BYTE.com > Tangled in the Threads > 2000 > September
The Art Of Organizing Search Results
By Jon Udell
September 7, 2000
(The Art Of Organizing Search Results
: Page 1 of 3 )
People who set up websites often ask what's the best search engine to deploy.
When "best" means "easiest-to-use" my answer is usually Atomz. It's a hosted service, free for sites with fewer than 500 pages, which requires hardly any special skills to set up and use.
What does require some thought, and some skill, is the process of usefully organizing the results that come back from Atomz -- or indeed, from any other search engine. The Web is full of sites that make no effort to design their search-results pages. I don't just mean applying a templated style to the default Atomz or Excite or Verity or Microsoft result pages. Nor do I mean simply ordering results by relevance, which begs the question: relevant to whom, and for what? Rather, I mean a deep reorganization of the result set, which both reflects and adapts to the underlying information architecture of the site. Search engines can't do this for you. The task involves some or all of these things:
- Discovering, and exploiting, metadata patterns implicitly present in the site.
- Managing the site's content in a way that creates explicit metadata patterns.
- Extracting metadata from search results.
- Transforming the metadata into new, more useful shapes.
- Converting the metadata into HTML, for delivery to the browser.
- Possibly converting the metadata into XML for delivery to downstream components.
My first experience with this procedure yielded the search-results page for an earlier incarnation of this site:
In this example, results are grouped by month. Within each group, icons are used to indicate three different datatypes -- newsgroup messages, press releases, and Byte.c
BYTE.com > Tangled in the Threads > 2000 > September
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