Not that anyone from Google may be reading this post, but you never know. There’s a lot of static thinking going on the web, and some innovative things I’ve seen in one technology could be used in other places. Here are some:

Consider allowing information seekers to reorder search results.

A search engine will provide its own highly touted ranking system, which can turn out to be the number one factor for the success of online businesses. But why provide only one set of ranking? Why not create multiple ways to rank search results, so that users can choose what’s best for them from something like a drop down box.

I’ve seen this feature on article databases, and it blew me away. How often does one create lists from a database and then allow users to resort them and order them by one or another field? I think there are two things going on when presenting search results: the creation of a list of results, and a ranking of said list. Allow users to order the search results in more ways than one after the search. Some ideas: order by links to, order by relevance, order by special magic super secret search ranking, order alphabetically?, order by traffic ranking, etc

Rank Spam

Instead of just creating a spam folder, and dropping all the suspected spam into it, rank the spam from ‘more likely to be spam’ to ‘less likely to be spam’ with either colors, or text size of the subject or something similar.

It’s painful to have to go look at the spam folder and browse through offensively titled emails, and only 99% of the time find nothing, but that 1% of the time it is an email that mistakenly was labeled as spam that you cannot miss or else your career is over. I don’t think it would be an impossibility to let users know what the spam ranking of an email is and then let them sort the mail so they can browse it less painfully. I’m sure that spam ranking is already happening, only the general public isn’t benefiting from it as much as they could.

Create Alternating Background for Search Results

Isn’t this a no brainer? Just a slightly different hue on alternating search results would be so nice to have.

, has a new feature. At least I think it’s new: forward and next buttons. With it you can create a mighty powerful browsing experience. The thing I’ve always loved about Google’s toolbar is how you can seamlessly integrate it with the rest of the browser’s customization. You don’t need to use the extra horizontal bar, you can turn it off and the drag the buttons to a bar you already have open, and thus save valuable vertical screen space:

And now with the ‘forward and next button’ along with the ‘I’m feeling lucky’ button you can find the results you want from search without having to stare at line after line of mind-numbing plain text results.
Here’s my secret:
Customize the Google Tool bar so that you have the ‘I’m feeling lucky’ and the ‘forward and next’ buttons visible. Click a term search such as ‘‘ in the search box. First, this important, click the regular ol’ Google button (the G). Don’t look at the results, now click ‘I’m feeling lucky’, now just click forward and next to browse the different search results! If you searched for ‘Color Tool’ you’ll come to my Color Tool with just a few clicks of the ‘next’ button! Note, you have to click that G first for some reason, or else it wont work.

The Wall Street Journal writer Lee Gomes gives readers an insightful glimpse of how search engines rank strategies encourage the creation of bad information. Search Engines penalize a web site’s search result ranking if they copy information. Webmasters, whose income often depend on how well they rank on search results, have resorted to creating snippets of worthless information, only in order to improve their page ranking on Google. As Gomes points out, there are many people doing this. Even legitimate sites like WordPress (the blogging software used by Share Wonders) have been known to be guilty of it. The author raises the important concern that:

Legitimate information, like articles from the WHO, risks being crowded out by junky, spammy imitations.

Search engines are at fault, as are the dishonest perpetrators, and things should change to discourage this behavior. In the interim, users should be critical of the credibility of information found on the internet. They should find authoritative gateways on the internet that often point to relevant information like the Librarian’s Index to the Internet, , Wikipedia and the Internet Public Library. Regardless of the source or the methods used, having a critical perspective is a necessity in any information search.

OpenSearch is an A9 technology licensed by A9 under the creative commons license and enables websites to allow search engines to do a better job of searching their site.

The richest content can�t be adequately indexed by one engine alone. Different types of content require different types of search engines; most of the time, the best search engines for a site are the ones written by those that know the content the best.

If your site has search capability then you might want to consider OpenSearch. It’s being adopted even by Microsoft: IE7 will be able to discover if OpenSearch is available on your site and give users the ability to search it from their browser search box.

The requirements are simple:

You�ll need to produce RSS or Atom formatted search results with some small additions, and then write a simple OpenSearch Description file.

It can’t hurt if you have the resources. Maybe it will improve your site search and your traffic.

a9, search

Tech.memeoroandum is depository of information and discussions pertaining to technology:

The Web is humming with reports and opinions on technology. tech.memeorandum is page A1 for these discussions. Auto-updated every 5 minutes, it uncovers the most relevant items from thousands of news sites and weblogs.

They have a feed available. Looks like a great science related resource, and many people seem to know about it already: almost 2,000 subscribers to the feed I chose on bloglines!

science, information, research

Postgenomic is a life science web log aggregator, but it does more than that:

Postgenomic collates posts from life science blogs and then does useful and interesting things with that data.

For example, it allows you to get an instant picture of which web sites are being heavily linked to by researchers in the medical sciences, or which papers are being cited or reviewed most often by bioinformaticians, or which buzzwords are being used the most frequently by evolutionary biologists.

Sounds interesting. It has three feeds you can subscribe to: recent top stories, recent reviews, and recent hot papers. I found out about this via The Social Software Weblog. They report that it’s currently limited to 155 blogs, and that it’s been up for less than a week. The creator of postgenomic is an anonymous scientist named ‘Stew’ who’s working on the project anonymously for fear of losing his job!

life, science, research