[Sigia-l] Findability

[Lars Marius Garshol]

* Lars Marius Garshol
|
| 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.

* listera at rcn.com
| 
| If the end-result of clicking on "Similar pages" associates the main
| focus of that page to the gazillion "similar" pages Google indexes
| (by the same rules Google finds *anything*) then, who needs
| concepts/categories/etc?

If you're happy with that I guess you can stop doing IA and start
reselling Google licenses instead.

| As you found out, while not perfect, it works remarkably well. And
| isn't that the point? Otherwise, is it even remotely possible for
| Google to create concepts/categories/etc for the entirety of the
| web? 

No, I don't think they have any other choice than to do pretty much
what they do. A detailed ontology of everything is a bit much to ask,
I think.

| The ("average") user is the winner here, as there are no
| external/rigid/additional requirements: I like this item, now find
| similar stuff. So doing away with the notion of a concept might not
| have been such a poor start?

Well, it works remarkably well if you consider what it's doing. If you
want to find something I don't think it's all that helpful. If it
guesses correctly about what you are looking for (e.g., a list of beer
breweries) it does OK, but I doubt it does in anything more than a
tiny handful of cases, and when it guesses wrong it is pretty much
useless. 

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