electronic museum

Entries categorized as ‘search’

Search as content delivery

January 30, 2008 · 2 Comments

Warner music announced recently that it has filed a law suit against music search engine Seeqpod for all the usual copyright music industry wrongs.

The interesting thing in this case is that Seeqpod don’t host any of the music you get to find: all they do is provide a (rather nice) user interface on top of an mp3 search.

The law here isn’t the slightest bit clear. Already by providing particular strings to google you can get directory listings of mp3’s, so all Seeqpod are actually doing here is delivering a UI.

The interesting question seems to be that the precedent set by cases like this could determine how search engines are allowed to operate. One line of argument is that no one but the hosts of the content (you, me, anyone with mp3’s on our webspace) should be held responsible for the copyright infringement. That then puts a huge strain on the legal machine (hurrah!) because each case has to be dealt with individually.

Once the gateway providers to that content – in this case, the search engines – are held accountable, the game changes shape considerably.

Anyone who has spent any time on this blog knows where I come from on this: the music industry needs to accept that the landscape has changed considerably and embrace the fact that every single one of us has – with any home PC – the potential to copy material. If you show me one person who has never duplicated, ripped or ‘distributed’ (even to their mates) copyright material then I’ll show you a liar…

The ’search as content delivery’ paradigm is hooked intimately into the fact that users now work with our content both “traditionally” – within the confines of our sites, but also via other means such as google images – users see and use our content but never come near our website.

The ramifications of this are far reaching and require us to ask questions about context, metrics, ’success’, virality, marketing, and also, apparently, legality as well…

Categories: content · copyright · music · search

Semanticism. Semanticness. Semanticitivity.

December 10, 2007 · 3 Comments

Ever found yourself struggling to answer the question “but what is the Semantic Web? Can’t you give me an example…”?

When I was talking at a UKSG seminar recently, one of the deligates asked one of the presenters exactly this – how the Semantic Web might work in practice. The response was slightly woolly – arguably like pretty much everything to do with the entire notion of “semanticness” ;-)

Now, thanks to the video below from True Knowledge (thanks Simon!) it all makes a little more sense.

Categories: collections · conference · museum · search
Tagged: ,

Open Education search

September 5, 2007 · 3 Comments

As some of you might remember, I put together www.museumcollections.org.uk a while back to demonstrate what could be done for collections searching with next to no cash (a fiver to register a domain), time (20 mins, tops) or effort (cut and paste). Underneath this is Google coop, an implementation of the big G’s search engine which lets you search across multiple websites. In this particular example, I added a bunch of domains or sub-domains featuring museum collections and also asked people (so far about 20) to contribute if they wanted to add further domains to the list.

lost?O’Reilly radar posted last week about Open Education Search, a collaboration to “build a web search portal dedicated to open educational resources“. There is more about the project on this later post, but it looks as if it will make extensive use of Custom Search, another offering in the bewildering array of free search services provided by Google.

For me, the interesting thing about using Google coop is that it places the bar for cross-domain collections searching, and automatically challenges any institutions considering the various approaches favoured in the past (such as, for instance, Z39.50), to come up with something better.

There have been rumblings in the pipeline for as long as I can remember about a national (or international) search engine for museum collections. Pretty much everyone agrees we’re in a ridiculous place right now: you have to know which institution to go to in the first place to then do the searching for the thing you’re interested in. There is no central place for finding all the Babbage-related collections on the web, for example, except for – oh, hang on – Google.

“…wait!…” shout the hardcore metadata types, “…Google apps doesn’t provide our users with the granularity they require: we need it to be better!”

Well, here’s a proposed solution to that problem: instead of a bunch of museums getting together and spending the next five years (and equivalent vast sums of money) arguing about standards, interoperability etc, before eventually self-imploding and deciding it’s all too much like hard work, how about we club together and buy a Google Enterprise or two (~£15k education price, I believe) and point it at each of the collections websites. Tweak the results, pay a designer £5k for the end result, buy a domain?

I’m being slightly fatuous (imagine!) but there’s a serious point here: Google does search really, really well, so why not use it? Yes, it’s “brute force” searching, but nothing – nothing – has come even close yet to doing it better. This is a perfection gene issue: I vote for cheap, cheerful and 90% perfect (and actually getting it done) rather than 99% perfect and still being here, £3m worse off and with nothing else to show in a few years time.

So. Anyone got £15k?

Categories: collections · mashup · museum · search · web2.0

Visualising collections

July 24, 2007 · 1 Comment

I’m a big fan of the diagram. Anyone who has worked with me knows I tend to put ideas down as organograms, mind-maps and other scribbles: I’m pretty bad at understanding concepts unless I can sketch them. Visual cues, linkages, the ability to promote ideas, connect them together – all of these seem incredibly valuable when thinking about relationships between concepts, objects, web pages.

Visualisation of www.electronicmuseum.org.ukIn the same way, I find the means by which we browse collections of stuff online is usually wholly unsatisfactory. As Seb Chan said in his talk at Museums on the Web UK, the way in which hierarchies or search results are displayed on the web is almost always terribly pedestrian, and has no real-world connection at all. His example of the supermarket shelf struck a chord: we browse by casting our eyes over the range of products available, use visual cues to pick out the ones we think are interesting and then hone in on those.

Usually people talk in terms of two modes of findability: search (enter terms into box, get results as list) and hierarchy (follow increasingly specific taxonomical tree to your destination). I think there’s another, usually missed, which has at the heart of it the sense of serendipity. This is what “browse” is, really, when you think about it. It’s the means by which you can cast your eye over a whole range of things you don’t know you’re interested in yet and then focus in on things that catch your eye. This is probably why many people find the apparent chaos of a museum store as interesting as a set of interpreted objects in a museum gallery. The lack of order, the sense of finding something, is itself an important part of the experience.

Online museum collections often work on the assumption that people know what they’re looking for. Sometimes they do, in which case search and hierarchy work fine – but if they don’t, and are just “browsing” in the true sense of the word, then the tools at our disposal are slightly more interesting. As a diagram addict these particular tools and methods always interest me.

Here’s a few:

History Wired which has been around a long time but I still like it: A Java app (boo) developed by Smart Money lets you zoom in to objects – the size of which is influenced by the “votes” that have been received for that object. The application can be licensed but last time I asked it was frighteningly expensive…

The fabulous Music Plasma – a lovely Flash based app for finding and browsing bands – *please* will someone do this for museum collections??

Search Crystal – blogged about by Seb recently, a slightly ragged-looking but quite satisfying tool for displaying search results visually

If you think about the ways in which content is searched for and used in “web 2 ways” it is often about this serendipity; jumping across from topic to topic, from object to object, often with little sense of purpose but just a desire to be entertained. Sometimes you’re after specific things, but sometimes you just want to have a fun time…

Categories: design · museum · search · technology · ukmw07 · usability

Google tweaks again..

May 16, 2007 · Leave a Comment

So much for not testing on a live evironment…

My Google search results just turned up looking a trifle different. First of all this:

Half changed Google page

…and then a couple of minutes later, this:

Full changed Google page

TechCrunch wrote about this a couple of weeks ago. I’ve seen the left hand nav change that is on their post a couple of times but the shaded bar and dhtml dropdown is a new one on me…

Categories: design · search · technology · usability