Phrase search in Movies and TV programmes

Subzin is a fun site - you can search the scripts of many Movies and TV programmes to find the a phrase which you remember, but can't quite remember which Film/Show it comes from.

Phrases are specified with the usual double quotes "", otherwise words are search as is. Stop wording is obviously not done, which makes sense if you are providing search for words actually spoken. Unclear as to the type of indexing being used.

Advanced search provides the user with the opportunity to search for a phrase in a particular title, and to restrict search by popularity, Genre, Type (Film/TV) and language (but English is only available at the moment).

(h/t: David Thompson).

Trusting Googles rankings

Students trust it to much apparently. My view is that for informational, as opposed to navigational or transactional searches, you need to look at more than one page of results (users tend to view only the first page of results, and in fact very rarely scroll down to look at all of them). Students take note! Quality and source of information provided in your assignments is very important (e.g. try not to use Wikipedia to much). Academic study is available here.

Challenges in Building Large-Scale Information Retrieval Systems

Jeff Dean of Google provides a very interesting talk on the companies infrastructure and its development on a video recorded at WSDM'09. It rather annoyingly stopped on several occasions, but you can go back to the slide you were watching as the video and slides are presented slide by slide - keep with it, its very well worth it (particularly if you are a techy)!

Never give a baby booze

Searching for 'young boozer', yields an interesting search result for a prospective Treasurer in the State of Alabama. You couldn't make this up!

UPDATE
There's even a video...

Sponsored links SEO and politics

Here. tsk!

(h/t: Caroline Horne)

Video of Blind person searching

This video of a blind person browsing and search amazon is a very useful example of how blind users utilize accessible technologies such as braille readers to interact with computers.

(h/t: BCS Accessible Technologies SG)

Is Google taking HCI more seriously?

Perhaps, if evidence from this blog - The Noisy Channel - is anything to go by.

(h/t: Penny Swan)

Search Solutions 2009

Report of the days events can be found at the Information Interaction blog.

Google, Bing and Yahoo

Who's winning?

Google.

Big time.

Halal Search engine

The first search engine I've come across with prevents you from seeing results lists, depending on the query terms being 'haram'!

3 out of 3, you can't see the results.

1/2 out of 3, you can, but get a warning.

I won't be using this service much.

(h/t: Brett).

Eye Tracking on Search

Here's a very short example:

Show quite a complex interaction using web, navigating to image search from the results list and inspecting results from that media.

Blind Search Tool

Here's a neat idea! You type in a query, and search engine results are presented to you blind e.g. you don't which which set of results comes from what search engined. More. Results. Related (Microhoo).

More Microhoo

More evidence, if needed, that Microsoft got a good deal, and Yahoo got a really bad one.

Microhoo

It's happened.

On the the other hand, why not call its Microsoft and be done with the 'hoo' bit?

Could be a win for advertisers though. Not everybody agrees that its a bad deal, at least for their own situation.

Heres a view from the searchers perspective.

And what about the issue of competition?

Previous postings: on, off, on, off.

UPDATE: an excellent blog posting by Jason Calacanis which has much to commend it. The bottom line, don't surrender (or commit suicide) - innovate!

How Google might have worked.

Here.

The Interface.

Non-English Video Search

Found a couple of sites which provide non-english language video search, RuTube and YouKu, both obviously 'inspired' by YouTube (which I tend to use rather a lot).

More details of RuTube and YouKu are available.

Can't enter Russian or Chinese queries, so I tried some English ones.

I tried queries 'putin' and 'manchester united'. The former yielded this rather amusing video called 'Putin on the Ritz' further down the hitlist. Found lots of relevant stuff for the latter.

I tried queries 'Uighur' and 'manchester united' on YouKu, found more interesting stuff on the latter, music videos mostly on the former - the area being something of a sensitive subject at the moment.

Bottom line - English queries seem to work quite well on these systems, and its clear that the services have thought about cross language issues to some extent.

Visual Search Engines

There are a number of visual search engines around, which instead of providing a list of hits in a linear fashion (like google), different metaphors are used to represent the retrieved pages. Here are some examples:

• http://www.kartoo.com/ - this is a search engine which uses Cartography as its basis, and uses map like visualisations to represent the importance of pages, and he relations between them. Nice idea, but its not clear how the metaphor works.


• http://www.search-cube.com/ - uses a cube to represent results, which you move around with either the up, down,left right keys or shift/mouse movement. Thumbnails are shown as tiles on each face of the cube - thumbnails can be pages, images, videos.


• http://quintura.com/ - presents a tag cloud, together with a linear list of results.


• http://www.searchme.com/ - presents screenshots of pages, which the user can navigate to either the left or right. Search terms are shown on the retrieved screenshots. Video Demo..


• http://redzee.com/ - much the same as searchme, but with more pages to left and right displayed.


• http://middlespot.com/ - presents a set of page screenshots in the same way image search engines work, but these are thumbnails of the retrieved pages. One page at time is expanded and highlighted.


• http://viewzi.com/ - presents results as tiles, can either view text versions or screenshot thumbnails. To change view you navigate left and right. Video Demo.


• http://www.sbrows.com - presents a list of thumbnails in the lower part of the browser, and a screenshot of the page being inspected is presented in the middle (and larger) section of the browser. Navigation of the list is done left to right. This is a beta service, and doesn't appear to be working properly; thumbnails clicked on don't seem to match the screenshot when I used it. Video Demo - no sound.

Basic problem with all these systems - how do you represent a multi-dimensional space in 2D or 3D representations? All the the services here are either meta-search engines, or are another type of interface to one search engine (e.g. Google). Its difficult to know what some systems are using as their underlying search services.

The Future of Information Retrieval

Views on this can be found on these videos (including some old friends and colleagues):

(Software patents are crazy!)

Found this by using Kartoo, a visual search engine, and clicking on the videos tab. Must do a full scale evaluation of visual search engines one day. Watch this space.

Searching for the Hamas Covenant

Been searching for this on the web few days ago, without much success using the search string 'Hamas Covenant'. To many hits related to Obama and his old church publishing this covenant in their newsletter. Tried it again today, and bingo - these are all gone! Oh the wonders of Google.

Translations of the Covenant are available via MEMRI and The Avalon Project. This was written in 1988, and has not yet been updated.

Be warned, this is a very offensive document. So is their manifesto.

Grumpy Smurf

When searching for 'grumpy smurf' on google, this is the first image I get.

LOL!