March 2009 InfoTip: My Favorite Clouds by Mary Ellen Bates
We are all too used to long pages of search results that offer little relief in terms of visualizing whether in clusters or images. But it doesn't have to be that way. There are visual aids. Mary Ellen Bates describes two that will present a "cloud" view of the results - where more important words (by some measure) are bigger and bolder.
+ SearchCloud.net lets the user indicate relative importance of words.
+ Search Cloudlet is an add-on for Firefox that will show relative frequency of words in search results.
Read her reviews of both.
There is one point I will quibble regarding how search engines rank results - "They are all weighted (relatively) equally by a search engine, which uses the order of my search words as an indicator of importance; at most, the search engine will assume that the most important concept is nanotech if I put that word at the beginning of my query. "
I'm not sure that putting most important word first applies anymore. Changing the order of the words in the query can make some difference in the ranking of results, though usually it's just a repositioning in the top 20 or so. Google also ranks according to the order and proximity of words - suggesting that natural phrasing could be more effective.
A classic example from the training pages at University of California, Berkeley, is grass snake is different from snake grass. Run both searches at Google and you'll see differences where grass snake gets more snakes, and snake grass finds an article at eHow on how to grow the grass sooner.
However, you can indicate importance by repeating a word. Back to Mary Ellen Bates' example - nanotechnology "renewable energy" Boulder nanotechnology - really raises the importance of nanotech and noticeably changes the ranking.
Posted by Gwen at April 2, 2009 12:00 PM