December 17, 2007 10:10am

What the hell is that song?

Posted by michael.twofish tagged and
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Prediction of the day. Within 5 years--let's say by Christmas 2012--it will be possible to search for a song by playing or singing a bit of the song. People will be able to sing into their computer and be taken to search results where they can play and purchase the song. Or they'll be able to hold their phone up to the radio, and get a text message back with information on the song and where to buy it.

Maybe 5 years is even a bit on the long side.

October 11, 2007 5:45pm

Search APIs

Posted by michael.twofish tagged , , and
2 Comments
There's quite a difference between the terms of use of Google's and Yahoo!'s search APIs. While both say you're not allowed to do anything illegal or mission critical (I especially like Yahoo! saying you can't rely on the API if you're operating nuclear facilities), they differ in terms of what you're allowed to do with the results. Google spends a lot of time saying what you're not allowed to do once you get results (you can only retrieve a small number of results (8 at the moment), you can't use them as the main content on your ...
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September 20, 2007 4:39pm

Image search

Posted by michael.twofish tagged
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[Update: Live seemed to have turned off all the cool features and are back to boring image search. What happened?] Of the three main search engines (Google, Yahoo! and Live) Live search is streets ahead when it comes to image search. They also appear to be the only ones who are doing much innovation in this space. So, why do I say such a thing? I'm not really talking about the quality of their results, because they're all about on a par. Live has a much better user experience. The first thing you notice is that they ...
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September 7, 2007 5:31pm

The system of use is the repository

Posted by michael.twofish tagged and
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In the beginning, Web search was based on aspects of the resources being indexed, like term frequency and inverse document frequency. That's of course still important but things really took off when search engines started to treat the Web as a connected graph, placing as much importance on the interconnectedness of the resources as what was in the resources themselves. Google made a huge jump forward in this area with its PageRank algorithm. As things stand, search for digital material for teaching and learning (or learning objects or open educational resources) focuses on the resources themselves (or metadata about them), ...
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August 29, 2007 3:14pm

Feeds in search results

Posted by michael.twofish tagged , and
0 Comments
I'm finding more and more feeds are being returned from Google. This seems like stupid behaviour to me. You use a search engine to meet an information need. I want to know something about Ferret, I'm likely to use a search engine to find it. Do I want to subscribe to a feed? No, that's way too much commitment. If I find what I'm after and the site looks interesting I'll poke around a bit and then I might decide it's interesting enough to subscribe to. The correct behaviour would be for Google to return a link to the ...
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