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Huckabuck
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1. A homemade frozen treat consisting of a paper cup filled with a sweet liquid, such as Kool-Aid. Native to New Orleans.
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2. A meta-search engine drawing results from Google, Yahoo and MSN amongst others and featuring a unique "search tuner" feature to adjust your results. Also Native to New Orleans.
It should come as little surprise that I’m not intending to write about the frozen treat. Despite the fact that it’s looking like a hot, muggy day and I certainly wouldn’t mind one - writing about frozen treats won’t bring them into my hands. The meta-search engine, on the other hand, I can easily take a look at, without needing to travel to New Orleans.
Huckabuck’s Technology Offering
Huckabuck.com is one of the rising crowd of new metasearch engines. They’re big selling point is the use of an equalizer-like search tuner, allowing the user to define their preferred blend of results. Not happy with your search? Perhaps you wanted a pinch more Technorati in the mix. I’ve mentioned before that I think user-customizable search tools are an important new development in search. This is probably one of the more user-friendly examples of this kind of technology I’ve seen.
I’ve reviewed attempts at customizable search before - I was highly critical of MSN’s Search Macros and not incredibly thrilled with the anemic offering from Mojeek. Both great ideas, but neither particularly well implemented. Huckabuck, on the other hand, seems to have a very nice, clean implementation. Unobtrusive when not activated, yet very easy to understand and use when you choose.
The implementation is in AJAX, with all the fancy graphical interactions available to that technology. However, appearance is not what I’m reviewing; I’m interested in results and usability. Here’s the tuner itself:
The use should be pretty clear from the outset. A set of sliders, to disable or adjust the use of these six data sources for the metasearch. Also, above those sliders, arrows to navigate between a variety of presets emphasizing technology (Digg), social search (del.icio.us), research (Google), shopping (MSN), or blog search (Technorati). Each preset places an emphasis on a different engine. Interestingly enough, no present places any emphasis on Yahoo - perhaps Yahoo is lacking in any kind of specialty?
As an aside, this isn’t necessarily a negative - Yahoo may simply provide the best results for a generalist search. Although, with the growing importance of contextual search and vertical search, this is a dubious positive.
Continuing to the right side of the selection panel, we have the ability to change theme (not interested), an autocompletion option (intriguing), a virtual keyboard (curious), and the ability to change the number of results per page (very nice). Some of these are useful, some are window-dressing, but they are all very clearly conveyed - and that’s what matters to me.
I played with the autocomplete feature a little - it’s a lot like Google’s Suggest. A neat time saver for common searches. If you’re looking for something a bit more off the beaten path, it doesn’t have much to offer, of course. The virtual keyboard was also a little intriguing. I’m not sure this is really a worthwhile addition - perhaps, in combination with autocomplete, it could be somewhat handy. However, to me the primary purpose of a virtual keyboard should be as an aide for mobility impaired users. This particular implementation will certainly be usable by that population - as long as they browse with JavaScript activated. The AJAX implementation of the tool does mean that, from an accessibility perspective, it may not be perfect.
In fact, without JavaScript, none of these tools will function at all. Still, there are some advantages to browsing without JavaScript - the advertising won’t function as well.
What about the search results?
Well, there’s not much to say there - Huckabuck isn’t using their own algorithm, so the results are rather at the mercy of the engine they’re drawing data from. However, the customization available using the search tuner gives them an edge - if you don’t like their results, it’s very easy to change. I do wonder, however, whether it might not have been more user friendly to use their presets concepts as their slider categories. As it stands, you adjust the importance of a data source in the results - what if, instead, you adjusted the importance of, for example, commercial data in your search and the interface adjusted MSN’s importance in the background? Many users may not be aware of what engine would be best to adjust for their results - but would probably be more quickly able to identify what type of data they were more interested in. Huckabuck’s slider presets provide this data, but the sliders themselves are a more obvious tool than the selector for the presets.
Other thoughts about Huckabuck
I like the fact that the owners of Huckabuck, Chris Schultz and Blake Killian, are deeply involved with the New Orleans community. They are sponsors of BrainJams New Orleans, which is doing a lot of work to help rebuild New Orleans businesses.
I also love the fact that they donate a portion of their search profits to charity. For a startup, this is a exceptionally wonderful choice. Currently, the beneficiaries of Huckabuck’s Social Mission are Tipitina’s Foundation, working to rebuild New Orlean’s music culture, and the Backbeat Foundation, also supporting musicians in New Orleans. As a musician myself, I certainly find their goals uplifting.
More information:
This is the one-hundredth post I’ve made at inter:digital strategies. As such, I’m going to look into a category of things which doesn’t really apply closely to the general principles of search and look at a category of web 2.0 services which are of particular interest to me - personal libraries.
I own a fairly large number of books. In fact, I own enough books that about four years ago I decided it was worth my time to build a database containing my library which I could keep on my PC and on my PDA. This little catalog provided about a half-dozen fields which I could perform searches on or sort by date, category, author, or title. It’s a nice little thing - but kind of a pain to maintain. The process of exporting the library back and forth between my PC and my PDA is a little awkward. The time to write in each item is a little annoying. Altogether, it’s not ideal. But, it was free.
The Web 2.0 phenomenon of bookmark sharing, image sharing, and social collaboration online has, unsurprisingly, also resulted in at least two (that I know of) online library sharing services - Librarious and LibraryThing.
What do I need from an online library service?
My priorities for such an online service are as follows:
- Make it easy for me to add to my library.
- Make certain I can add everything in my library.
- Let me use my library from a handheld browser - I want to check whether I already own something while I’m out bookshopping!
- Allow me to choose whether I’m going to share my library (or specific items in my library) with others.
In addition to these issues, which are important to me as a user of an online library, I’m also concerned about certain issues with these sites as I would be with any site.
- Good searching and sorting functions.
- Privacy and data collection policies.
- Web site accessibility.
- Web standards compliance.
Some of these could easily jump between lists, but I’ve split them up for ease of reference.
Critical Library Service Functionality
Make it easy for me…
Both services make it reasonably easy to add new titles. In Librarious, you have two options. You can search for books from the "add item" form, and add items directly from that form using AJAXian tricks and treats, or you can use the provided bookmarklet to add titles while browsing Amazon.com. The "add item" form is not perfect - there is no "Submit" button for the query. The search is performed as soon as the input box loses focus. This is easy - but not intuitive.
LibraryThing is even easier - it provides a side-by-side two-paneled interface where you can submit your search (with a submit button) and browse a list of results in the neighboring panel. You simply need to click on the title of an item to add it immediately to your list.
Both systems have advantages and disadvantages, and it’s not clear to me that there’s any need to discuss this particular aspect further, since there’s no clear winner. There will be on the next point, however.
Make certain I can add everything in my library
I own some rather obscure books - things I’ve picked up from library discard sales, at used book shops, etc. Librarious has a major flaw in their library system. You can only add items which appear in Amazon.com’s catalog. There’s no free hand entry, and no alternate database to query. A couple of the more obscure items in my library were simply not available.
LibraryThing, however, not only offers the ability to manually input a book, it also provides searching against library catalogs and Amazon.com. You can specify your search against libraries in the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, or the Library of Congress. In this area, LibraryThing provides a vastly superior capacity to Librarious. (You even have the ability to view the MARC records!)
Mobile Browsing of my Library
Well, at the moment I don’t own a mobile browser. However, on the basis of tests using Opera’s small screen rendering and their Opera Mini simulator, I’m able to come up with some general appraisals.
LibraryThing, in general, performed better than I expected. Opera’s small screen rendering does a pretty phenomenal job of managing the table-based design. Although there are some limitations to the simulator, I found the site pretty easy to navigate. I was able to quickly access the search function, and fairly easy to browse my own collection of books. It’s not been designed with mobile navigation in mind - but does manage fairly well.
Librarious, although using a more contemporary CSS-based design, is actually less usable when linearized in Opera Mini. Unfortunately, the code is ordered such that a panel containing news announcements and another panel containing a Librarious-wide tag cloud precede your library listing. With no internal page navigation provided, this makes for quite a lot of scrolling to get to your own books. In general, it’s OK - but painful because it COULD be so much better.
What if I don’t WANT to share?
Well, as far as I can tell, neither service provides any means to choose NOT to share a particular book. There will be no need for the government to acquire a search warrant for my library, alas! LibraryThing does offer the option to keep your entire library private; but this isn’t exactly what I had in mind. I do like the social aspect of the online library.
General Functionality
Searching and Sorting
On any site, the ability to search is absolutely critical. On a library collection site, this simply becomes MORE critical.
I hate to say this for any site, but Librarious has a HORRIBLE search function. The search box is located well below the fold in the right panel of the 3-column layout. The search function does not appear on every page - in particular, it does not appear on the home page. Given that a search is quite likely one of the first things I’d potentially want to do on visiting, this is a MAJOR flaw.
Not only does the search function fail to appear on every page - it is not actually the same SEARCH on each page. Depending on the section of the site you are currently browsing, you will be searching a different data index. Perhaps the creator felt this was a neat advantage, but to my sense of usability, this is a huge mistake.
If you have navigated to your collection page, you have the ability to sort your list according to five categories - title, author, rating, date added, and popularity. You also have the ability to search your collection or browse by tag.
However, if instead you’ve navigated to the "Users" page, you are presented with the ability to search all media. (Actually, you are presented with a search of a non-existent index "medias" - but this is clearly a typo.) On navigating to the "books" page, your view is that of the most recent books added with the same sort options - and the search is of all books.
The variability of the search feature is moderately intuitive - not always, but mostly. However, the site has only that single one-book interface for search (no advanced search) and I feel that the box, in order to be helpful to visitors, should really remain consistent.
LibraryThing has a much more traditional search interface. It also has no search tool on the main page, but unlike Librarious (with no link to a search function at all), it provides a prominent link to the search page at the top of the screen. They provide 7 separate searches, for books and tags within your library, and for books, tags, authors, users, and user locations for all libraries. Although not inspiring, this offers a quite reasonable degree of functionality.
Privacy and Data Collection
It’s important to always be aware of what kind of data you are offering up to a service. And when you’re providing such extensive personal data as a multi-thousand item library, you should definitely consider who will have access to what information.
On privacy, once again, LibraryThing wins hands down. First of all, it actually has a privacy policy. Not only this, but it’s privacy policy seems very reasonable and honestly concerned with your privacy. With LibraryThing’s ability to keep your entire library private and profile private, you’ve got good reason for confidence concerning your data.
Librarious, unfortunately, doesn’t appear to provide any kind of privacy policy. Nor can you make your library private. So, no benefits there. It’s not that I believe their untrustworthy - I seriously doubt that they’ll be selling library lists to the government, for example. However, it’s very comforting to have everything written out and explicit.
Neither service, however, actually requires any personally identifying data at all in order to use the service. You only need to provide a username and password to use both services. So it does appear, despite the lack of an explicity privacy policy for Librarious, that you could sit reasonably secure if you’re bothered.
Web Accessibility and Standards
This review has gotten a lot longer than I originally intended - so I’m going to let this pass with a cursory glance. Suffice it to say that neither site has done anything of significance to consider accessibility, and neither site successfully validates. In fact, both sites failed validation quite badly.
I wouldn’t see that either site is a nightmare for accessibility, when it comes to basic navigation, but they are both AJAX-ian services - and it is inevitable that a significant degree of functionality is lost without the use of Javascript. However, it must be said that LibraryThing does maintain a significant level of functionality even without JavaScript, because it is not, infact, an AJAX service. It has made use of iFrames and other tricks which look very similar. Although this technology is less "Web 2.0", it behaves much more successfully when Javascript is not available.
To sum up:
Both of these projects are the results of very dedicated work from individual programmers. LibraryThing was developed by Tim Spalding, a web developer and publisher based in Portland, Maine. Librarious is the project of one person who appears to go to a great deal of effort not to provide his name anywhere. In my hour and a half writing this and half an hour explicitly searching for it, I failed to find a name. Regardless, Librarious is certainly the more recent project - still in Alpha, the project was begun, apparently, around January of 2006. LibraryThing dates at least back to August of 2005, which is the earliest entry of it’s blog. In addition, LibraryThing requires a $25 lifetime subscription or a $10/year fee to maintain a library greater than 200 books. This gives it the advantage of an income.
At any rate, I have to favor LibraryThing as my online library of choice, given everything I’ve looked at above. Although neither project is perfect, LibraryThing has fewer flaws - and a lot more project transparency.
Having been in correspondence with the creator of Mojeek.com, it’s only natural that he’d get back to me with his responses to my article. In general, it seems he found my comments to be salient and useful. Always gratifying to be useful! At any rate, I’m including his comments with the relevant quotes from my own article, unedited:
However, it would be very valuable if Mojeek could add a Lushe-like bookmarklet to add sites to your site search.
Marc: I’ve not come across Lushe.net before but will check it out properly later. Having a bookmarklet like they do is a great idea and I will look into that definitely.
I’m also concerned by the fact that you can’t add unindexed sites to your list - as I commented in my previous article, the Mojeek index was far from being the most current available, and one site I tried to add (this one) was not yet indexed.
Marc: The ability to add unindexed sites will be available soon! Also, which will not be immediately noticeable, sites listed within personal search accounts will get crawled and refreshed more often, hopefully making the feature even more useful.
Finally, it would be very useful to be able to establish more than one personalized search. At the moment, it appears that one user is associated with one personalized search - but I would consider it quite reasonable that I would want more than one personalized group of sites.
Marc: You can have multiple accounts if you like but adding multiple groups to the same account is more complicated but I will take note and look into it as that’s a good idea.
Marc: The phrase "Edit Listed Sites" isn’t crystal clear to me, as it doesn’t specify the purpose for the listing - perhaps "Edit Personal Search" would be more clear. However, it’s far from being a major point of concern.
The one thing I would want to change about the interface is that you cannot access your personal search from the main Mojeek home page.
Marc: Both points taken and I’ll consider changing the phrases to something more obvious and adding a link to the home page, although the idea was that people would use their own personal search page rather than the main Mojeek page.
It’s also worth noting that one advantage of the Mojeek personal search is the ability to use it as a site search tool. If you selected only your own site as the selected site, it will act effectively to search your site. However, this tool will only becoming truly useful if the indexing rate speeds up sufficiently to keep a current index.
Marc: You can also do site searches by appending &r=site.com to the search url (or using the advanced search page), once searching a site the search boxes will have the option to search that site again..
http://www.mojeek.com/search?q=search&r=www.mojeek.com
Although the advantage of having it listed in a personal search is that the site will be refreshed more often.