Comments on: Search strategies, part 2

By: Columbus

Columbus — Sun, 25 May 2008 01:49:42 +0000

To do anything truly worth doing, I must not stand back shivering and thinking of the cold and danger, but jump in with gusto and scramble through as well as I can.

By: Jacksonville

Jacksonville — Sat, 24 May 2008 17:08:10 +0000

Keep on going and the chances are you will stumble on something, perhaps when you are least expecting it. I have never heard of anyone stumbling on something sitting down.

By: search » Search strategies, part 2

search » Search strategies, part 2 — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 23:51:29 +0000

[...] arts wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptConsider, for example, the aspect of this strategy that involves switching from general search engines to SeattlePI’s search engine. If I was right about the the source of the article, that would be a winning strategy because the target … [...]

By: mranalogy

mranalogy — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 05:08:41 +0000

BTW, the google search history only records the sites you actually clicked on while logged into google.

So unless he went to the site by first doing a search and then clicking on a result, it wouldn’t be in Google.

However, I have been saying for YEARS that this is a killer product. One that just keeps track of all the URLS you’ve visited and searches thru them all. So you can say “search all pages I’ve VISTED for “.

Like all killer products, the interface is simple, the execution would be….challenging.

By: Jon Udell

Jon Udell — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 13:13:12 +0000

“But if I were going to tag it, then I might have bookmarked it as well.”

True. In my case I bookmark, and tag, using del.icio.us.

By: Tim

Tim — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 20:33:50 +0000

So – in reference to your reply in comment 6 : how exactly do I tag pages I’ve visited? Some intermediary site or plug-in? But if I were going to tag it, then I might have bookmarked it as well. Tagging and bookmarking are “sort of” a search strategy – they’re more of an indexing strategy, to me. Searching gets easier if items are indexed, but only if the indexing scheme aligns with my search strategy.. it will do me no good if I’m searching for “Pointillism” and the indexer tagged the item with “Lots O’ Dots”.

By: Adaptive UI for focused attention « Jon Udell

Adaptive UI for focused attention « Jon Udell — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 16:23:22 +0000

[...] focused attention Filed under: Uncategorized — Jon Udell @ 11:23 am The goal of the search strategy I outlined the other day was to find Mary Czerwinski, a Microsoft researcher, and interview her for [...]

By: Phil Loomis

Phil Loomis — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 14:38:43 +0000

I just tried ChaCha (a site where remote workers search for you). This is a hard search, like yours, though I may have less information, and know less context. I saw an article about three high school students whose teacher got them access to professional level astronomy data (which is now possible to anyone). The students were able to analyse the data and come up with findings that are publishable. Obviously interesting from the point of view of “future of science” as more data comes online. This is harder because it may have been reported only locally, or in just one small online magazine; and none of the people will have any links to others, or much publicly recorded profile.

This problem is way too hard for ChaCha: this is interesting — ChaCha is a useful service for many people who have simpler queries. The people who are working on ChaCha have much more search skill than a large number of people.

This just shows how deep and wide “search” really is.

By: Isaac

Isaac — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 05:52:18 +0000

Not sure how if this is the right channel, but I’ve found no other way, so Jon, here is a plea that I hope you can really help out as you’re inside MS.

you must’ve heard about the plea from Gorbechev about a Russian school principal who got arrested because he unknowingly bought a pirate copy of windows. I know that MS is very sensitive on this issue, but I don’t agree that that man should be sent to jail because of this. First, there’s no way he or the school can ever afford to buy a copy of Windows (and now Vista is insanely expensive), and second, I truly believe that software for educational should be economically accessible in local standard. However, the horrible thing is that MS PR has already issued a cold-blood reply, saying that MS would not intervene because it respects the Russian judicial system. Nevermind how “respectable” the Russian judical system is, but it can really undone the positive image that MS has built up and, in my humble opinion, can be averted.

So please, Jon, convince the PR boneheads to stop and help the school principal and the students who cannot really afford the MS software.

Here is another link: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2091412,00.asp

By: Douglas Knox

Douglas Knox — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 05:15:30 +0000

This is brilliant and instructive, to reflect on your actual search process. Historian William Turkel recently made some observations that seem complementary to yours, thinking about the process of inference that a human intelligence would go through if presented with no more evidence than the search strings people offer to the “database of intentions.” http://digitalhistoryhacks.blogspot.com/2007/01/keywords-and-clues.html

By: Tim

Tim — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 01:53:52 +0000

Huh – 2 hours after I posted I found another “search strategy” – look in your Google search history. Mine contains more than my browser history, which is cleared quite often – but I don’t know how to clear my Google search history.

The “strategy” – scroll down through seaarch history, choosing things that “sound likely”, then check the search results.

Tagging does sound good – but I haven’t yet figured out where to go to get this tagging technology of which you speak.

As for the ‘del.icio.us’ for serarches idea: maybe a genetic algorithm which tries to find the ‘genes’ of successful searches?

By: Jim Russell

Jim Russell — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 17:47:22 +0000

“A successful search strategy involves a bunch of those kinds of calculations. How could we surface them from unconsciousness, study them, and optimize them?”

I think this would be a great research project for the hive mind to tackle. I imagine a del.icio.us for searches. A user could tag the search results, annotating the search as you have done. The idea is to generate a large number of transparent searches by a large number of searchers.

Furthermore, the open research project should categorize the annotations, generating a searchable database. Those categories would come after a bunch of published search trails. We could infer them from the data made available from those initial transparent searches.

By: Ben Bryant

Ben Bryant — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 13:00:32 +0000

good work describing so clearly and in such a readable fashion something I go through very often.

By: Jon Udell

Jon Udell — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 05:28:32 +0000

“It’s impossible (or very very difficult) to find an artist using verbal descriptions of the art”

Unless you had tagged the pages with the art you liked. That helps a couple of ways. You might just remember the tags you used. But if not, you can scan or search your tagspace to find them.

I hadn’t thought of this kind of annotation as a search strategy, but arguably it is.

By: Jon Udell

Jon Udell — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 05:22:03 +0000

“My bet is that most ordinary folk have a much harder time finding stuff on the web”

Yes. But maybe if we knew more about how good searchers actually search, we could make search software smarter for everyone.

For example, I was scanning for names. A view that extracted names from result sets would have been helpful. Of course it’s not obvious just from the query transcript that I was scanning for names. But you might be able to infer that from the clickstream.