Faceted Search: An Interview with Tito Sierra

I met Tito Sierra at the IA Summit in Miami, and we talked soon afterwards about his experiences with faceted search. Previously at Amazon.com, Tito has spent the past few years at NCSU Libraries, working with a great team to transform the library catalog and identify best practices for search design.

In addition to sharing lessons learned via Endeca at the NCSU Libraries, they've extended their successful model to the Triangle Research Libraries, and created a research testbed for faceted search and navigation.

Highlights (notes not quotes) from my conversation with Tito include:

• We went overboard at first by exposing twelve facets. Our studies showed users suffering from "facet fatique." The new design has a smaller facet footprint, and we removed the prominent LCC browser.
• We're also employing collapsible facets, quickfilter checkboxes, and stacking breadcrumbs to use space wisely.
• Facets are ordered by frequency of use (e.g., subjects are most popular) and grouped by type (e.g., exploratory versus known item search).
• We've created virtual hierarchies (e.g., formats under Videos and DVDs).
• We've designed "facet triggers." For instance, upon selecting an institution (e.g., Duke), users are shown individual libraries (e.g., Law).

I also asked Tito about the future of search. As massive digitization projects (e.g., Google, OCA) mature, he's excited by the prospect of discovery interfaces that leverage both algorithms and structured metadata. Tito also sees potential in personal search and the use of past queries to inform future results.

Finally, Tito is committed to advancing our shared understanding of search. His testbed is designed to make it easy for researchers to experiment with and gather data on a variety of faceted search and navigation interfaces. If you're interested in learning more, please contact Tito.

Strange Connections

Check out The Noisy Channel by Daniel Tunkelang, chief scientist at Endeca.

Karl Fast told me about Evernote. Ready to build a search engine for your life?

Brian Goodman: Interview

I talked with Brian Goodman about Search Patterns. As manager of IBM's WebAhead Lab, Brian identifies and develops emerging technologies (6 to 18 month time horizon) that can be applied to solve real business problems.

During the past year, Brian's group has focused on building social spaces (e.g., blogs, wikis) and platforms (e.g., tools for bookmarking, tagging, rating, and reputation management) that support integration. For instance, they designed an enterprise tagging system with widgets that can be integrated into any service.

This platform approach has enabled the integration of social content into enterprise search. The first step was a portlet (on the side of result pages) featuring blog posts and bookmarked articles. Subsequent adoption and satisfaction were higher than expected.

The team then went further by integrating social data (e.g., ratings, tag frequency) directly into the algorithms for enterprise search. A page that's been bookmarked, for instance, receives a boost. In similar fashion to Google's PageRank, this approach to socially influenced search improves both result relevance and user satisfaction.

Other highlights (notes not quotes) from my conversation with Brian include:

• Created a recommender system that leverages folksonomies and taxonomies (which are deconstructed into tags). Users can subscribe to tags and taggers (people). The recommendations are surprisingly good.
• Created a reputation system built on peer review and feedback that became a fantastic source of data for expertise search (which is also integrated into enterprise search).
• These tools help people identify content and individuals they wouldn't normally find by searching.

Looking ahead in search, Brian sees more personalization, and a profound need for new interaction models that make complex queries simple.

Strange Connections

If you can't go to the IA Summit, or if you're like me and can't wait to get there, check out Meet Your Peers by Jorge Arango. See y'all soon!

Behavior & Design

I've added a collection to Search Patterns that includes concept visuals, behavior patterns, and design patterns (e.g., faceted navigation).

Also, with the help of my Blackberry Curve (I dropped my trusty Treo one too many times), I've added several new examples to mobile search. I'd love your feedback and suggestions for new patterns. Thanks!

Strange Connections

Going to the IA Summit? Then, create a personal schedule using Crowdvine.

Will Evans: Interview

I talked with Will Evans about Search Patterns. As an information architect and interaction designer, he's designed search for such sites as Kayak and Gather.

Will is an amazing source of insight and examples. He's already contributed to the pattern library but was willing to share more, including Volkswagen UK (faceted navigation), and the Encyclopedia of Life (taxonomy visualization).

Will noted we must look beyond our immediate disciplines and vocabularies for sources of innovation. In that spirit, he recommends the following:

• Scented Widgets
• Dynamic Taxonomies
• Semantic Search

Will is now with CrowdSprout, a startup that will aggregate supply and demand by using the power of social networking and e-commerce. In other words, it's a search system that helps buyers and sellers find deals. Good luck Will!

Jason Blackwell: Interview

I talked with Jason Blackwell about Search Patterns. Jason, a user experience specialist at IBM, has led an enterprise social search project that uses bookmark and tag data from Dogear to improve search and social networking.

The team wanted to keep the main intranet search results (official data) front and center while offering social data as an extra feature. The initial design adopted the Google model with filter tabs for each content type (e.g., blogs, wikis, forums, news, people). But users didn't visit the tabs very often.

The new design adopted the Ask model with a customizable sidebar (to the right of results) that by default presents three preview results for each content type. Click-throughs skyrocketed. A nice example of how seemingly small design details can make a big difference. Other highlights (notes not quotes) include:

• We review the top 300 queries (which account for 30-40% of all searches each week) and manually adjust the Best Bets as necessary.
• Tags and bookmarks impact the ranking of the main search results.
• We may add personalization and narrow/broaden capabilities.

Jason noted that designers no longer own the search user experience. At IBM, folks use Greasemonkey to add new sources to the sidebar. And, on the Web, StumbleUpon injects social data into Google results. By providing APIs and RSS feeds, we can open search to support further customization and innovation.

WineM

My favorite contribution to Search Patterns this week is WineM.

Here's an excerpt from last year's press release:

The smart wine rack uses radio frequency identification (RFID) to track individual bottles in the rack and identifies ones that fit the users' wine selection criteria. Collectors and restaurants can use WineM racks to search collections, track specific bottles, update information about wine in real time, and manage inventory visually...the wine in a collection can now be dynamically reorganized by any combination of year, region, price, or any other information axis that interests the collector or sommelier.

A handheld device accepts queries, and full-color LED lights transform the elegant wine rack and the bottles themselves into a search results interface. The system even supports faceted navigation. Very cool!

Strange Connections

I'm happy my disturbing hole has wormed its way into the minds of futurists.

If you're coming to the IA Summit in Miami, please consider the IA Institute's Leadership Seminar. An important topic and some great speakers!

Keith Instone: Interview

I talked with Keith Instone about Search Patterns. Keith is a lead information architect at IBM where he's working with the UX and IT teams on the next generation of search for ibm.com. Here are some highlights (notes not quotes):

• One goal is to make search more contextual. Where is the user when they start to search? We can deliver context-sensitive results. But what if our educated guess is wrong? We must let the user drill down or go sideways.
• We're conceiving of search as a separate space with unique layout and navigation for result pages.
• Simply defining a shared vocabulary is a challenge. What's the difference between a filter and a facet? Filters are visible (e.g., link, tab, checkbox) whereas facets are conceptual and "behind the scenes."
• The user interface is not the biggest challenge. First, search is a massive IT project. Given millions of documents, it's not easy to index all and only the right stuff efficiently. Second, getting the content tagged with high-quality metadata (e.g., language, part numbers) is difficult in such a decentralized organization.
• While search is a project, it's also a process. We employ a mix of tools and methods (e.g., the search elsewhere test) to solicit feedback and drive continuous improvement.

Keith predicted that trying to make site search work as well as web search will remain an ongoing challenge. This made me wonder whether it would ever make sense for Google to license domain-specific PageRank data as an input into site search algorithms. Probably not, since Data is the Intel Inside, but it's an interesting idea. Thanks Keith for a thought-provoking conversation!

Strange Connections

The Externalities of Search 2.0 by Michael Zimmer examines privacy threats emerging where search meets Web 2.0.

Charles Knight has posted a list of the Top 100 Alternative Search Engines. Be sure to try them all.

Jenifer Tidwell: Interview

My research for Search Patterns will include a series of interviews, and I'll blog the highlights. My first is with Jenifer Tidwell, a pioneering curator of interaction and interface design patterns and the author of Designing Interfaces.

Jenifer is currently consulting with Endeca on development of a pattern library for guided navigation, and she's been actively collecting interesting (good and bad) examples of search interfaces. Here are a few:

• WebMD
• eToys
• Anthropologie
• Artist Rising
• Circuit City
• Marriott
• CarMax

She also passed along a link (from Will Evans) to Technology Review's special report on Next-Generation Search (free registration required) where I found Midomi, a singing search application that lets you find music with your voice.

Jenifer and I then discussed the need to identify a richer set of search design and behavior patterns (beyond Faceted Navigation and Best Bets) and the importance of illustrating the combinatorial complexity of search system design (e.g., to support user interactions that combine multiple patterns).

In short, a great first interview. Thanks Jenifer!

Strange Connections

Thanks for all the suggested search patterns, examples, ideas, and resources (e.g., Liz Danzico's search interface types). I'm adding to the search pattern library as time allows. Please keep 'em coming!

Clueray

As an advisor, I'm happy to see Clueray launch the public beta.

The site is slow and rough, but the idea is promising: a recommendation engine that auto-magically clusters search results by document intent.

Kurt and George are in conversations around licensing their patent-pending IntentMatch technology for use with other search and search-based applications. If you'd like to talk or just provide feedback, please pull this string.

Search Patterns

I'm working on a new book (and talk) about the future of search, and I've created a seed collection of patterns and examples to support my research.

Please add tags, notes, and comments, and suggest new examples. Over time, I hope to include patterns that illustrate user behavior and the information architecture of search. I'll be blogging about search patterns as the collection and my ideas evolve. If you have comments or suggestions, please let me know.

Strange Connections

If you enjoy great wine, delicious food, and talking about faceted search, FIND'08 is the place for you. I visited Torino a few years ago and loved it!

Alison Head is leading a new research initiative called Project Information Literacy. I've agreed to serve as an advisor. It's an important and timely topic!

Music Search

Songza, a music search engine from Humanized, sports a beautiful interface that leaves MusicIP, SeeqPod, and SkreemR scratching in the dust.

The music quality isn't great. It's streamed from YouTube. It may even be illegal. But how can you not love a product that so eloquently integrates a rich, viral feature set with transparent messages and a sinfully delicious pie menu?

Strange Connections

IxDA thread about Songza. Aza Raskin will be speaking at Interaction 08.

Nice list of interface design quotes.

Here comes another bubble.

The IA Institute is hiring an Executive Director. Spread the word!

Keeping Found Things Found

I've been a fan of KFTF for some time, so I was happy to serve as a technical editor for William Jones' book about personal information management.

And, I'm even happier to see that Keeping Found Things Found will ship within a few weeks. It's priced as a textbook, but after you read my blurb...

Keeping Found Things Found is the missing manual for 21st century literacy. We're at the epicenter of a rapidly expanding universe of personal information. Books, music, photos, videos, email, contacts, calendars, wills, bills, records, and receipts: how can we keep our piles and files from spiraling out of control? William Jones has the answer in this important book about finding our memories and organizing our lives. A must-read for designers, developers, librarians, and anyone else who cares about the future of information interaction.

...I'm sure you won't be able to resist finding and keeping this book.

Strange Connections

I've joined the advisory board of Clueray, a search startup based in Ann Arbor. Kurt Skifstad, the founder and president, is headed to Silicon Valley to talk with potential partners and investors. If you'd like to talk with Kurt, let me know.

I recently stumbled upon Bruce Sterling's hand-scribbled visual essay on Understanding the Spime. It's nice to see the ambient findability meme is securely lodged in the brain of my favorite science fiction author.

Elastic Lists

This is a wonderful demo of elastic lists by designer Moritz Stefaner.

The visual nature of the interface really encourages you to explore and interact and play with the data set, an example of information aesthetics in action.

Scroogling the Future

In Scroogled, Cory Doctorow asks the question: What if Google were evil?

It's a funny, brilliant, unsettling story. I recommend it highly! But, be sure to dim your lights and turn off Google Desktop before following the link.

Attention Analytics

I had breakfast with Lou Rosenfeld today, and during a conversation that inevitably wandered into search analytics, Lou wondered if there was a single article, talk, or interview that had sent the most eyeballs my way in recent years.

This was all the excuse I needed for some late summer procrastination, so I dove into Google Analytics for a quick swim.

On the blog side, my Washington Post chat is the winner, followed closely by the NPR interview, the Slashdot book review, and my announcement of the original Laughing Lemur Contest.

On the Semantic Studios side, my Information Architecture 3.0 article blows the competition out of the water. Nothing draws attention like a fracas.

Beyond that, my Semantic Studios traffic is fairly steady, with a substantial portion driven by search engines, thanks to high rankings on such queries as authority, social network analysis, and user experience.

And, in gray, trailing into the distance, is the long tail of the lemur, sporting such uncommon queries as "swedish marketing blunders" and "yosemite beef jerky."

Heh. I'm suddenly feeling very hungry. Wow, it's getting late. I've spent the whole day on analytics. Thanks a lot Lou!

Strange Connections

If you missed the original skirmish, you can get a piece of IA 3.0 this October at Smart Experience in New York or ASIS&T in Milwaukee.

Ms. Dewey

While reading about the Top 100 Alternative Search Engines, I stumbled upon Ms. Dewey.

If you haven't tried Ms. Dewey, you should. She's undoubtedly a core element of Microsoft's strategy to kill Google and own search.

Strange Connections

Dave's Why Rich slides are worth a look for the rich definitions and examples.

The 2007 NFAIS Annual Conference promises to be a great event for disruptive information professionals.

Enterprise Search Summit

The advance program for ESS 2006 is now available. I'm already looking forward to my annual stroll through Central Park. See you in New York!

The Long Tail of Place

As the geospatial web goes mainstream, I suspect we will wander the long tail of place, migrating beyond the usual points of interest covered in travel guides, following roads less traveled to unknown places that indulge our idiosyncrasies.

There are undoubtedly scores of small and unusual restaurants, bars, shops, museums, rivers, parks, and paths that will become more traveled thanks to Google Maps and the imminent mass annotation of physical space.

While we're on the topic, you might want to pre-order The Long Tail now, and grab The Adventures of Long Tail while you're at it.

Book Rank

Chris McEvoy, the man behind the Userati, has created an interesting new mashup called Book Rank. Here's how it works:

1. Take a single book from Amazon as a root.
2. Take the recommended books for that book.
3. Repeat until you have reached a distance of 20 from the original book.
4. Add up the number of recommendations for each book.
5. Calculate BookRank from the Distance, Recommendations, SalesRank.
6. Display the 250 books with the highest BookRank.

Seems like a useful, novel way to find books.

Google Base

Google Base is a general purpose metadata registry and cataloging service that allows users to create records that describe digital and physical objects. Google may use this metadata to create stand-alone services like eBay and craigslist and/or to enhance Google's regular search results with guided navigation.

Or maybe not. It's actually quite difficult to define. Right now, it's chock full of porn, spam, and information architecture. In all this confusion, I'm hoping to get rich quick by selling this chair. The ability to tag physical objects is certainly interesting. If nothing else, Google Base brings us one step closer to UFOs.

Evaluating Search

Google will no longer tell us how many billions of web pages they've indexed, though they do claim to be "more than 3 times larger than any other search engine." John Battelle tells the story over on Searchblog.

Of course, index size is a flawed metric. Most users never get past the first 10 results, and neither Google nor Yahoo! lets you explore beyond the first 1,000 hits. And if you're crazy enough to dig deep into the result sets of Google and Yahoo!, you'll find that both pad their indexes with spam. For a search index, quality counts, and sometimes less is more.

It will be interesting to see how the search wars play out in the coming months. As the playing field becomes level with respect to speed and size, it seems clear that brand, relevance, and user experience design will be the keys to competitive advantage. What do you think?

You Are Here

Welcome to findability.org: the next generation. In case you haven't noticed, it's a borg. I mean, it's a blog. Yes, after years of quiet resistance, I've succumbed to the call of the blogosphere. I've been assimilated.

In blogging, my most transparent and prosaic goal is to promote my new book, Ambient Findability. I've poured blood, sweat, and tears into this strange text, so I won't be shy about inviting folks to read it.

That said, I'm hoping this blog will go beyond the book. As my classification scheme hints, I'll be writing about authority, business, culture, design, search, ubicomp, etc. And let's not forget the oft-maligned category of miscellaneous. I very much reserve the right to write about seemingly random topics.

So, if you want the original findability, it's there but not here. And if you like this new place, please come again, or better yet, leave a piece of yourself behind.