Search

Dick: Did you run that 37Signals SearchSniffr tool against the site? What does that thing do anyway?” Jane: It takes terms from our logs and related sites’ logs and uses them in search queries, and then generates a report. I have it here somewhere… here it is. The Sniffr Sensitivity is 87, which is too…

John Battelle reports on Google’s recent demo of word clustering algorithms, which could force them to take the UI plunge: What do I mean by that? Well, of all the major engines, only Google has strictly maintained what might be called the C prompt interface to search: put in yer command, get out yer list…

Over on the Asilomar email list I started exploring a method of adding search to a site that has grown to need it. The point is to get a pretty good idea of what should be done to arrive at good results in a logical way, rather than just install a search engine and improve…

James showed me this gorgeous visual search interface he and Designframe created for a company that makes ‘metal fabrics’ – sheets of flexible, woven metal designs. Aimed at architects, the results page is key too. First off, the color photos pop nicely on a black background. Second, instead of prominently showing the product that matches…

Hapax‘s FindEngine is a search engine system somewhat like Autonomy, but better according to some accounts, due to its unique use of computational linguistic analysis. They have an interesting way of displaying results/answers: Rather than delivering results in the form of links to documents that you then have to read to verify, FindEngine™ delivers answers…

In the left column you’ll notice I reinstated the LombardiSearch interface for searching the web. The point is to more easily choose the right search engine for a query based on the engine’s particular search method. In this case I’m using Teoma, Google, and AskJeeves. Thanks again to Mathew for the Javascript assist.

Gene Smith’s comments on browse vs. search makes me think the difference between search and browse is melting away, it’s a matter of using the right metadata to describe the content so even the search is basically an automated browse…bouncing from topic to topic to extract the right information. As a scenario, it’ll be like…

Looking at my referers I see people often find their way here by searching Google for ‘noise‘ where I’m currently result #9. While this is like warm massage oil on my ego, it confirms what I used to rant about (see March 12) that popular doesn’t necessarily equal better (or more relevant). Does a person…

Bridget is experimenting with how to improve Google’s ranking of a particular site. A little bombing and tweaking of the title tag did wonders. Historical note: years ago I submitted this blog to Bridget’s portal and she was nice enough to note me in her blog, and the link popularity spread from there. So perhaps…