Re: Navigating Vs Searching (keywords and metainformation)

Harvey,

In principle yes, anything that the browser is going to act on
should be open to inspection by the user even if it is not
trumpeted by default.

The closest thing I can think of to an application that would
lever off the META KEYWORDS information for a page is the "more
like this" query for a follow-up search.  This "like this" could
indeed include the keywords from the HEAD.META data for the
previously-found page.

The hack I thought of that you might want to play with is to find
a search engine that supports a "more like this" button and use
it, then follow up by using the "refine your search" button on
the resulting search report to learn what it had used as the
technical definition of "like this."  Beats parsing search URLs.

We are possibly over the line into ER IG territory, here, but a
little experimentation with what works today never hurt.

Regards,

Al

to follow up on what Harvey Bingham said:

> At 09:18 1998/11/11 -0600, Jon Gunderson wrote:
> >I think the type of searching Al is talking about is very useful in the
> >case you know what you are looking for.  But, we also want to help user who
> >are just trying to explore new pages, so searching just headers by creating
> >a list of just the headers is very useful.  The user can then sequentially
> >move though just the headers.  
> >
> >The question I have is can this be considered a search or should we have a
> >different label like direct navigation?
> 
> That is a distinct subset of direct navigation, useful by itself. So is
> stepping
> by links (to external URLs as one class, and to internal URLs as another).
> For electronic books, even print page numbers have value (table of
> contents, index
> of original print versions have print page number references) when jointly
> using
> materials with some the printed book and others eyes-free.
> > 
> We have discussed stepping through links, headers (H1...H6), and searching
> for 
> a string (possibly with wildcards). 
> 
> Some authors supply keywords. These may well have been the reason for the
> page 
> to have been found for the user by some search engine. When the author adds a 
> reasonable number of pertinent keywords, they would be a useful fourth aid to 
> search, and to characterize remote pages at more detail than the title of
> the page.
> 
> Would the list of keywords on a document be useful, once the document is open?
> As it is part of the head metainformation, it is not normally exposed to
> the user.
> We allude to the usefulness of stepping by links, referring to the anchors
> in the
> body, not the links to external URLs in the head. There may be other
> metainformation
> now hidden to the user in the head. Should any of that be exposable? 
> >Jon
> 
> Regards/Harvey
>

Received on Friday, 13 November 1998 14:24:52 UTC