magpie's shiny things

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?

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.

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?)

The mas­ter has a new book out: “Beautiful Evidence.” There’s an inter­view with him in New York Magazine.
I sug­gest read­ing it on-line for the sim­ple plea­sure of read­ing some­thing on a site that makes read­ing on-line if not plea­sur­able then at least pos­si­ble. (Check out text siz­er con­trol just above the title.)

Thanks to InfoDesign for the inter­view pointer.

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.

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.