[Sigia-l] Findability

[Lars Marius Garshol]

* Lars Marius Garshol
|
| By navigating in a concept space rather than in document space you
| could have experienced something closer to real findability.

* listera at rcn.com
| 
| Call me delusional, but isn't that precisely what the "Similar
| pages" link attached at the end of each Google result item is for,
| minus the highfalutin name?

In a sense you could say that, but it attempts to find similar pages,
not pages about the same concepts,for the simple reason that the
notion of a concept is entirely missing from Google. Given this poor
starting point I have to say it works surprisingly well. If you try it
on the search results for "Guinness" you get:

 Starting from           Similar
 ----------------------  -------
 Guinness                Beer brewery home pages (+ Jack Daniels)
 Guinness World Records  Reference sites (apparently)
 Guinness Beer FAQt ...  Anything to do with beer
 The Guide to Guinness   Guinness pages + Irish pages + some cruft

So while it does roughly work, you still don't get the first pages
organized by what concepts they discuss (as in the hypothetical sample
I showed) and you still don't know how the pages relate to those
concepts. Similarly, when asking for "Similar pages" that only works
if Google makes the correct guess about what it is you are looking
for. 

In the first case, if you had been looking for more information about
Guinness being pointed at other breweries would have been a waste of
time. In an ontological system you could have controlled this, because
"Guinness" would have been a "beer product", produced by a "beer
brewery", and you could have navigated to the specific thing you were
looking for, before having to dive into the documents.

-- 
Lars Marius Garshol, Ontopian         <URL: http://www.ontopia.net >
GSM: +47 98 21 55 50                  <URL: http://www.garshol.priv.no >