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My favourite example when teaching a course on web programming and search in particular was 'cookies'. When you search for cookies, are you searching for your favourite aunt's cookie recipe or the stuff your web browser sends to a server? While it could be argued that both are research topics, my guess is that most people searching for cookies of the epicurean type are probably interested in buying some.
Yahoo! Mindset, announced today on the Y! Search Blog sort of helps you resolve the difference. My search for cookies brings up 10 results with a slider at the top. The slider slides between "shopping" and "researching", indicating what I'm interested in.
Now here's the cool part. Move the slider in either direction and watch the results change instantly.
The uncool part? Looks like (at a casual glance at least) they're storing the first 100 results or so in the page, but keep them all invisible. That means two things... 1. Yahoo! has to take the time to order 100 results rather than 10 (chances are they'd have to do this anyway), and 2. You have to download all 100 results to your browser.
It may have been more efficient to use XmlHttp to do this, but I haven't thought about the server side costs to implement that.
The second cool thing is that it remembers where I left the slider and defaults to that on subsequent searches.
May 27 2005, 21:41:10 UTC 7 years ago
May 28 2005, 02:57:47 UTC 7 years ago
by the way - the classic search example of java shows only one coffee bean shopping link in the top few and that too on the research axis. hmm.
May 29 2005, 21:14:05 UTC 7 years ago
May 28 2005, 08:57:55 UTC 7 years ago
*goes off to play with it for a while*
May 29 2005, 05:56:33 UTC 7 years ago
Hard problem to solve. Good stuff, nonetheless.