shirley niemans

Search Engine Society is the name of Alex Halavais‘ forthcoming book, due to be published by Polity in October 2008, as part of the Digital Media and Society series. Halavais is assistant professor of interactive communications at Quinnipiac University (USA), a ’social architect’, and blogs about politics, culture, teaching and research at a thaumaturgical compendium. With his book, Halavais aims to unpack the black box of the search engine, in order to counter a host of assumptions underlying both technological developments and the way we use search engines to make sense of the networked world.

Approaching search from a user perspective, Halavais notes that the diversity of searching skills represents yet another level of the digital divide as even the most basic search is a complicated action. Where students tend to ‘shop’ sites such as Wikipedia or IMDB before turning to the search engine, experienced users engage in a more ‘focused browsing’; carefully circling concepts while extracting, recording and recombining data until results are met. Reaching those parts of the web that aren’t easily indexed however, requires yet alternative strategies.

Search based on re-finding information have become a recent interest to researchers. Making use of the remembering web, for instance through bookmarking sites such as delicious, re-finding may become a profitable search strategy. Much the same goes for real-time search, the process of re-using those searches that have proved to work in the past. In this line of ‘query-free search’, an engine may provide ways to find conceptual similarities to previously found pages or documents. As users gain experience, searching tends to become more complex. Most general-purpose search engines seem ill equipped to meet this diversity of needs, often building on traditional methods. Another pressing problem in determining a search strategy is the engine’s constant updating of ranking algorithms, causing a state of flux that is all but transparent.

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The vertical search phenomenon has been on the rise for several years. As opposed to the ‘horizontal’, general purpose search engines such as Google, Ask.com and MS LiveSearch, vertical engines index only a specialized part of the Web. As the elaborate ‘verticals’ category at altsearchengines.com shows, recent developments are many, including engines such as Wellsphere, searching consumer health sites, BackType for finding and sharing comments and Loo2Go, the German engine that finds you the nearest public toilet. Better known examples are A9’s e-commerce search, local search engines and media type or content-related engines like Polar Rose or JobSearch.

Building on the idea that a search engine might best be developed within the context of the specific content that is offered, there have been several developments on the query side as well. OpenSearch, developed by Amazon sponsored A9, has become the standard format for search engine description documents since Firefox 2 and IE 7. The description documents tell the browser how to ‘call upon’ a search engine, defining the properties of the search box and engine on your site, such as the database it should use when suggesting search terms to your users. Any website with a search option can offer its results in the OpenSearch format, allowing for the syndication of results with those of other sites, by aggregators or meta-search engines.

One of the latest search-related initiatives is Briteclick, a start-up company that presented its tool (not an engine) at the TechCrunch50 conference just yesterday. Its main feature is the way it allows for sidebar information to become available in just one click on a keyword (hence ‘briteclicking’), without having to leave the page you are on. For instance, when using mail, one could highlight and right-click the word ‘Merlot’, choose ‘Briteclick’, and the sidebar will display a module allowing one to search a large wine database. Briteclick is set up as a free and easy to install platform that lets vertical search engines create a Briteclick module that will be displayed in the sidebar during a relevant search. With this tool, Briteclick claims to have developed an application that “simplifies the way people search and complete tasks on the web”. Unfortunately, Briteclick is not publicly available as of yet, beta testing is possible by invitation only.