[Sigia-l] "best bets": trademarked? other names?

[Andrew McNaughton]

On Thu, 26 Sep 2002, Avi Rappoport wrote:

> At 8:06 AM -0400 9/26/02, Bill VanLoo wrote:
> >Now, when I'd first heard of these from Lou Rosenfeld, he mentioned that
> >"Best Bets" originated at Microsoft. My question: does Microsoft own a
> >patent or trademark on this technique or the name "Best Bets"? If not, I'd
> >like to call ours "Best Bets" in hopes that users will be familiar with the
> >term from other sites (read: microsoft.com). If they do own a
> >trademark/patent, I'll gladly take suggestions for alternate names.
>
> Just more data points: Google calls them "KeyMatch" and Inktomi
> Enterprise Search calls them "QuickLinks", AskJeeves has had them
> forever.
>
> I call them "manual recommendations" and I'm always looking for more
> examples:  <http://www.searchtools.com/analysis/recommendations.html>.

I like 'manual reccomendations' for discussions of the
strategy/technology.  It's nicely unambiguous in discussion here for
example.  For presentation to the user though I'd prefer something like
'editor's choice' or 'editor's picks'.  Stressing the editorial role, and
the editor is more important to the user than the mechanism.

In some cases it might be nice to provide info on why the item was
reccomended.  eg if the user searched on 4 words, and the manual
reccomendation was based on only 2 of them, it might be helpful to the
user to know that, and help raise the perception of quality of the
reccomendation.

Andrew