It would appear the BBC Programme Catalogue has awoken from its long slumber, hungry for keywords to devour, eager to reveal its deepest secrets! Huzzah!
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Resurrection of the Programme CatalogueIt would appear the BBC Programme Catalogue has awoken from its long slumber, hungry for keywords to devour, eager to reveal its deepest secrets! Huzzah!
Live Search BooksMicrosoft has released in (βeta) their Live Search Books, which contains searchable scans of thousands of pre-1927 titles in the public domain. More information is available on Live Search's Weblog.
Unfortunately, for our purposes, this is slightly less than useful. Let's see: "Thomas Hardy." Good! "Ezra Pound." Okay. "T.S. Eliot?" Not so much. Oh, well. Microsoft has also gone live with Live Search Academic, their response to Google Scholar.
Go, Search like NoblesBrowsing the local used book store this past weekend, scanning the Poetry section, my mouth watered when I stumbled across a like-new copy of Shakespeare's Words, a glossary of words used in the plays and poems. Alas, purse and brain both empty, forced I was to leave it begging on the shelve! (Perhaps it was for the best, as C.T. Onion's glossary seems to be the more authoritative.)
Today I see Kottke (whom I must confess not reading very much of late) pointing to Clusty's search engine, Shakespeare Searched, which is just plain cool (and some wag named the search functions "billy." Farceur!). Although, I don't see anything about which text they're using, except that it's in the public domain. For instance, my search for "Spunge" comes up empty, but the modern spelling, "Sponge" returns the expected result. And it's easy enough to discover the Shakepeare Searched tagline, "Go search like nobles, like noble subjects," is spoken by Helicanus in Pericles Act II, Scene iv.
Clouds Intend
Roll Your Own SearchEverybody's doing it: rolling their own searches. Rollyo lets you create and share domain-specific searches. In the space of a few minutes, you can register, select a bunch of websites to limit a search to, and then link to the resulting "personal search engine."
For instance, if you wanted cut through a lot of the noise which normally turns up in a search for our hero, you can type in a few keywords in the search box for "Henry Reed." Rollyo is running a plain, vanilla Yahoo! Search in the background, which makes it slightly less accurate than using, say, a9.com, which runs on Google. Because the search pages are user-created, however, most of the gruntwork and vetting is already done. Human-editing is what made Yahoo! such a great tool to begin with. And, for the benefit of gawking and abuse, there's a "My Rollyo" feature which allows you to save your favorite searchrolls, and propel the elite to "High roller" status.
The Safety-CatchFor over two years now, since the last time I overhauled the look and feel of the Henry Reed pages, I've been caught in a struggle between design and accessibility, form versus function. The problem, in a nutshell, is that many visitors could not recognize the only clickable button on the site as an actual, clickable button.
Since the site was for the author of the poem "Naming of Parts," I tried to have a theme involving various rifle parts in silhouette: an image map on the homepage, random images on the content pages, and a "flickable" safety-catch to use to send in a search query: But this proved confusing for many users. Last month, for example, out of a total of 321 search queries run, no fewer than 72 were for the word "Search," which appears by default in the search box as an identifier. Folks were just clicking on the little safety-catch to see what it would do, and then flipping and digging through the search results and landing on whatever looked interesting. But since the word "search" appears on every page, the results were more or less random (except that the Search page was ranked highest), and a lot of people just ended up choosing an item from the header navigation row. I was also seeing far too many blank queries: people clinking in the text field and then sending an empty box home with the safety-catch. I really didn't want to give up the safety-catch button. Sure, it's gimmicky. But it tied the whole theme together. Flick the safety-catch. Never letting anyone see any of them using their finger. But an excess of between 50 and 100 users a month, failing to use one of the simplest interfaces on the site? That's just too many. So I finally broke down, let go of my stubborn, tenacious fixation on design, and let myself gently down into the icy current of the lowest common denominator: A button.
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