March 2003 Archives
March 27, 2003
A day in the life of BBCi Search - part 8
This is part 8 of an 8 part article - Start at the beginning 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 - Download a PDF version of the entire series Conclusions The overall conclusions that I have drawn from this study of one days activity on the BBCi Search service are: over 80% of users make unique enquiries 2 out of 5 searches are specifically focussed on the UK. 1 in 12 searches have incorrect spelling. 1 in 5...
A day in the life of BBCi Search - part 7
This is part 7 of an 8 part article - Start at the beginning 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 - Download a PDF version of the entire series Change of use over time Part of the information logged by the search system is the location the search originated from. By examining the pattern of search usage over different periods of the day, we are able to build up a picture of how the focus of BBCi users...
A day in the life of BBCi Search - part 6
This is part 6 of an 8 part article - Start at the beginning 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 - Download a PDF version of the entire series The value of a Taxonomy As I mentioned, BBCi Search has a team constantly monitoring the search activity on the site, and attempting to match the searches being made with the best possible content available, both on the BBCi site and on the web as a whole. This role...
A day in the life of BBCi Search - part 5
This is part 5 of an 8 part article - Start at the beginning 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 - Download a PDF version of the entire series Questions & URLs Two other types of search I examined were where users had entered either natural language questions or URLs into the search box on the BBCi site. I found that although it was a regular occurrence, it was not a significant proportion of searches - URLs made...
A day in the life of BBCi Search - part 4
This is part 4 of an 8 part article - Start at the beginning 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 - Download a PDF version of the entire series Spelling The spelling of search terms presents perhaps the biggest challenge to the BBCi Search team, and to the process of information retrieval on the web as a whole, in bringing back relevant and targeted results to the user. When a search is made on the BBCi site, effectively...
A day in the life of BBCi Search - part 3
This is part 3 of an 8 part article - Start at the beginning 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 - Download a PDF version of the entire series Advanced Search 'Advanced Search' is a general term describing different types of search syntax, including using quote-marks to force exact phrase matching, using '+' or '-' modifiers on search terms, or using Boolean constructions with AND, OR or NOT. BBCi Search does not offer an explicit advanced search option,...
A day in the life of BBCi Search - part 2
This is part 2 of an 8 part article - Start at the beginning 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 - Download a PDF version of the entire series UK-ness The first quality I looked for was the UK-ness of a given search term. Some searches are specifically about the UK, for example: "dvla", "edinburgh fire" and "first aid courses london". On the other hand, some searches can't be about anything other than world wide events or interests,...
A day in the life of BBCi Search - part 1
This is part 1 of an 8 part article - Start at the beginning 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 - Download a PDF version of the entire series A day in the life of BBCi Search - Introduction Since BBCi launched in November 2001, the improved search offering has been collecting data on the way that BBC website users search both the BBC's website, and through the homepage Websearch, the whole wide web. Given such a mass...
A day in the life of BBCi Search
I am speaking next week at an internal BBC Search & Findability conference, where I will be doing an as-yet-unfinished presentation on "What search tells you about your users" - which I plan to make available on currybetdotnet in due course. A lot of it will be based on some research I did over Christmas into the behaviour of BBCi search users on one particular day, which I have been presenting as 'A Day in the Life of BBCi...
March 26, 2003
I am an expert on combat-trained sea mammals
Well, at least according to certain search engines, anyway. Over the last couple of days I have been getting so many referrals to currybetdotnet from people searching for information about "dolphins in the gulf war", or "sea lions in iraq", and it really shows to me what I consider to be one of the key flaws of the current search engine model. A couple of months ago I saw a news story about the US Navy animals in the...
Bigger isn't always better with search results
Paul Hammond pointed me at this idea of a 'Better Google' from 37signals. it struck me that it isn't too dissimilar from services already offered by a couple of lesser-used search engines. Teoma has often been touted as a potential 'Google killer', and in the right hand column of its results set it "auto-magically" lists 'resources' related to the search. These are sites that would be seen to be good starting points for research on a subject, as they...
March 25, 2003
Searching for the "War on Iraq"
BBC News has been reporting that the Iraq war is the number one search term according to the Yahoo! Buzz index. With a self-deprecating flourish the Yahoo! Buzz index announced that: "surprisingly -- or perhaps not surprising at all to those who question the intelligence of the average American -- terms related to the war with Iraq never managed to upstage buzz mainstay American Idol" It hasn't been much different this side of the Atlantic. The top ten searches...
March 21, 2003
"War on Iraq" specific search links
We have just launched an additional column of the "POPULAR SEARCHES RIGHT NOW ARE" panel on the BBCi homepage. It has been a pretty quick & dirty development job, but it means that we should now have on the homepage three popular searches that provide an alternative to reading about the war, and three popular searches that will guide the user to the BBC News stories that other users are searching for, and that have an editorial connection to...
March 20, 2003
Anti-war demo at Walthamstow Central
My journey into work today was held up at Walthamstow Central at lunchtime by an anti-war demo of some 100 school children that paralysed the bus station. It is the first positive thing I have seen to come out of this conflict. I can't describe how heartened I was to see people that age being politically engaged, and making their own banners, and thinking strategically about how to cause the maximum disruption with the minimum of resource. Respect to...
March 18, 2003
Identifying real names within BBC Search terms
...or why Martin Luther King is my nemesis I've been working on a way to identify the people or 'characters' that BBCi Search users are looking for. It is in a rough beta at the moment, but I am hoping we can eventually turn it into a 'People in the news' or 'People you are looking for' feature on the BBCi site The way it works is by first identifying all of the searches on a given day that...
March 9, 2003
Word bursts within BBC search logs
I have been doing a lot of thinking around how Jon Kleinberg's word bursts might be applied to my work with the search logs on the BBC website. I thought, and David Sifry confirms, the maths to do this on large data sets is mind-boggling. However, we are already very good at picking out bursts of search activity on the BBC site based around search terms, like on the homepage - but they are not the smallest discrete unit....
March 8, 2003
Morgan Stanley makes the case for a swift war
Whilst I was travelling home on the Victoria Line late on Wednesday, a couple of drunk besuited men in their late twenties / early thirties got on the train. They were waving around a print-out of a PowerPoint presentation, and were arguing about it. Eventually one got off, and the other settled down to make annotations on the report. Reading over his shoulder I saw that the presentation appeared to be from Morgan Stanley, the financial services company, and...