Recently in Searching and Finding Category

Back in February, Mark Zeman, Lecturer and Subject Director in Digital Media, College of Creative Arts, Massey University, New Zealand, tipped me off to a search agent research project called Searchbots. I tagged it as something to blog about in my email and then, well, I got busy with my new job.

I’ve finally checked it out. Mark was clever enough to give me short precis of the project:

• Experimental social search engine created as a Masters in Design project.
• Build your own search robot and send it out to search on your behalf.
• Search using tags, location, color and mood, or ask a question.
• Get ongoing personalized reports and feeds.
• Talk to it and feed your Searchbot metadata to keep it alive.
• The more you interact with your Searchbot the better everyone’s results.
• Runs on top of API’s from Google, Yahoo, Digg & del.icio.us and more.
• Cross references popular Digg items with del.icio.us tags.
• Building an artificial intelligence using people’s common sense and clicks.
• 34,000+ Searchbots built.
• Interactive tag clouds & other metadata games to play with your Searchbot.
• Get your unique tag cloud plus your Searchbot printed on a tee-shirt.
• Your Searchbots finds facts and entertainment. Mix it up.
• Diligently retrieving the best of the Internet for the good of humanity.

Here are the questions (to users) the research is designed to address:

• Does personifying the search interface increase the motivation of users to contribute metadata?
• Will users become attached to their Searchbots through ongoing interaction and therefore be willing to play metadata games to keep it alive?
• Will using mythology and game theory help make searching an active give-and-take relationship? Will this sustain an open-content social search engine?
• Would you rather fill out a basic form or talk to a Searchbot? An agent that works on your behalf to wade through search results.
• How will users respond to creatively tagging the web? If I search for the color red will I find a website about tomatoes, communism or angry people?
• How would you define your ongoing “relationship” with your search engine? Does it endlessly talk in your ear or just drip-feed you good clues?

Mark said he was planning to run a survey of users so if he notices this post, he can chime in and let us know “some of the findings on how personifying the interface effects users motivation levels.”

Maybe everyone else in the blogosphere knows this already but I just read that Dave Sifry is stepping down as CEO of Technorati: Technorati Weblog: A Change In Seasons

Looks like Tantek’s timing was impeccable.

I first met Dave during the dotcom bust when blogging was booming (again) on the backs of a lot of underemployed folks, myself included. I was working hard, updating Radio Free Blogistan three to seven times a day, hanging out on the #joiito channel on irc, and going to various blogger dinners and shmoozes here in the Bay Area.

I met a lot of folks with interesting startup ideas or who were looking at various ways of turning their passion for blogging and or social networking into businesses or publications or both. Dave’s idea was simple to explain and easy to understand, so I wasn’t surprised to see it get funded and take off.

I’ve got other friends working there now - some of whom I introduced to the Technorati people. I guess I consider myself a friend of the company, if that’s even a possible thing to be, and I’ve hesitated to complain or criticize too much when I’ve found the service sluggish or otherwise frustrating.

I applauded their recent redesign and I still visit the site when I am in the mood for some egosurfing (usually disappointing) or to see who’s been blogging about the Yahoo! Pattern Library recently.

It sounds like Technorati is having a tough time right now. Valleywag reported something like eight layoffs in addition to the CEO vacancy, and people don’t seem to talk about how Google or Yahoo! should buy Technorati so much anymore.

(Disclosure: I work at Yahoo but I have absolutely no knowledge regarding acquisition plans or lack of them for any startup out there.)

I’m sure the next thing Dave does will be interesting and I wish him the best.

Looks like Technorati has reconfigured itself to be less blog-centric and to take a more multimedia look at what they call over there the Live Web (Technorati Weblog: Come check out the refreshed www.technorati.com!):

First, we’ve eliminated search silos on Technorati. In the past, you had to know the difference between keyword search, tag search and blog directory search in order to make use of the full power of our site. No more. Starting today, we now provide you a simplified experience. Simply indicate what’s of interest to you and we’ll assemble the freshest, hottest, most current social media from across the Live Web - Blogs, posts, photos, videos, podcasts, events, and more.

We’ve also worked really hard at making our user interface simpler, and more intuitive. We’ve been spending months doing user testing, and listening to you, our users, collecting and prioritizing what you wanted, what you liked, and what you hated about Technorati. We haven’t gotten it 100% right yet, and we’re going to keep working hard to improve, but I think we’ve made a big step forward with this launch.

…

With this launch, we also provide you with more context around more stuff like videos, music, and blogs. Over time, these pages will become richer and more comprehensive as we add more information about the thing itself, like where it was published, who links to it, what other things are similarly tagged, and more.

So I just wasted, er, spent a half hour surfing twitter pages and poaching friends of friends. I noticed that I had a strong gut sense of who I felt it was ok to befriend, most of the time, but that it doesn’t necessarily map to people who are actually my friends or whom I’ve met, although it may factor in how recently I’ve dealt with them.

For some, I added them because I’m interested in what they have to ssay or what they’re doing. I anticipate that their feed will be intereesting, or the preview of their recent thoughts is copmpelling. I’m aware that some of these people may not remember me, may not add me back (which is fine) or allow me to add them if they are twittering privately.

The etiquette is awkward. The UI at twitter sort of implies you should add people back, but that may be just in the contexts of private twitters.

I often notice odd disjunctions between my friend lists or various social services. Some people have talked about being able to bulk upload friend networks using hcards or something from one service to the next, but I wonder if that mapping really makes sense. For whatever reason, for example, Joi Ito is a contact of mine in Flickr but not on LinkedIn. At least one of us probably wants it to be that way.

The whole topics of reciprocity and social guidelines about when it’s ok to ignore a connection or a friend request and when it carries a social burden to do so is interesting too.

This has been another in a series of posts full of questions and half-baked proto-thoughts with few answers or real insights.

Speaking of twitter, I’ve dressed up my sidebar with badge bling. Been thinking hard about seriously redesigning my main blog and possibly moving it over to mediajunkie, which may be the catchiest domain name I own.

Terry let us all know that today Yahoo, MSN and Google have agreed on a standard Site Map format. Using a sitemap.xml file will facilitate search engine crawlers to index your site and help with Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html

This Slashdot article on an IE/Y!IM clickfraud exploit makes me wonder if the whole basis of online advertising is under assault, if there’s a chance we could see the sort of collapse that followed the banner-ad kiting practices of bubble 1.0, and if some new models of search engine ad-word placement are going to have to emerge to continue to fight this arms race.

Mark sent a link around the office to Enterprise Search Center, saying “This is a new site dedicated to corporate search technologies. Should be more and more useful as more articles are contributed.”