templatedata

For a long time one of the big problems with the use of Flash in websites was that search engines could not 'craw' Flash files. Well the good news is that Google have developed an algorithm that allows them to index textual content in Flash files. Heres hoping other search engines develop this ability as well.

I thought I would celebrate my first blog post by letting our loyal templatedata readers know about a new search engine called Cuil. Pronunced 'cool', Cuil claims to have the largest index in the world with 121,617,892,992 web pages indexed and is run by a group of ex Google staffers.

Google has announced an extension to their news search: the news archive search.

News archive search provides an easy way to search and explore historical archives. Users can search for events, people, ideas and see how they have been described over time. In addition to searching for the most relevant articles for their query, users can get an historical overview of the results by browsing an automatically created timeline. Search results include both content that is accessible to all users and content that requires a fee. Articles related to a single story within a given time period are grouped together to allow users to see a broad perspective on the events.

• In 1998 the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that Monica Lewinsky was visiting Sydney, perhaps to see her 'Australian flame', an academic from Sydney.


• In 1993 a study to be carried out by Sydney academics on brain damage and drinking was big news.


• In 1966 the Oakland Tribune led with a story reporting "A SYDNEY UNIVERSITY physicist said today the United States, Britain and Russia are studying the possibility of using a nuclear rocket to prevent an asteroid from smashing into Earth." (His name is Prof. Stuart Thomas Butler).

A typical back-up post for a blogger lacking inspiration is to blog about the search terms people have used to get to their site. Sometimes they can be amusing, sometimes just plain weird. In a similar vein, AOL recently published the search histories of some its users and the results were jaw dropping. Of course, there are a whole heap of privacy issues around this as AOL users can be identified. This identification enables you to string together a picture of the person's life, as this journo has done over at CNet. Highly questionable but compelling reading.

If you're too busy to find related content for your website you could always use Google's new 'Related Links' service that plugs into your site and delivers related links to your content, on the fly.

Today the National Library launches Libraries Australia - an online catalogue that enables the general public to access the catalogues used by librarians for years. It provides access to the catalogues of over 800 libraries from across Australia. Basically this has meant putting a public front-end on Kinetica.

First impression: I like the 'Google-style' interface. Just one search box. (You can also limit the search to particular types of media).

Nothing much else to add other than what the headline says - Google has launched a blog search. Although, Read/Write web is not impressed.

For anyone interested in search, check out this collection of papers written by people working at Google.

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This month Jakob Nielsen turns to search engines: 'mental models for search are getting firmer' he says. What does he mean? People now have a fair idea of how they want search engines to work. Basically it boils down to a text box, a search button and results. No fancy boolean searches, no metadata searches. To put it bluntly, they just expect search to work. Search engines like Google have enabled people to search simply and now that is what they expect of all search engines.

So, how does our search engine shape up? From the word-of-mouth reports I have received over a number of years, not very well. So how do we improve it? By taking this mental model of search that most people have and trying to make it work with our search engine. This would mean a simple, one text box search that allows for some specialised searching but that doesn't require specialised searching to achieve decent results. This may mean a bit of thought in terms of configuration but as long as the audience doesn't require thought to search, we should see some improvement. The search engine needs to do the 'thinking'.

Search engines like Google have led to a level of expectation and like it or not, if your search engine doesn't match up, it's going to perceived as being hard to use.

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Scirus is a search facility that searches only scientific information on the web and offers access to full text articles. It's search pool includes journals. It is being touted as a rival to Schoogle but we shall see. In some ways it seems surprising that it has taken this long for 'scholarly' information to be targeted by search engines on a scale this large. Even though the quality, or 'scholarliness' of some of the search results is questionable, such engines offer a challenge to libraries to assess if and how they can integrate them into their services. For the end user, well, too much access is never enough I say. Bring on the scholar-search wars!

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Check out Google scholar, the Beta is online now. It allows you to:

search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.

I would be very interested to see how libraries could utilise this. Will look at giving it a good workout and review in a day or two.

In the meantime,The Chronicle of Higher Ed, Searchenginewatch and ResourceShelf have reviews.

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Boing Boing correspondent Xeni Jardin has posted a rough transcript of the Google CEO's remarks at the 35th Internet Anniversary. It's worth a read. I particularly liked the last paragraph:

The other thing to remember is that the average person does not want to debug their computer. We prefer instead the idea of a person typing something in and Google -- or someone else -- figuring things out for you. But very few things are organized around that principle of simplicity; we love and appreciate the complexity in technology but people using the internet really don't want that. When you see an ease of use breakthrough, it's such a wonderful thing.

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I heard about this on the stupendous NewsRadio a couple of days ago and thought at the time, isn't the web great, now it's saving people's lives! I have finally found a link to a story about how Google 'saved' the Australian hostage in Iraq. The SBS journo was kidnapped and used Google to verify his indentity and prove to his captors that he wasn't a spy.

Also, I thought I would sneak this in at the bottom of this post: If architects had to work like web designers. So accurate it hurts.

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Google have released the beta of their desktop search.

It's a desktop search application that provides full text search over your email, computer files, chats, and the web pages you've viewed.

Haven't had a chance to give it a complete workout yet, it's indexing the files on my machine as I type. Will post an analysis when I have really got it working.

Read more. Check out the screenshots. Read what searchenginewatch has to say about it.

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