make sense of the billions upon billions of unorganized bits of data in the world." (Susan Dumais - Microsoft Research) - courtesy of usability in the news

Posted on April 09, 2005 | Permalink

Get linked to get found in search engines

"Search optimization is about getting links. The more links you get to your website, the more likely you are to get into the first page of search engine results." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on March 20, 2005 | Permalink

Search optimization, not search engine optimization

"Search optimization focuses on how people search. Search engine optimization focuses on how search engines work. Search optimization sees quality web content as its foundation stone." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on March 13, 2005 | Permalink

Automatic Meaning Discovery Using Google

"We propose a new method to extract semantic knowledge from the World Wide Web for both supervised and unsupervised learning using the Google search engine in an unconventional manner." (Rudi Cilibrasi and Paul M. B. Vitanyi - CWI, University of Amsterdam)

Posted on February 04, 2005 | Permalink

Seeking Better Web Searches

"Deluged with superfluous responses to online queries, users will soon benefit from improved search engines that deliver customized results." (Scientific American) - courtesy of ui designer

Posted on January 25, 2005 | Permalink

Towards collaboration between information seeking and information retrieval

"For many years researchers in library and information science have borrowed theory from other fields to provide insight into our research findings. We are moving from this borrowed theory approach to creating a conceptual framework that has been tested, refined and adapted specifically for application in our field. The conceptual framework has developed rapidly during the past ten years with early signs of application in other fields." - Papers presented at the 5th Information Seeking in Context Conference, Dublin, Ireland, 1-3 September, 2004 (Carol C. Kuhlthau - Information Research, January 2005)

Posted on January 24, 2005 | Permalink

Can many agents answer questions better than one?

"The paper addresses the issue of how online natural language question answering, based on deep semantic analysis, may compete with currently popular keyword search, open domain information retrieval systems, covering a horizontal domain. We suggest the multiagent question answering approach, where each domain is represented by an agent which tries to answer questions taking into account its specific knowledge. The meta–agent controls the cooperation between question answering agents and chooses the most relevant answer(s). We argue that multiagent question answering is optimal in terms of access to business and financial knowledge, flexibility in query phrasing, and efficiency and usability of advice. The knowledge and advice encoded in the system are initially prepared by domain experts." (Boris Galitsky - First Monday January 2005)

Posted on January 04, 2005 | Permalink

The year search became personal

"This is perhaps the Holy Grail of search, understanding what it is you are looking for and providing it quickly. The problem is that no one yet knows how to get there." (BBC News)

Posted on December 26, 2004 | Permalink

Google Suggest improves search's web scent

"Why is this huge? Because the biggest problem with search as it exists today is that users can't know what lies on the other side of that Submit button. It could be nothing, it could be just what they are looking for - how to know ahead of time?" (Brett Lider - every breath death defying)

Posted on December 16, 2004 | Permalink

Yahoo! Video Search beta

"Search for videos across the web." (Yahoo!) - courtesy of searchblog

Posted on December 16, 2004 | Permalink

Fine Tuning Your Enterprise Search: How To Get The Best Results To Your Users

"It is increasingly recognised in the modern enterprise that getting the processes of searching for and retrieving information right in a business can deliver a vital competitive edge. In a knowledge based economy employees who can't find vital internal information about their jobs are less productive, and with the advent of the web, potential customers who can't get straight to the information they need are only a click away from a competitor's site." (Martin Belam - currybetdotnet)

Posted on December 07, 2004 | Permalink

Information seeking research needs extension towards tasks and technology

"This paper discusses the research into information seeking and its directions at a general level. We approach this topic by analysis and argumentation based on past research in the domain. We begin by presenting a general model of information seeking and retrieval which is used to derive nine broad dimensions that are needed to analyze information seeking and retrieval. Past research is then contrasted with the dimensions and shown not to cover the dimensions sufficiently. Based on an analysis of the goals of information seeking research, and a view on human task performance augmentation, it is then shown that information seeking is intimately associated with, and dependent on, other aspects of work; tasks and technology included. This leads to a discussion on design and evaluation frameworks for information seeking and retrieval, based on which two action lines are proposed: information retrieval research needs extension toward more context and information seeking research needs extension towards tasks and technology." (Kalervo Järvelin and Peter Ingwersen - Information Research, Vol. 10 No. 1, October 2004)

Posted on October 19, 2004 | Permalink

Search is Not All There

"With a theoretical limit on the amount of information we can possibly consume, finding the information both on the internet and on your own computers can be a daunting task. Recently, there's been a lot of attention on search." (Kevin Cheng - OK/Cancel)

Posted on October 19, 2004 | Permalink

Fault-tolerant Fulltext Search for Large Multilingual Scientific Text Corpora

"In the work reported here, we present a new way of performing fault-tolerant fulltext retrieval on large text corpora, such as scientific encyclopedias." (Wolfram M. Esser - Journal of Digital Information 6.1)

Posted on October 15, 2004 | Permalink

Search: The Current and Next Big Thing

"Search is not restricted to entering a text field and getting back a collection of links" (Daniel H. Steinberg - Web 2.0)

Posted on October 09, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Refining the Search Engine

"The vast amount of information on the Internet is growing every day - it's enough to gag a Google search. Researcher Ramesh Jain offers up new strategies for information retrieval." (ACM Ubiquity)

Posted on September 21, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Internet time and the reliability of search engines

"Search engines are unreliable tools for data collection for research that aims to reconstruct the historical record. This unreliability is not caused by sudden instabilities of search engines. On the contrary, their operational stability in systematically updating the Internet is the cause. We show how both Google and Altavista systematically relocate the time stamp of Web documents in their databases from the more distant past into the present and the very recent past. They also delete documents. We show how this erodes the quality of information. The search engines continuously reconstruct competing presents that also extend to their perspectives on the past. This has major consequences for the use of search engine results in scholarly research, but gives us a view on the various presents and pasts living side by side in the Internet." (Paul Wouters et al. - First Monday 9.10)

Posted on September 14, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Search Engine Technology and Digital Libraries: Moving from Theory to Practice

"This article describes the journey from the conception of and vision for a modern search-engine-based search environment to its technological realisation. In doing so, it takes up the thread of an earlier article on this subject, this time from a technical viewpoint. As well as presenting the conceptual considerations of the initial stages, this article will principally elucidate the technological aspects of this journey." (Friedrich Summann and Norbert Lossau - D-Lib Magazine) - courtesy of chris mcevoy

Posted on September 10, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

It's Not Just About Searching - It's About Findability

"The current emphasis on content management is not about content management at all but rather about content publishing - and there is a difference. Organizations are aware of the problems in getting current, reliable information into an intranet but feel that their responsibility stops with building the repository and providing some templates for page display. Far too little attention is paid to the fact that unless people can find the information, the effort to add it to the repository and to make the look consistent is wasted." (Martin White - EContent) - courtesy of uidesigner

Posted on August 24, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

8 Quick Ways to Fix Your Search Engine

"Our finding (...) is that almost every site's search engine could use improvement. We also found that most organizations' Web teams couldn't really affect the quality of their search results - they were stuck tweaking search technologies that had already been purchased and installed. Often, the most dramatic change they could make was in the design of the search and results interfaces. In some cases, as the old saying goes, this was like putting lipstick on a pig. But cleaning things up does help users find answers to their queries." (Jeffrey Veen - Adaptive Path)

Posted on August 13, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Site Content Search

"Your search engine can make or break your site. This report with give you the tools you need to get search working." (Adaptive Path)

Posted on August 13, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

CHI 2004: Tangible Interface for Collaborative Information Retrieval

"Combining collaboration, tangibility and calmness, researchers at the University of Cambridge have harnessed the future to produce a search interface with a difference." (Ann Light - Usability News)

Posted on August 13, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Enhance Usability by Highlighting Search Terms

"We've written a script in PHP that you can add to individual pages or entire websites that will automatically highlight words in your page if the user has followed a link from a search engine results page." (Brian Suda and Matt Riggott - A List Apart)

Posted on August 11, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Search Engine Optimization and Non-HTML Sites

"The mistake of building entire sites in Flash is not just an amateur's mistake - many leading Web designers, who are paid copious amounts of money, do the same thing. Sometimes the use of Flash is the only way to achieve a specific function (e.g. Web-based games), so you need Flash for that feature - but do you need it for the whole site?" (Alan K'necht - Digital Web Magazine)

Posted on June 17, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Trumping Google? Metasearching's Promise

"Metasearch promises to give patrons one-stop access to the many and various resources at the heart of the library digital collection." (Judy Luther - Library Journal) - courtesy of urlgreyhot

Posted on May 26, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

The Truth About Federated Searching

"Federated searching is a hot topic that seems to be gaining traction in libraries everywhere. As with many technologies that are rapidly adopted,there are some misconceptions about what it can do." (Information Today)

Posted on May 23, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

In search of better search results

"Clearly, the rate of improvement in delivering high quality search results isn't keeping up with Moore's Law in terms of doubling every couple of years. In fact, the 'law of search results' could be expressed as an inverse to the growth in the size and complexity of the data." (Dan Farber - ZDNet)

Posted on May 12, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

The new frontier of search

"If you want to find information fast, you need search and retrieval technology. That is not news to people who have been interfacing with IT tools for the last decade. Even laypeople are familiar with recreational search engines, like AltaVista, used for exploring the Internet. Early on in its development, search made inroads into vertical markets like financial services and as an adjunct functionality embedded in KM and document management products." (John Harney - KMWorld) - courtesy of elearningpost

Posted on May 10, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Search Engine Meeting 2004

The Hague, The Netherlands (19-20 April 2004) - Available presentations in PDF (infonortics)

Posted on April 27, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Metadata based search and browse functionality on the NSW Office of Fair Trading intranet: A Case Study

"The NSW Office of Fair Trading launched its first intranet in June 2003. At the very beginning of the intranet project we recognised that unless users could find information easily the intranet would not succeed. We also understood that different people prefer to find information in different ways. To maximise the chances of searchers finding relevant information, and to provide flexibility in search options, we developed and implemented metadata driven search and browse functions. This case study describes the standards, tools and technology we used and how metadata was manipulated to retrieve information in a number of different ways." (NSW Office of Information and Communications Technology) - courtesy of column two

Posted on April 23, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Searching versus Finding: Why Systems Need Knowledge to Find What You Really Want

"Read about how one would query to retrieve the longest word in the English language: is it 'floccinaucinihilipilification' (a possible answer) or possibly 'pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis' (a better answer?) According to Bill: These tasks will require systems that can determine what passages are saying and reason with the resulting knowledge, and they will require additional sources of knowledge and advancements in automated reasoning. An active research area devoted to question-answering is currently pursuing such goals." (W.A. Woods - Sun Microsystems Laboratories)

Posted on April 14, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

The high cost of not finding information

"We need to embed both people and information within a system that fits how people in the organization work, that understands the workflow and when the needs for information arise. People need to use information within the context of their jobs and their environment. It's not just the information that is vital to the organization. It's the exchange of information, the information within the context of the people and the situation of the moment that needs to be recorded and tracked so that when people disappear, the reasons why decisions are made remain behind." (Susan Feldman - KMWorld) - courtesy of john rhodes

Posted on March 31, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Infolution: Technology in depth and white paper

"Having the right information at the right time is absolutely essential to one's business. 'Information is power!' or so the saying goes. But while information is a valuable resource, overwhelming information can pose a serious problem." (Tarchon)

Posted on March 17, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Do you 'google'? Understanding search engine use beyond the hype

"Much anecdotal evidence suggests that Google is the most popular search engine. However, such claims are rarely backed up by data. The reasons for this are manifold, including the difficulty in measuring search engine popularity and the multiple ways in which the concept can be understood. Here, I discuss the sources of confusion related to search engine popularity. It is problematic to make unfounded assumptions about general users’ search engine choices because by doing so we exclude a large number of people from our discussions about systems development and our understanding of how the average user finds information online." (Eszter Hargittai - FirstMonday 9.3)

Posted on March 04, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

User-Centered Information Retrieval

"To find information, a reader uses either a search engine or the reader browses through metadata. The main difference between search engines and metadata lies in the quality of the links. A search engine offers you a lot of results, yet quite a few of the results refer to unusable information. Metadata cover only a small part of the available information yet the links refer to very useful information." (Marcel van Mackelenbergh)

Posted on February 25, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

On search, the series

"This series of essays on the construction, deployment and use of search technology (by which I mean primarily 'full-text' search) was written between June and December of 2003. It has fifteen installments not including this table of contents." (Tim Bray - Ongoing)

Posted on December 18, 2003 | Permalink

The search for search's next generation

"The burn-out of the dot-com era left a smoldering envy of those few dot-commers that managed to stay alive. Google is foremost among these. If they can continue pulling in dynamic data from more and more sites, their dominance may well continue -- for access to dynamic data is indeed the key to the next big improvement in search." (Andy Oram - O'Reilly Developer Weblogs)

Posted on December 18, 2003 | Permalink | TrackBack

Metadata and search

"Metadata is fundamental to persons, organizations, machines, and an array of enterprises that are increasingly turning to the Web and electronic communication for disseminating and accessing information." (Dublin Core Metadata Initiative)

Posted on November 06, 2003 | Permalink | TrackBack

Putting it Together: Taxonomy, Classification & Search

"The more complex the enterprise, the greater the need to search among multiple sources, but the one- or two-word search used by most people 'doesn't give much complexity in the results (...)." (Jeff Morris - Transform Magazine) - courtesy of elearningpost

Posted on September 18, 2003 | Permalink | TrackBack

Using XHTML/CSS for an Effective SEO Campaign

"If youíre reading this article in the hopes of learning how to get an adult site listed in the 'school supplies' category on Google, we kindly suggest you fall off the face of the earth. Any hate mail regarding this can be directed to sally@morekinky.net. It's due time to pay her back for all those 'petting zoo pictures' that manage to bypass my spam filtering system." (Brandon Olejniczak - A List Apart)

Posted on August 05, 2003 | Permalink | TrackBack

Search Engine Personalization: An Exploratory Study

"Web search engines are beginning to offer personalization capabilities to users. Personalization is the ability of the Web site to match retrieved information content to a user's profile. This content can be set explicitly by the user or derived implicitly by the Web site using such user profile information as zip code, birth date, etc. (...) Our findings show that despite the high level of interest in Web personalization, most search engine Web sites currently offer no or limited personalization features." (Yashmeet Khopkar et al. - First Monday 8.7)

Posted on July 11, 2003 | Permalink | TrackBack

Web Search: How the Web Has Changed Information Retrieval

"Topical metadata have been used to indicate the subject of Web pages. They have been simultaneously hailed as building blocks of the semantic Web and derogated as spam. At this time major Web browsers avoid harvesting topical metadata. This paper suggests that the significance of the topical metadata controversy depends on the technological appropriateness of adding them to Web pages. This paper surveys Web technology with an eye on assessing the appropriateness of Web pages as hosts for topical metadata. The survey reveals Web pages to be both transient and volatile: poor hosts of topical metadata. The closed Web is considered to be a more supportive environment for the use of topical metadata. The closed Web is built on communities of trust where the structure and meaning of Web pages can be anticipated. The vast majority of Web pages, however, exist in the open Web, an environment that challenges the application of legacy information retrieval concepts and methods." (Terrence A. Brooks - Information Research 8.3) - courtesy of victor lombardi

Posted on July 03, 2003 | Permalink | TrackBack

Searching The Workplace Web

"The corporate intranet is an organism that is at once very similar to and very unlike the Internet at large. A well-designed intranet (...) is perhaps the most significant step that corporations can make - and have made in recent years - to improve productivity and communication between individuals in an organization." (Ronald Fagin et al. - IBM Almaden Research Center) - courtesy of column two

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