Re: Rolls of interfaces in your favorite colors (was Re: Terminology)

Jonathan,

(Happy New Year!)

what can be serachedon a search engine depends on what the search engine
knows. It is possible for it to index things like you suggest, and I believe
that most of the information (size, etc) is on altavista, although I don't
know if it does wordcounts. I also don't think it lets you sort by size.

XML won't make a lot of difference either way to this, although it coul be
used by hte designers of the "machinery under the hood", or the "deus ex
machina" (choose your metaphor) in such a way that the user could do their
own trickery to customise searches more easily.

This goes again to the question of what is  afirst-class object - if filesize
is, and the altavista database could be queried, you could write you own
queries. However as far as I know that isn't the case - they provide a query
language, and for a given query provide a limited number of responses and
some links to further responses, so you need to use something programmable to
get the search that you want.

If they had an RDF store that you could query, then it would be more like
what you are looking for.

I think it is an important point that AltaVista and Google and Yahoo are
different, because they present different information (or present it
differently), and that to have a user interface that works differently for
people is inherently confusing, and if it can be avoided it helps different
people make useof the same site.

Charles McCN

On Tue, 28 Dec 1999, jonathan chetwynd wrote:

  Scott raises a point which although mentioned on many occassions in this
  list
  never makes it to the guidelines.
  
  Once again could we all please spend some time considering how people
  access web
  pages.
  
  altavista and google have very different homepages and this helps define
  their
  audience and its demands.
  
  I would like to be able to configure things like:
  
  I am searching  for 5-10k images with links to 100-500k
  images in pages containing less than 30 words.
  
  Then type in keywords to search for. Naturally I have other needs, and
  need to be
  able to switch quickly between them.
  
  Is anything like this possible currently?
  
  How would XML help with this?

Received on Sunday, 2 January 2000 08:41:36 UTC