magpie's shiny things

shiny things in messy little piles

Page 89 of 96

Findable vs. Refindable

Sites like del-icio.us, while pro­vid­ing an inter­est­ing (voyeuris­tic?) look into what sites oth­er peo­ple are find­ing inter­est­ing, are pri­mar­i­ly about col­lect­ing things for myself and mak­ing them refind­able.

How is refind­able dif­fer­ent from find­able? And fur­ther on how can look­ing at what cues peo­ple cre­ate for mak­ing things refind­able for them­selves inform what we do to make things find­able in the first place.

I’m not ready to accept the easy answer that the cues to refind­able are the best cues to find­able. Mean­ing that I do not think that tag clouds are suf­fi­cient find­ing aids. What val­ue do they bring to mak­ing things more find­able? And can we fig­ure out how to cre­ate that val­ue up front in our con­tent and organization?

BananaSlug — Pacific NorthWet Search?

Quick­ly folks — it’s almost 5 on fri­day but I could­n’t pass this up.

Alt Search Engines throws up some odd lit­tle SEs on it’s Fri­day round up and this one just came across the feedreader.

BananaSlug

That’s right our Pacif­ic Northwe(s)t Mas­cot — the banana slug — has got it’s own search engine. and in keep­ing with our not-so-uptight image it tweaks the search terms by throw­ing in a ran­dom bit of whimsy.

Inject a lit­tle serendip­ty into your Fri­day after­noon browsing.

TQR — Metasearch Puppy Piles vs. Lone Wolf Search Engines

All search engines are not the same and all search engines do not return the same results. Ask each of the big four search engines the same ques­tion and you’ll get four very dif­fer­ent sets of answers. Well duh… 

But just how dif­fer­ent are the results? Dif­fer­ent Engines, Dif­fer­ent Results, pub­lished in April by the good folks at Dog­pile gives some hard numbers.

Over the set of all returned first page results 88.3% of first page results are unique to the search engine that returned them and only 1.1% of the first page results turn up in all four engines.

This is a great study for fer­ret­ing out lit­tle nuggets that will astound and amaze the naive searchers. Even the DH who has to lis­ten to me bab­ble on about this stuff and who, being an ubergeek him­self, ought to know bet­ter thought that there was­n’t much dif­fer­ence in the results of one SE vers­es another.

Anoth­er favorite num­ber is from Fig­ure 2.

Google’s index­ing cov­er­age of the “Total Web”(1) is giv­en as 69.6%.

Do the math. Google does­n’t cov­er 30.1% of the Web.

That said the study is prone to a bit of an apples and oranges con­fu­sion. Some­times they sep­a­rate out spon­sored and non-sponsored results and oth­er times they don’t.(2)

Cum gra­no salis. Though they cred­it researchers at Queens­land U. and Penn State this research is in aid of a par­tic­u­lar com­mer­cial ven­ture — Dog­pile. (One of my fav agre­ga­tors, though.)

(1) Actu­al­ly the term used in the fig­ure “Total Web” is mis­lead­ing. It should be “Total Vis­i­ble (to Search Engines) Web” There’s a whole ‘nother web out there that the search engines can’t see. The authors get it right in the text.

(2) For exam­ple in Fig­ure 5 they list the per­cent­ages of first page results (of those returned by all four SEs) that you would miss if you had only used one SE. (All around 70%.) But they don’t call out spon­sored vs. non spon­sored results. So what? So… spon­sored results can only appear in results pool of the SEs that the spon­sors have cho­sen to pay for. By def­i­n­i­tion, there are cer­tain results that can not appear in mul­ti­ple search engines.

(Why is all the good stuff in the footnotes?)

Personalization of Your News Coverage — Even if You Don’t Become a Member

The saga of TV sta­tion search wierd­ness continues.

For the last few days I have been doing a bunch of search inter­face test­ing on the news sites of our local TV sta­tions. I had a stan­dard list of search sub­jects that I ran through all the sites. One of which was “motor­cy­cle chase”. (Oth­er search­es includ­ed the words: car wreck, truck tire, and boat race.)

I returned to two of the sites this morn­ing to look for the con­tact infor­ma­tion for the news direc­tors. I have a com­plaint to make about their biased cov­er­age of motor­cy­cle safe­ty. Specif­i­cal­ly about their will­ing­ness to swal­low, unchewed, the PR pablum that the Wash­ing­ton State Patrol feeds them. This PSA greet­ed me on KING5’s site.

Motorcycle Safety

Obvi­ous­ly KING5’s cook­ie was still hang­ing out in my brows­er cache.

Note with me the irony of the sit­u­a­tion, the car is cross­ing the cen­ter­line. Shows the true state of motor­cy­cle safe­ty here in the fine state of Wash­ing­ton. Idiot cager’s prob­a­bly on the phone.

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