Fwd: Re: [Sigia-l] "best bets": trademarked? other names?
Richard Wiggins
rich at richardwiggins.com
Sun Sep 29 21:22:29 EDT 2002
Wow, I sure hope that neither the concept is patented nor the label
trademarked. Both are important. I am persuaded that virtually every site
that offers search should implement the Best Bets concept, and I think
that's a great label for it. More re prior uses of the concept and the
label:
Re the concept:
As we probably discussed in an earlier thread, I proposed what we're now
calling the Best Bets concept at the Access 98 conference in Saskatoon,
Saskatchewan. Lou Rosenfeld and I both spoke at that event and there were
hundreds of witnesses.
Here is a link to my PowerPoint presentation where I described the concept:
http://library.usask.ca/access98/ppoint/wiggins/html/sld001.htm
Here is a link to the relevant slide:
http://library.usask.ca/access98/ppoint/wiggins/html/sld079.htm
Here is the text of that slide:
_____
A Modest Proposal: The Accidental Thesaurus
- For intranet, online product catalog, newspaper, campus sites
- Build a thesaurus based on what people look for
- Don’t even try to be comprehensive
- Use your search logs to find what people look for -- and how they actually
search
- Fuzzy matching of user searches against thesaurus, a la AskJeeves
____
I seriously doubt the concept started with that presentation. Surely in the
long history of online searching and federated searches in particular
someone's thought of this before. I hope anyone seeking a patent can be
foiled by prior publication and prior art. They'd better have started
earlier than July 10, 1998; plus I know I thought of it earlier than that.
(I bet lots of prior art goes back decades. I often think of great ideas
that others had already thought of long ago. :-) )
_________________________________________________________________________
Re the label Best Bets:
It seems to me that Best Bets is a great label for what this is all about.
I also like "Top Picks". With all due respect, "manually
constructed results" and the ilk, is, in my opinion, a good label for
us but a quite poor label for end users. It conveys very little to the
user. It is a label chosen from the perspective of the publisher, not the
reader. In a previous life I tried to convey to end users the difference
between a "hand-crafted catalog" and "robotic Web index"
and that was a total failure.
KISS.
In practice I don't think the "Best Bets" labeling needs a huge
amount of identification for end users, assuming the best bet hit list items
appear at the top of the overall hit list. But if there is labeling, it
needs to convey to the user that they really, really ought to click here
first. "Try these links first" might even work.
I assume that in the searching literature that the term "best
bets" has been used all over the place including referring to online
searching. I am not a lawyer and trademark law is famously obscure at
times. "Best Buy" trademarked a well-worn phrase for their store.
Let's all adopt the Best Bets label before someone tries to make it a
trademark.
The most important thing to me is how valuable the Best Bets concept is, and
the idea how everyone should implement it -- whatever the label.
Cueing Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire"....
/rich
On Thu, 26 September 2002, Louis Rosenfeld wrote:
>
> On 9/26/02 8:06 AM, "Bill VanLoo"
<bill at i33.com> wrote:
>
> [stuff deleted]
> > 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.
>
> Slight correction: they didn't originate at Microsoft, I just happen to
> know a bit about how it's done there thanks to writing a case study on
MS
in
> our book. Apologies if I ever made it sound that way; tweren't my
intent...
>
>
>
> Louis Rosenfeld
> www.louisrosenfeld.com
> information architecture consulting
>
> ------------
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____________________________________________________
Richard Wiggins
Writing, Speaking, and Consulting on Internet Topics
rich at richardwiggins.com www.richardwiggins.com
------- End of forwarded message -------
____________________________________________________
Richard Wiggins
Writing, Speaking, and Consulting on Internet Topics
rich at richardwiggins.com www.richardwiggins.com
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