When I see this on a tech publication …
… usually what follows is a really poor search experience. I don’t know if Google Custom Search is tough to implement (we work with Lucene), or if web developers at the tech publications who use it are improperly implementing it – but it’s like hiring NASA to do your kid’s math homework and then the kid somehow bringing home a D. It just doesn’t make any sense.
So many tech trades have Google Custom Search slapped onto their sites. If you type in an exact tech phrase that you know the publication covers, I think the minimum expectation for a reader these days is to be able to sort by relevance, sort by date, or sort by author. Few of the publications that have Google Custom Search implemented offer these basic conveniences. Most just spit back articles by relevance – and often times, the most relevant matches aren’t even articles (but are promos for events they hosted in 2003, or other odd results).
I’m not interested to call out the offending publications. But it’s really weird that any company whose main asset is content would make it so impossible for users to hone in on precisely what they are looking for. Trying to find exactly which author at a specific publication most frequently writes about cloud computing or network attached storage or SOA? If you hit the home page and see that Google Custom Search, typically the results are such a garbled mess that you can pretty much forget about it.
Another thing that’s really odd about this bizarre lack of respect for proper search configuration by so many of these tech trades is that many of them have actually digressed over the past 10 years. Some of the very worst search experiences are on some of the most reputable trade publications (by the very largest publishers). And some of these really poor search experience publications once had search that worked very fluidly / intuitively. What happened?
Posted by Alex
February 5, 2010 at 4:24 am
Interesting post, keep up the good work!
Posted by Craig Oda
February 10, 2010 at 10:29 am
Can you offer up a custom version of IT Database as a way for the publications to show their articles to the public? You could offer them a button on their web site to list articles based on different search criteria. “Search Powered by IT Database.”
BTW, you should ask people with blogs to write up reviews of IT Database or IT Memos. Have you actually tried to do this? It’s kind of like pitching reporters.
Here’s a short review:
http://blog.socialmediasurfer.com/2010/02/itmemos-new-and-free-resource-for-buzz.html
Posted by admin
February 10, 2010 at 10:43 am
That’s an interesting idea, Craig. We’ve been sort of all-consumed by direct sales to tech vendors, but there do seem to be a lot of intriguing ways we could license certain capabilities – this being one of them. A REST API is on the horizon for us, and would open up a lot of these opportunities.
Thanks for the idea on blogger reviews, too.