{"id":1069,"date":"2005-10-07T16:38:00","date_gmt":"2005-10-07T20:38:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/wp\/2005\/10\/07\/search-context-and-the-long-tail\/"},"modified":"2005-10-07T16:38:00","modified_gmt":"2005-10-07T20:38:00","slug":"search-context-and-the-long-tail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/2005\/10\/search-context-and-the-long-tail\/","title":{"rendered":"Search context and the long tail"},"content":{"rendered":"

Not that this isn’t widely understood, but James Robertson\ndoes a nice job at\nputting<\/a>\nsearch context in, erm, context;<\/p>\n\n

\nIf I type HDTV in, I’ve provided no extra context – no information on whether I need a definition, or information on buying, or what have you. It’s a crap shoot. Seattle Hotels has that extra context – not only are you interested in hotels, but you are specifically interested in Hotels in Seattle. The difference between the two result sets is all about the amount of context provided.\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

I wonder; when a site offloads search to Google via a\nsearch form, as many do, does Google use what it knows about\nthat site to provide context for the search?<\/p>\n\n

Some playing around with the Google\ncustom search page<\/a>\nrevealed that they may not. I first did a\nsearch<\/a>\nfor “CDF” restricted to w3.org, and the top two results were the\nChannel Definition Format<\/a>\nand\nCompound Document Formats<\/a>\nlinks, as you’d expect. But when I broadened the scope of the search to\nthe entire Web by selecting “Search WWW”, those two were way down the\nlist<\/a>,\nwith the second link not even on the first page. Interesting.<\/p>\n\n

It seems like an obvious long-tail-ish hack, but I don’t recall hearing\nanybody mention it being used. But I’m hardly a search guru. Anybody know?<\/p>\n\n

Update<\/em>: Michael Bernstein<\/a>\nsent me a link to what appears to be Google’s\nSite Flavored Search<\/a>;<\/p>\n\n

\nSite-flavored Google search delivers web search results that are customized to individual websites. Simply fill out a profile describing your website’s content, and when you add a site-flavored search box to your site, your users will get search results that are “flavored” to be more attuned to their interests.\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

When you go through it though, it does ask you for your site URL, then presents\nits analysis using some circa-1995 Yahoo directory ontology. For example, it told\nme my site was in the “Internet”, “Programming”, and “Software” categories. Ok,\nbut surely PageRank’s got a lot<\/em> more to say about that, no? Not with some\npre-fab ontology, but in relation to other sites?<\/p>\n\n

Anyhow, so you click on the “Generate HTML” button after that, and it gives you\nsome HTML you include on your site, which includes this line;<\/p>\n\n

\n<input type=hidden name=interests value=58|62|65>\n<\/pre>\n\n
… which seems to represent those three categories.  Ok, but that seems\nkinda crude, no?  It reminds me of\ndel.icio.us<\/a>,\nonly centralized (their ontology), and not Web friendly (numbers instead of URIs).<\/p>\n\n
So what am I missing?  Why is Google doing this, and not something based on\nPageRank?<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Not that this isn’t widely understood, but James Robertson does a nice job at putting search context in, erm, context; If I type HDTV in, I’ve provided no extra context – no information on whether I need a definition, or information on buying, or what have you. It’s a crap shoot. Seattle Hotels has that […]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1069","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1069","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1069"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1069\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1069"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1069"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1069"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}