By Vegard Sandvold on December 22, 2008
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.
By Vegard Sandvold on December 22, 2008
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.
By Vegard Sandvold on December 19, 2008
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.
By Vegard Sandvold on December 19, 2008
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.
By Vegard Sandvold on December 15, 2008
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 »
By Vegard Sandvold on December 14, 2008
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 »
By Vegard Sandvold on December 9, 2008
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?
By Vegard Sandvold on December 9, 2008
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?
By Vegard Sandvold on December 5, 2008
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 »
By Vegard Sandvold on November 27, 2008
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.
Latest Comments