A new article by search expert Avi Rappaport.

From the summary:
Avi writes:

I’ve just posted an article on the Long Tail, Short Head and Search. Every site, intranet and enterprise search log I’ve analyzed fits the model of the Long Tail, with a very few very popular search terms, then tailing off very quickly to unique queries (the Long Tail), creating a Zipf curve.

The Short Head — the few most frequently used search terms — is the best place to start in analyzing search engine usage. My article also gives some suggestions for taking the information and using it to improve a search engine.

Source: SearchTools.com

Need Press? Repeat: ‘Green,’ ‘Sex,’ ‘Cancer,’ ‘Secret,’ ‘Fat’

The original pitch landed in the inbox with a whiff of medical authenticity overlaid with a snicker-inducing headline: “Toxic Ties to ‘New Shower Curtain Smell’ Evident, According to Latest Laboratory Testing.”

There was a news conference, this release said, at New York University Medical Center. It was led by a doctor representing an obscure if official-sounding group that few people have heard of, the Center for Health, Environment and Justice. There were revelations about how shower curtains that are “routinely sold at multiple retail outlets” and can “release as many as 108 volatile chemicals into the air.”

Thus, the Toxic Shower Curtain Story was born.

ABCNews.com picked up on it, only to debunk it. With varying amounts of credulousness, other outlets ran with it as well, including U.S. News & World Report, The Daily News in New York, MSNBC.com and The Los Angeles Times. The gist of some of the coverage was that it was all a tempest in a bathtub, though other reports took the information at face value.

How do stories of this ilk get such bounce from major news organizations?

Those who make their living composing news releases say there is an art to this easily dismissed craft. Strategic word selection can catapult an announcement about a study, a product or a “breakthrough” onto the evening news instead of to its usual destination — the spam folder or circular file.

“P.R. people want to invest time in things that are going to get picked up, so they try to put something to the ‘who cares?’ and ‘so what?’ test,” said Kate Robins, a longtime public relations consultant. “If you say something is first, most, fastest, tallest — that’s likely to get attention. If you can use the words like ‘money,’ ‘fat,’ ‘cancer’ or ‘sex,’ you’re likely to get some ink in the general audience media.”
…
David B. Armon, the president of PR Newswire, a distribution service for public relations professionals, likens writing a news release to writing a headline for the front page of a newspaper: every word has to do heavy lifting.

“It’s a lot more scientific than it used to be,” Mr. Armon said, “because you’re not just trying to get media pickup, but to get search engine attention.”

Source: New York Times

What’s Obscene? Google Could Have an Answer

Judges and jurors who must decide whether sexually explicit material is obscene are asked to use a local yardstick: does the material violate community standards?

That is often a tricky question because there is no simple, concrete way to gauge a community’s tastes and values.

The Internet may be changing that. In a novel approach, the defense in an obscenity trial in Florida plans to use publicly accessible Google search data to try to persuade jurors that their neighbors have broader interests than they might have thought.

In the trial of a pornographic Web site operator, the defense plans to show that residents of Pensacola are more likely to use Google to search for terms like “orgy” than for “apple pie” or “watermelon.” The publicly accessible data is vague in that it does not specify how many people are searching for the terms, just their relative popularity over time. But the defense lawyer, Lawrence Walters, is arguing that the evidence is sufficient to demonstrate that interest in the sexual subjects exceeds that of more mainstream topics — and that by extension, the sexual material distributed by his client is not outside the norm.

Source: New York Times

Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, spoke at Syracuse University today.

+ Android and iPhone will be quite different. No details.

+ Google has NOT found a way to make “significant” money from YouTube to this point.

Schmidt also said he believed that social networks will “eventually” figure out how to sell advertising on their pages. Facebook and News Corp.’s (NWS) MySpace have both struggled to develop an advertising model that appeals to advertisers and social network users.

Library of Congress Digital Preservation Update (June 2008 issue)

In this issue:

-Information about a recent GIS tutorial at the Library of Congress

-The release of a new transfer format: BagIt

-An announcement about a recent kick-off meeting for the Minnesota Historical Society project to preserve state and local government information

-A link to a digital preservation interactive presentation produced for the National Bookfestival at the Library of Congress

Source: Library of Congress

From the article:

Employees at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory can now use the lab’s search engine to find some useful resources: each other.

Lab employees, information technology personnel and experts on various subject matters can all be located with a few key words.

“[We’re] making the data more contextual and personal,” Scott Studham, the lab’s chief information officer, said at the Gartner InFocus Day gathering today.

Source: FCW

From a report/news release from MS Research:

That long-awaited vacation is almost here—just you, your spouse, and your teenage son, all eager to embark on a leisurely adventure to sunny climes for some much-needed R&R.

But your planning has not kept pace with your anticipation. There is work to be done: hotels to book, flights to schedule, activities too consider. You need to research and collaborate to reach a decision. Time is growing short, though. How will it all get done?

Well, you could try SearchTogether, a research project from the Adaptive Systems and Interaction group at Microsoft Research Redmond. The team recently released a beta of SearchTogether, a free Internet Explorer plug-in that enables groups of people to collaborate on Web searches.

Source: MSR

What is Autonomous Search?
by Youssef Hamadi; Eric Monfroy; Frederic Saubion.

From the abstract:

Autonomous search is a particular case of adaptive systems that aims at improving its solving performance by adapting itself to the problem at hand. We propose a general definition and a taxonomy of search processes w.r.t. their computation characteristics. This formalism is expressed by some computation rules between computation states. The sequence of application of these rules (i.e., the strategy) then characterizes the search process itself. Using these rules we then classify some well known solvers and try to answer the question that was raised during the first workshop on Autonomous Search: “What is Autonomous search?”

Source: Microsoft Research

Widgets to the rescue — USASearch.gov aims to make agency info easier to find with new spotlight tool

The rise of widgets on the Web has spawned a virtual industry of plug-in capabilities. Now a Web services group in the federal government is entering the fray with a new set of search widgets aimed at improving government Web sites.

The new plug-in applications, developed for USASearch.gov by Vivisimo, are in final testing and due for release next month. They are designed to address a frequent failure of search engines tethered to agency Web sites: getting often-sought government information and services to appear prominently in the search results.

The widgets aim to solve that problem by giving agency Web managers new tools to spotlight selected information and extend the capabilities of USASearch.gov, a customized search engine launched three years ago by USA Services, a unit of the General Services Administration’s Office of Citizen Services and Communications.

Source: Government Computer News

Via an email:

With the CLEF Flickr Challenge, now you can prove that you are also a great searcher in the context of a challenging retrieval task, where you have to find images without a-priori knowledge of the language(s) used to annotate them. You can go straight to:

http://soporte1.lsi.uned.es/flickling

and start testing your search skills.

The challenge is simple: you will be given raw (unannotated) images, and your goal is to find them in the Flickr.com image repository, using textual search facilities. The more images you find (and the less hints you need), the better you score in the ranking.

The Flickr challenge is an initiative of the interactive CLEF (http://www.clef-campaign.org) track. Visit http://nlp.uned.es/iCLEF for details.

The (anonymized) logs of your search activity will contribute to a log analysis task in the context of interactive cross-language search studies.

The latest new and modified LCSH (Library of Congress Subject Headings) direct from LC.

Abbreviations used on the list:
UF= Use For
BT= Broader Term
RT= Related Term
May Subd Geog = May by Subdivided by Geographic Location (Baseball–Chicago, IL) is an example.

Note: Lists from earlier in 2008, along with 2007 and 2006 lists can be found via the drop-down menu at the top of the page.

Source: The Library of Congress

A monthly rundown of the most popular and interesting searches using the search engine on ESPN.com.

Each article/list is compiled by Maalek Marshall, ESPN.com’s Search Editor and contains the Top 25 search terms/phrases for the past month.

Year-end lists back to 2005 are also available.

Btw, ESPN.com search results are available as an RSS feed. Look for the XML box near the top of every search results page.

UPDATE: Brewster Kahle Comments on the End of Microsoft’s Book Digitization Program

As Danny Sullivan writes on Search Engine Land, so much for an alternative to Google’s products in the academic and scholarly arenas. Very sad. Of course, one has to wonder how many searchers knew about and used Microsoft’s offerings in this area. Our guess, not that many. Again, a sad moment. Building it doesn’t mean they will come and use it. Databases are not a field of dreams.

Of course, many other full text online book search guides and databases exist. Just because Microsoft is leaving doesn’t mean that there aren’t other places to turn.

In this post, we list several of them.

In terms of “scholarly articles” as found in Live Academic Search or Google Scholar, many libraries in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and elsewhere provide FREE full text access to databases containing this type of material. Access is available remotely, in other words, access from any web computer. No need to visit the library. All you need is a library card (also free) from that specific library. Here’s an example of the many FREE databases (again, all you need is a library card) from the:

+ San Francisco Public Library

+ Chicago Public Library

+ Library of Virginia

+ Vancouver (B.C.) Public Library (Canada)

and thousands more. Contact your local library and see what you have access to. Of course, those with access to an academic library (let’s say, University of California-Irvine) have the ability to use (remotely, 24×7x365) even more databases.

Finally, more and more public and academic libraries now offer free downloadable access to audiobooks and movies. Again, all you need is a library card.

Check out (no pun intended) and gain access to thousands (if not more) articles, books, recordings, and more from the comfort and privacy of your home or any web computer.

See Also: Libdex
Take a look at what you can access with your library card. Here’s a great database to find contact info and web pages for thousands of libraries around the world.

Barry Schwartz writes:

A week ago Google announced the release of a safe browsing diagnostic tool. To use the tool, just append a URL to the end of http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=.

For example, to test this site, you would enter http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=http://searchengineland.com/. Google will then return four sets of security information about that page.

Source: Search Engine Land

From the article:

Not everything Google touches turns to gold. These are some of Google’s biggest nonstarter Web services, software programs, and business moves.

Source: PC World

See Also: Recent Interview with Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt (via Fortune)

See Also: Google News Now On Earth (via Search Engine Land)