Just read an article about pulling the plug on the advanced search feature of the Financial Times: Newssift.
About one year ago the interface got some pretty positive reactions, due to the fact that this kind of user interface was fearly new on a public website.
Powered by Endeca the functionality heavily made use of facets. All categories, subjects etc. were made-up of metadata in the content, were the values are used to generate the lists of choices.
It's a shame that FT has no logging or other results as to the way the service was used and if the users liked or disliked this new way of searching FT content.
As a search professional I am always looking out for experiences with non-conventional search interfaces. Could this experiment have been more succesfull when guided and analyzed?
See: http://paidcontent.co.uk/article/419-financial-times-shuts-semantic-search-service-newsift/
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Edwin
Re: "As a search professional I am always looking out for experiences with non-conventional search interfaces. Could this experiment have been more successful when guided and analyzed?"
Have a look at what we are doing with "item -search" at Xyggy (www.xyggy.com). In our everyday lives, we constantly search for and find "things" (also called items or objects) and are remarkably good at it. This is due in large part to the human capacity to learn new concepts after observing a few examples and generalizing to new instances. Yet, in the digital world search is dominated by text-search which essentially finds combinations of the query text in the document corpus and then applies a relevance method to the documents containing the keywords. Item-search works by considering the whole item (in this case documents) and given one or more items in the query finds other similar items. Similarity of items will always trump text-search relevance since the entire item is being considered.
An important aspect of item-search is that the search box can accept both a text query as well as items by dragging them in and out of the search box, and allows direct interaction with the items to improve relevance. An implementation using patent data is at http://www.xyggy.com/patent.php. Enter keywords eg. "earthquake sensor" and relevant items to the keywords are displayed. Drag an item of interest from the results into the search box and the relevance changes significantly. When two or more items are added into the search box, the system discovers what they have in common to return better results. Items can be toggled in/out of the search by clicking the +/- symbol and items can be completely removed by dragging them out of the search box. Each change to an item in the search box automatically retrieves new relevant results. It is easy to see how this can be extended so that items can be dragged into the search box from anywhere on the web or intranet.
Dinesh Vadhia
ceo & founder
www.xyggy.com
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