While I am talking about search engines, sort of, I think I’ll post on how I want searching on the tubes to be better.
In my opinion Google is still numero uno but all the things I am suggesting have Yahoo better positioned to make the change. Which is crap because I don’t like using Yahoo search and their new alpha is on the right track whilst being a bit of a visual aberration.
First up, when I search for something technical, often programming related, I want the search results to include the tagged results from del.icio.us. Naturally Google can’t do this, they have Google bookmarks, but it’s too late, I’m on delicious which is owned by Yahoo. The problem is that Yahoo doesn’t index this content. This is a shame because it is user categorised relevant content. From my experience one doesn’t bookmark content junk in delicious unless they perceive it to be relevant.
I tend to look in delicious if I can’t find something on Google but I want to do it both at once. Once this has been done, the keywords that the search engine also has for this entry or the delicious keywords are listed under each entry.
Why? I may not have the vocabulary to adequately describe what I am looking for. Half the problem with searching is expressing what you are looking for. I mentioned this before when I blogged about Chomsky theory and a business owner’s ability to express requirements. You can read about this here. When I click on a tag I can then get a filtered subset of that delicious tag. Drilling down essentially. Whether I drill by one tag or all tags I can’t tell which is better or if both options should be provided.
Cuil does some drilling down. This is achieved by showing the user what other content intersects the search terms. It doesn’t provide user bookmarked content.
Next up is to integrate Flickr into the search results. Once again a Yahoo purchase and this is something they have done. It’s a shame because all those accurately tagged images are not accessible from Google. Naturally this should cover public images only. Images that are tagged can be additionally tagged with accurate “content” levels so that searches can filter their own results according to their modesty index.
The fundamentals of searching haven’t changed since the mid-nineties. You enter a term into a search box and get a set of results. Open a bunch up in tabs to see if you have relevant content. Perhaps its time to look at how we can search rather than how to best provide results for how we currently search.
On this topic is the Yahoo Alpha (in Beta, ugh!) which provides a set of search results for the web, and images, and Yahoo answers and several other categories on the page. I don’t like it. Each item is in a separate section of the page and you have to change your focal point to examine results. This makes it too easy to miss content. Some of the sections are closed which means I need to interact with the page to see if the results are relevant. Too much effort. Consolidate my view, remove the image and video sections, or at the most do what google does and has a few very small thumbnails at the top.
When I want to search for images, I know that I do. I realise that Yahoo wants to provide a single interface for federated searching. For me I would prefer to prefix a search with the string “image:” or “video:” and have it automatically redirect to the relevant search context. Obviously this isn’t winning in the learnability stakes but it is making the website more efficient to use. Both of these are usability issues suited to different user skill levels.
Note: Google should buy Yahoo. It would solve some of my problems.
2nd Note: I didn’t mention Microsoft Live Search because in Australia it is associated with NineMSN and I fear my search results will be along the lines of “find the right hair style to suit your compiler” or “fixing link errors in friendship bands”.
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Ryan Boucher is a Software Inquisitor and is passionate about it. You can find a whole raft of articles and anecdotes about software testing and other topics he gets excited about. |
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4 Responses to “How I want searching to be better”
Good post; to your point about prefixing a search with ‘image:’ or ‘video:’, a very similar feature actually exists in Alpha (http://au.alpha.yahoo.com/faqs.html#faq9)
Also, you mention that Yahoo doesn’t index del.icio.us; a site-restricted search on au.search.yahoo.com shows over 22M results; so they’re in the index. If you want to see a tighter integration between del.icio.us and other web search results, have you looked into search monkey? (http://au.gallery.search.yahoo.com/) you can add enhancements that others have built, or you can make your own (ie. don’t wait for someone else to enhance your results – do it yourself). I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on this.
- Seb
Thanks for your comments.
re: image: This what I want, however your search isn’t very forgiving. You’re FAQ doesn’t indicate the keywords have to be suffixes otherwise it doesn’t consider them so “images sydney” shows a traditional result whilst “sydney images” does provide the image only search. This took a while to decipher.
re: del.icio.us: I tried a search on the word “velociraptor-sympathiser” which has existed in my delicious bookmarks for some time and it shows 15 results. None of the 91 bookmarks under that tag are included. A delicious search shows zero results but a delicious tag search finds all 91.
Incidentally the default search in delicious is not a tag search but a text search. I’m curious about that decision.
Search Monkey is a good concept but I can’t help but think that I’m doing someone else’s work for them. User generated content is a great concept but it shouldn’t supplant continual research and development in one of your major revenue streams. If it turns out that I’m the only person on the interweb that wants federated search than I would expect that I would be required to build my own search enhancements.
You have almost won on one topic. My FireFox search control now has yahoo second so I could do image searching directly from the browser the way I’ve always wanted to. However there is no Yahoo Beta search engine plugin for FireFox…. so close and yet so far.
Thanks for you comments Seb. You did make me aware that Yahoo is on its way to supporting some features that I want to use.
re image: I totally agree – the feature isn’t intuitive enough (yet). There is also similar functionality on the standard web SRP (actually, it’s along the same lines as your recommendation re. small thumbs at the top of the algo text results); do a search for ‘image ‘ and you get the first few thumbnail results from image search (au.images.search.yahoo.com) at the top of the page.
re. availability of del.icio.us tags in web search: agreed this needs some work.
re. Search monkey: I guess it’s about choice. Some people want traditional search results, all text and no fuss. Others want more. This lets developers play around with search results, and users benefit from the creativity that ensues. I also think that giving _external_ developers access to a platform that Yahoo developers also use for enhancing search results is a more scalable way of addressing the problem of “I’m a user who wants and hasn’t built it yet”
re. Firefox search engine plugins for Yahoo Alpha (assuming this is what you mean – as opposed to Yahoo Beta) – go to http://au.alpha.yahoo.com/ and click the search engine dropdown list in the firefox chrome; you should see an option to ‘add alpha (beta) search’. (There is also a link in the footer of the page: “Add alpha to the Firefox Search Box”.)
- Seb
I’ve got the alpha plugin setup for image searching. Thanks.
On the topic of custom content. I am all for exposing the platform for developers. It can help build a community and those developers who can and want to make a difference, will. As I mentioned before I just want Yahoo to lead the way especially in regards to developing more fundamental changes to the searching concept. Ideally I hope you guys also integrate the best extensions into the whole for everyone to use by default.
I’ll be keen to see how you go with the enhancements to your search over time. Feel free to keep my updated.