[Sigia-l] Wisnewski RE: "Best Bets" or "Accidental Thesaurus" Examples?

[Richard Hill]

[Forwarded for Mary Wisnewski <mwisnews at nortelnetworks.com>  DIck Hill]

 >From: Richard Wiggins 
[<mailto:rich at richardwiggins.com>mailto:rich at richardwiggins.com]
 >Subject: [Sigia-l] "Best Bets" or "Accidental Thesaurus" Examples?
 >
 >
 >Hi -- I'm looking for examples of search engines that offer "Best Bets" 
search results, >specifically those built using analysis of search logs.

Hi Richard,

Nortel Networks' corporate site is making use of this concept.  We use 
Inktomi's "quick links" feature to flag top product-related search results 
for specific search terms.  The terms are drawn from analysis of search 
logs & additions from the product meta tags.

<<http://www.nortelnetworks.com/>http://www.nortelnetworks.com/>
search for : vpn, alteon, callpilot.

The results include a box drawn from the quick links records which points 
to multiple resources per term, so that if you search for "Alteon" we don't 
presume you want the marketing material for the product.  If you want 
training or technical support content or downloads, those are avaiable in 
the "product resource box" at the top of the page.

We have about 150 terms in the quick link records covering about 30 
products - which covers nearly all of our top 50 search terms.  We are 
currently only flagging product records because we are using TeamSite to 
manage the "product object records" which contain this data and other types 
of web pages do not have object records.  We *could* add more quick links 
in directly using Inktomi's interface, but we feel it is currently covering 
enough of our key search terms as is.

Before creating this system, I was the information architect on Apple's 
external web site & created the "shortcuts" concept there in 1998.  Go to 
<<http://www.apple.com/>http://www.apple.com/>, search for quicktime, 
g4.  Apple has expanded the original shortcuts, which looked a lot like the 
G4 search result, to allow multiple links for a single product term.  See 
the QuickTime record for the nouveau shortcuts style.

-mary
-- 
Mary Wisnewski                     Information Architect
mwisnews at nortelnetworks.com        408.495.2407 (ESN 265)

Executive Director
American Society for Information Science and Technology
1320 Fenwick Lane, Suite 510
Silver Spring, MD  20910
FAX: (301) 495-0810
PHONE: (301) 495-0900

http://www.asis.org