inter:digital strategies

A few weeks ago, I reviewed an early beta search engine called Mojeek. Well, Mojeek hasn’t gotten a huge amount of press, so that article pops up pretty easily in a search - and Marc, the creator, ran across that article and dropped me a line. In the conversation which ensued, he gave me access to a test account for his personal search - which I am now going to delve into in some depth.

Personal search accounts are currently only available in Beta testing, and must be requested personally - visit Mojeek Personal Search (Beta) for more information!

Mojeek Personal Search: Functionality

Mojeek’s personal search gives you the ability to create a set of preferred sites to search. You can list as many as you wish, as far as I can tell, provided that they have already been indexed by the Mojeek crawler. This is a similar functionality to that provided by Lushe.net. Where Lushe.net manages a database of your preferred sites but uses Google’s search engine, Mojeek centralizes these functions into a single site.

One additional feature offered by Mojeek is the ability to exclude sites from all Mojeek web searches. If you know that you NEVER want to read documents from, say, Fox News, you are able to exclude that site from your site results. While you are logged in, the option to add to your personal search or exclude from results is provided as part of all search results.

The personal search option is welcome and still relatively unique, but there are a number of ways in which it could be improved.

Combined with the flexibility of Mojeek’s alternative algorithm search options (still rudimentary), this personal search could have great potential. However, it would be very valuable if Mojeek could add a Lushe-like bookmarklet to add sites to your site search. 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. Granted, the site is only a month and a half old, but I could hope! A highly useful service would be the ability to request a crawl of sites which were not in the index.
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.

Mojeek Personal Search: Interface

In general, the interface for Mojeek Personal Search is simple and straightforward, just like their main search interface. The first view on logging in is of your basic personal information. There are only five other options of places to go: your personal search home page, three editing pages: personal information (optional, can be public or private), edit listed sites (sites to be searched by your personal search), and edit excluded sites (sites not to be searched by web search), and help. 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. When logged in, you have the option to switch between searching the web and searching your own selected sites on all other pages - but on the home page you have no such choice. A minor thing, but something which would make the site that much more user-friendly.

Other Comments

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.

The search engine continues to have great potential - between the personal search, site search, and alternate algorithm selection there are some useful tools available. The suggestions above, I believe, could allow it to build even further and possibly gain some footing in the search world. User-controlled search factors is likely to be one of the most valuable developments in search technology in the next generation of search.

For more information on user-controlled search factors, read Adding more factors to Microsoft’s sliders, by Bill Slawski. Microsoft is taking a different approach to user modified searching than Mojeek which may also have interesting repercussions for search.

At the end of February, I posted about a new search engine called Dumbfind. The engine is designed around tagging technology, and was offering a trial of a scheme for contextual advertising based on tags. Today, I’m going to combine my efforts by doing a follow-up on my own Dumbfind Adsonomy trial while talking about their user interface, my theme for the week.

My trial was very unsuccessful. I ran ads for two of my own websites, and received (according to my statistics) no referrals at all from Dumbfind.com. Zero. Zip. Nada. You get the point. I feel there are two major contributing factors to this.

The first has to do with Dumbfind’s traffic. An Alexa position of 44,315 (as of this writing) is respectable for a small business, but I also have to note that this is a recent increase of 95,000 positions. Maybe I’ll receive a few visits in the last two weeks of my trial, if this continues. But respectable positioning for a search engine is not the same as for a small service site. Dumbfind may be building their traffic, but it’s just not there yet.

The second flaw is from the design of their Adsonomy system. First, each ad only provides the attachment of 10 tags. Second, these tags must be selected from their tag database. This eliminated many potentially useful tags. If the tags being applied are maximally general, such as "search engine marketing", there is a greatly reduced chance they will bring up my ad – but Adsonomy didn’t permit terms which were regionally specific and associated with my keywords.

It is unclear how Adsonomy associates your selected tags with searches. One serious lack in the Adsonomy interface is any discussion of how it works! I was unable to define a search which caused my own ad to show up. Not a definitive test, by any means, but it does leave me wondering.

The Dumbfind search results are very awkwardly displayed. In my tests, I found it difficult to visually distinguish sponsored listings from actual search results. I also find it very difficult to understand the listings. An example listing:

The top line of these results tells you the url and title of the website. The font is small and not very obvious - for a while, I thought these were contextual advertising, partially because the name of the company doesn’t appear obviously in any of the following links. This is partially the fault of the site itself - they have optimized their titles for search terms but have not included their site name. However, the display of this information is entirely the responsibility of Dumbfind. I’m left confused due to three issues:

• The first element and only title level indicator of the site address in the results is smaller than most of the remaining text.
• The largest element is exclusively drawn from title tags. If this includes the site name, great - otherwise, it is confusing.
• All results are provided with supplementary pages.

The fundamental problem, to me, is that the search results are too complex - I’m barraged with information about this site in a manner that overwhelms and confuses me. I have no option to remove supplemental results and simplify my view, and the beginning of each result is unclear due to the scale of the other elements.

I like the way Dumbfind’s main page looks. I like their idea of tagged searching. However, I find their search results confusing and cluttered with advertising. It’s unlikely that they would win me over against any other service, unless they can provide more customization tools or simplify their default results.

A few weeks ago, I blogged about a new search-engine-in-training called Mojeek. This engine, essentially nothing special, had a neat idea to provide users with a choice of search algorithms. Unfortunately, this apparently one-man operation hasn’t yet gotten off the ground with the idea.

Nevertheless, customizable search is becoming de rigueur for the search industry. Customized searching is a great idea, fundamentally. However, I do have some doubts about the universality of the application. Developing a customizable search interface which makes it easy for a search to be refined and saved is not something I’ve seen yet.

MSN has recently announced their fancy new search tool: "Search Macros". This is a fundamentally neat idea with a fundamentally flawed interface.

Search Macros are a feature of Live Search that make results more relevant for a given search topic. This is done by easily using, creating and sharing customized sets of search engine rules.

If these macros were truly easy to share, I’d be thrilled. If they were easy to create, I’d be even more excited. Frankly, if they were easy to USE, I’d be pretty satisfied. But I don’t see that as being the case. Criticism number one: how do I become aware of this service?

I actually learned of this service reading industry news posted at SearchEngineWatch. I’m sure this isn’t how the average user will learn about it - so why don’t I go poking around looking for other options. A great first look? Windows Live. It’s a search option for this engine, so of course this information will be available there, right!

Well, it’s not right there on the front page. OK, I’ll do a search and see if it’s presented as an option to refine my search. No. I don’t see any links here on the page that say anything like "refine search" or "advanced options" - I wonder what this little blue arrow does in the tool bar? Oh! There it is! It opens up a menu giving the option to create or find macros.

Well, the tool is definitely losing on ease to find - and, thinking as a member of the general public, I might be wondering at this point what a "macro" might be. But, fortunately, I’m a firm believer in the "click first, ask questions later" philosophy, so I’m going to go ahead and find a macro, whatever it may be. I’ve now learned about the service! On to complaint number two: how do I use this?

Well, I’m now on a completely separate site. I wonder why I need to deal with a completely different look for this tool? Does it also apply to other services? Well, it’s pretty easy to figure out. All these graphics with gear-like doohickeys must take me to macros. Not much information here - I wonder what "saltbaby.nadasurf" will help me find?

This is the place where you can view and install shared search macros from Live.com.

Complete first page explanation of the Live.com Macro Gallery

Ah! Well, now that I’ve clicked on that, I can see it’ll help me find info about the band Nada Surf. Well, I don’t care about that, I’ll go back. "Research.scholar" is probably more up my alley. This looks good! I don’t really understand that gobbledy gook down at the bottom, but I bet this’ll help me find great web pages…wait - no, no it won’t. This is searching for PDF formats and other local documents. Well, back to the drawing board.

Essentially, although it’s easy to figure out how to find and install these tools - it’s pretty difficult to see whether something is actually useful. What does this term.term labeling notation mean? Why can’t I narrow to search macros which are topical or document type specific? Well, just to test it, I’ll go ahead and install "beta.wikipedia".

The installation procedure is thankfully pretty easy. Not perfect, but pretty easy. You click on the button labeled "+Live.com" and up pops a new window of Live.com. You still have to notice the little yellow banner which says "Click to Install", and if you do, you’ve now got a macro installed. I now close this new Live.com window and return to my search in progress. And thus on to complaint number three: where’s my macro?

Wait a second - where’s my macro? How do I use this? There’s nothing listed in that drop down list with the blue arrow. Whoops! Looks like these Macros are session specific. Maybe if you’re logged in it’ll remember your details, but if not? Tough luck.

OK, enough criticism of the so-called "ease of use" for Microsoft’s search macro. Now I’ll be moving on to the creation process.

Creating a Search Macro on MSN Live Search

If you’re searching on the main page of MSN Live, that little blue arrow drop down also contains an option to "Create a Macro." I’ve had two different behaviors from this feature: the first and second time I clicked on it it gave me the option to log in to Windows Live using my Microsoft Passport Network login. I passed up this opportunity on both occasions - I’m not interested in creating a Passport account for this. Thankfully, Windows Live must have figured this out, because the third time it took me straight to the "Create Macros" interface. (I’ll be fair: this IS beta software, and I shouldn’t be expecting perfection.)

What I’m told about creating a search macro is this:

Create a namespace for your macros:
(This namespace is unique and will be associated with your Macros. Your macros can be used by others, but they will not be able to associate those macros with you..)

Ah. I see. OK. Hmmm… So, what’s a namespace then? Is this visible? If I decide to be funny and call my Macro something dirty, will people see it? What’s this used for? Clearly, this instruction could use a bit more explanation. There’s lots of space on this screen, and I think they could spare the space for an instruction.

The first thing I tried was to create a namespace using my own first name - Joe. I believe that Windows Live didn’t like that - although I didn’t actually get any kind of error message. The text box was cleared, and that was that.
My second try will be something more complex: joemacro. Same story. Huh. Let me do some research.

To create a macro click "Create Macros" in the dropdown menu on the far right side of the scope bar. (You’ll need to be signed in with your Passport. You’ll automatically be asked to sign in if you aren’t already.)

The first time you create a macro you will see the namespace creation screen. You only get one macro namespace and it will be tied to your Passport. Your namespace will be in the name of all macros you create.

Wait - so I do have to be logged in? Why did it let me do this, then? Why doesn’t it warn me? I’m afraid I’m losing interest!

Conclusions

The fundamental flaw with Search Macros is a lack of communication - the site doesn’t make it clear how to use the tool or what is required to use the tool. Windows Live doesn’t consistently track sessions, it doesn’t pass data back and forth, and changes interfaces halfway through the process. Is it a neat idea? Yep. Is it user friendly? Nope. Could it be user-friendly? Well, we’ll just have to wait and see!