Top 10 Alternative Search Engines of 2008 – ReadWriteWeb

By Vegard Sandvold on December 22, 2008 | Leave a response

ReadWriteWeb gives us their round-up of the Top 10 Alternative Search Engines of 2008. These are not at all like Google, but it may be worth leaving your comfort zone in order to try out some of these innovative alternatives. My favorite on this list is TagGalaxy. The market shifts slowly, given that the four major search engines get over 98% of all US search traffic. Some change and variation is definetly called for.

Faceted Search: An Interview with Tito Sierra | findability.org

By Vegard Sandvold on December 19, 2008 | Leave a response

Peter Morville shares some thoughts on faceted search. Lessons learned at the NCSU Libraries address: 1) users suffering from "facet fatique" when exposed to a large number of facets, 2) space efficient presentation with collapsible facets, quickfilter checkboxes, and stacking breadcrumbs, 3) grouping and ordering facets according to popularity and type [exploratory vs. known item search], 4) facets triggers.

More About The User Experience Evolution

More About The User Experience Evolution

By Vegard Sandvold on December 15, 2008 | Leave a response

I would like to round up my last two posts on Google’s user experience innovations and experiements with search suggestions with a few comments on other quite recent search engine result page (SERP) innovation.
Pagelinks
Sitelinks are short-cuts to specific pages within a site, and they have been around for a while. In Google they look... Read More »

Google's New Search Suggestions May Kill Your Website

Google’s New Search Suggestions May Kill Your Website

By Vegard Sandvold on December 14, 2008 | 1 Response

It has been reported that Google is experimenting with ads, links and answers presented in the Google Suggests list, directly as you type. Not everyone will take part in these experiments, so let me show you what it may look like.
Normally, when you start typing into the search box at google.com (international site), you... Read More »

Applying Turing’s Ideas to Search – Boxes and Arrows

By Vegard Sandvold on December 9, 2008 | Leave a response

Searchers are constantly challenging search engines with the Turing test, expecting humanlike answers to their sometimes ill-formed questions. Most search engines do well for short keyword queries (like "mars exploration"), but they tend to fail for natural language with syntactic structure (like "space missions before apollo"). Careful search interface design may provide parts of the solution. Query Suggestions help users formulate longer, well-phrased questions, providing optimal answers at the cost of less variety. Best Bets help search engines provide good answers when organic search results fail. Will these two techniques together give humanlike intelligence to the search machine?

Google Is Innovating Search User Experience

Google Is Innovating Search User Experience

By Vegard Sandvold on December 5, 2008 | 1 Response

The headline on digi.no this morning read “Search Does Not Get Better Anymore”. The background for the article was a report by Gartner, stating that technological development in search is falling behind, and that the need for federated search and conversation is not met by search technology providers today. A statement like that is... Read More »

Yahoo Launches “Vertical Lens” Search Through BOSS

By Vegard Sandvold on November 27, 2008 | Leave a response

With Vertical Lens, Yahoo lets you build your own vertical search engine. You get to mix and rerank your own site content with Yahoo search results, giving searchers relevant results both on and off site. Site content is indexed in real time, and content structure may be used by searchers to navigate and refine their searches. Ranking can be based on freshness, popularity or social factors. Yahoo Vertical Lens is a competitor of Google Site Search and Microsoft Live Search API's.

Internet And Search Heavily Used By Consumers In Research And Decision-Making

By Vegard Sandvold on November 18, 2008 | Leave a response

Research produced by Yahoo examines consumer behaviour in choosing local services and providers in five vertical categories: legal, real estate, home improvement, health care and vocational education. Did you know that 59 percent of homeowners use the Internet to do research on home improvement contractors, searching mainly for type of service needed and location (city, zip code)? As a local business and service provider, you need to have a professional website that is easily found by consumers using search engines. Local search providers must provide completeness, and novel features based on vertical metadata, in order to distinguish themselves from the majors like Google and Yahoo.

Meaningful representations of reality

Meaningful representations of reality

By Lene Pettersen on November 14, 2008 | 3 Responses

Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, says the American social anthropologist Clifford Geertz in his famous book The Interpretation of Cultures from 1973. Classification is ways of placing knowledge into meaningful and representative categories. What is thought of as meaningful... Read More »

Why Do We Forget Things?: Scientific American

By Vegard Sandvold on November 13, 2008 | Leave a response

Why is it harder to describe the details of an object, when it's so easy to recognize something we've seen before? MIT research may provide an answer. 40% of all web queries concern re-finding already known objects. Describing these objects with a query may be difficult, but recognizing them in a search result should be easy. And we can make it even easier by presenting image thumbnails and other salient features alongside the usual titles and teasers.

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