A follow up to uncontrolled vocabulary. Many of the more advanced search engines try to improve relevance by extracting meaning out of the content of documents, i.e. without any input required from users. This is commonly known as auto-classification (or auto-categorisation). It then enables you to perform faceted search queries (also known as conceptual search). [...]
In case you are wondering, this is not going to be an expletive-filled post or a discussion about what happens if you suffer damage to the frontal lobe of your brain. One of the big challenges for enterprise search solutions is deciphering meaning from words. There are five aspects to the challenge. (Possibly more, given [...]
Last year I wrote a blog post that generated a bit of offline feedback – Search Lessons. Or rather, it was explaining The Google™ Effect that sparked a debate. ¨Why can’t our enterprise search just be like Google?¨ People are used to Google when searching the Internet – simple (and single) user interface, fast results. [...]
On Microsoft’s Channel 9 network, there is an interesting podcast called ‘Just Enough Architecture‘, where the interviewee provides some good recommendations about the balance between how much architecture you need versus just getting on and writing software that does something useful. The same debate could be applied to taxonomy, specifically the use of metadata properties [...]
I can’t help it, the word ‘metacrap’ just makes me want to chuckle. Anyways, there’s a great blog post over on Wired, by David Weinberger – Metacrap and Flickr Tags: An Interview with Cory Doctorow. (transcript and audio available). Lots of useful information and opinion about search challenges, tagging and information rights. Like the following [...]
