Phil Bradley's weblog

The Boolify Project

I've seen a few people mentioning the Boolify Project recently so I thought that I'd take a quick peek. It describes itself thus: "Boolify makes it easier for students to understand their web search by illustrating the logic of their search, and by showing them how each change to their search instantly changes their results."

It does this by providing some basic Boolean operators in a jigsaw format, like this:

Results can be seen at the bottom of the screen. If you try and do something that you're not allowed, up pops an error message:

It's fairly basic in that it doesn't allow the use of (..) and there's no NEAR operator, but to be fair, it's designed as a basic tool, primarily for teaching children the absolute basics I think. You can scroll down to the bottom of the screen at any point to see how your search is progressing real time, though I do have some concerns at this point - my librarians -archivist search returns 2,200,000 results on Boolify, but at Google I end up with some 23,300,000 results. Even taking into account my search is run without any filtering, and Boolify uses safe filtering, that's a really big difference. The six results in Google before the first in Boolify are all perfectly innocent, so I'm not sure exactly how Boolify is filtering their content.

However, it's a nice basic tool, which will do the job that's intended of it. I would like to see a few more advanced features to broaden it's value out to older children, but as it stands, it hits its mark.

There's another useful function on the site however, and one that's easy to miss - 'All sides'. This allows users to type in a specific term and provide comparison results between extremes, such as "good" and "bad" or "postive" and "negative", or categories of your own choosing. An image helps explain what I mean:

Having chosen your 'good/bad' or 'positive/negative' options, the two columns below will give appropriate results - a really nice way to introduce children to the different types of data you can find on Google.

All told Boolify is one of those excellent products that sets out to do something and does so very well indeed. If you're a school librarian or a teacher, or even a parent trying to teach search to your children, this will greatly assist you.

Revisiting Google Squared

Suppose that you need to collect data on English castles, to include an image, description and details on a nearby town. Unless you've got a helpful book to hand (!) it might take a while to drag all of this information together. Then of course you remember that you also want phone numbers, which means you've got to go back and do the searching again. How about British poets, African countries or roller coasters? It's a time consuming and probably in some cases a fairly boring task.

This is where Google wants to help you out, with Google Squared.

The idea is simple - you tell it what you want to find, it creates a matrix filled with goodies based on what it discovers. You can then add in new factors according to taste, and Google will then go off and find the required data and slot it in for you. This turns a 30 minute job into a 3 minute breeze. Or... (pregnant pause) does it?

Let's go through an example - I've chosen English Castles, mainly because it's a subject that's close to my heart. This is the matrix that gets formed as a result of the two word search:

There's actually a total of 13 castles, which is a reasonable number to start me off; I can delete any of them, and add in others. The content is pulled from various resources - Wikipedia, specific castle home pages and so on - the searcher really doesn't have any control over this, so Google really does need to come up trumps here. Most of the time I think it does - I'm getting good initial data about Kenilworth for example, although the Hever Castle content is much more of a sales pitch, but it is pulled from the castle website.

The fourth column is 'country' which seems rather redundant give the nature of search, but it is concerning to see that the Tower of London has been relocated into the United States. To be fair however, a mouseover of that cell does show that the information is regarded as being low confidence, and I'm given three other options:

However, I'm still not impressed with the options available - 'London' would be helpful and to be honest, the clue rather IS in the name.

That's all that Google Squared turns up for me, but it's possible to add in other data options, and this is what Google is offering me:

I think these are reasonable options, and of course I can add my own. Choosing 'telephone' gets Google to fill in 9 cells for me, but these are all listed as 'low confidence' - understandable in the case of the Tower of London, since the number given is that of a named doctor working at Guy's Tower, Guy's Hospital, London. Really not acceptable at all. This is where Google Squared breaks down, catastrophically. I have to go through each cell in turn, checking and double checking, and even though the source of the data is given - I still have to check it all again anyway. Google isn't saving me time at this point - it's actually costing me time, since I reckon that I could find good quality authoritative data quicker myself than going through each option and checking myself.

I tried to add in other data options, such as 'purpose', 'disabled access', 'architectural style' and 'public transport'. Some of these were my own ideas, others were suggestions by Google. All met with total failure - the one which made me laugh the most was Public transport for Kenilworth castle is apparently:

Oh dear.

In case I was just being difficult (always a possibility with me!) I tried some of Google's own suggestions. To say 'laughably inept' is to be on the kind side. Let's take a brief look at their idea of British poets:

Jeremy Reed? The description itself says '...an American professional baseball player'. I have no idea where Google's got that from - a search in their own database doesn't turn this guy up. All that I can think is that in the Wikipedia there's a reference to Jeremy Reed, described thus: "Jersey-born writer Jeremy Reed is a British poet and prose stylist." Perhaps Google pulled that from one place, re-ran the search elsewhere and came up with that. Really, this is about as stupid as pig dribble.

They're not all this bad, and in fact the 'Romantic movies' one is actually quite good. However, none of them are good enough - not even close to it. Suggested columns are hit and miss at best, information is missing in most cases, all the information needs to be doublechecked and in some cases it's so bad a blindfolded senile monkey could do better.

Google - take this away and bring it back when it works please. I love the concept, but the execution is dreadful; you should be ashamed.

Facebook - just HOW rude and patronising can you get?

I was wandering through my Facebook page (as you do) and I happened to look at the top right Suggested Friends option. I was stunned at what I saw:

"She only has 14 friends." WTF do you think you're playing at Facebook? It's not up to you to comment on the number of friends that someone has or has not got - and if this person just wants 14 friends maybe that's all that she wants? That Facebook should be making the point that I or anyone should suggest friends for her is rude and arrogant in the extreme. That attitude that someone is 'less' than anyone else because of the friends that they have or don't have is something I wouldn't expect to see out of a primary school, and I certainly don't expect to see it on a social networking site. "Poor so-and-so, she's only got 14 friends you know" is a disgusting and patronising way to treat your users. I would really suggest rethinking your approach here.

Harvester 42: integrating meta search engines

Harvester 42: integrating meta search engines. Straightforward multi search engine, covering about 50 different resources divided into 16 different categories. Results are inframe, so you just scroll down the page to see the next frame.

Why I became a librarian

There's a whole bunch of really interesting posts doing the rounds at the moment based on the 'Why I am a librarian' meme. You can see these over at TheLibraryRoutesProject wiki site, and I've enjoyed reading many of the entries. So here's my version.

I was a fairly serious child - when I was six I wanted to become an archeologist, by the age of eight this morphed, don't ask me how, into becoming a journalist, and by thirteen I wanted to be a barrister. God, I must have been obnoxious! My cousin, older and apparently according to my mother, cleverer than I failed to make it, so obviously I wouldn't either. Consequently a re-think was in order. I'd always used the library from a young age, though my experiences were not always happy with it. I remember one time when I got a book out early in the day, read it and then took it back. This was in the days of the old Brown system and I got a real telling off from the librarian because she had to hunt through all of the tickets to find mine because she hadn't sorted them yet.

This didn't entirely put me off though, and by the time I was sixteen I was determined to be a librarian. Not however because of the usual 'I love books' line. Oh no. Librarians I had discovered could find things. 'If you can find things that other people want, that's a fairly powerful position to be in' was my opinion (which hasn't changed either by the way) and so that was that. I did the usual student working in the college library while I did my A levels, and then took a year out (during which time I learned to touch type, which was one of the most sensible things I've ever done) before going to the Polytechnic of North London to do a degree in Librarianship. I took that course because it meant that I'd be able to stay at home - and in those days, not only did we get grants that we didn't have to pay back, we also had our travelling expenses paid!

The course was dire. It was really, really bad. It was a 3 year course, and in the first year we didn't do anything to do with librarianship. Not a thing. We did some sort of English course, which was interesting, a foreign language (either German or Russian, because 'that's what scientific papers are written in') and maths. I think there was also a bunch of other rubbish in there but conveniently I have forgotten it.

In the second year we did some librarianship. An hour a week of cataloguing with Tony Croghan (who terrified us all, but who was/is a really sweet interesting guy), an hour a week on classification with Derek Langridge, although it was basically all Facet - we did literally no more than a week each on things like Dewey, Bliss, LC and so on. I also had 3 hours a week on local history with Victor Newburg (and it really was about history, bugger all to do with librarianship) and a bunch of other stuff.

Insanely I chose to carry on and do a fourth year, which was an Honours year. I still have no idea why I did that other than it beat working. Consequently by the time I actually became Chartered it had taken me over 6 years. Almost as long as to become a doctor! Insane.

Best thing about the course was that I met Jill, and we married shortly afterwards. I can't hardly recall one useful thing that I got out of the course itself, but I did get on well with the lecturers - David Nicolas, John Eyre, David Phillips to name but a few. There were 50 on my course - 1978-1982 and almost all of them have disappeared. I tried to find 'em via Friends ReUnited, from net searches, and had a little success, but for the most part - vanished! (If you are one of 'em, and you're reading this - do get in touch!).

Of course, I then had to get a job. This wasn't easy, since I didn't know what I wanted to do, so fell into a temp position at the British Council, in their Central Information Service. I loved it there and had huge experience - travelling abroad, teaching, reference work and so on. However, by then I'd seen CD-ROM technology and knew it was going to be big, and I also knew that the BC wouldn't get around to it for years to come. (In fact a decade later I was invited out to Kenya to run a course on implimenting CD-ROM technology!)

I moved to SilverPlatter Inc, a CD-ROM publisher, as the Head of UK & European Technical Support. Keep in mind at this point I knew how to turn a PC on, but that was about it. I had a very steep learning curve, and managed to keep a step or two ahead of the librarians that I was helping. I did this for 5 years, discovering the Internet as I went. I got asked by TFPL to run some training courses on CD-ROM, and this then morphed into courses on the Internet and in the end all my time was spent either working or taking days off to work for myself. Something had to give!

In 1996 I left SilverPlatter and set up as an independent internet consultant, and that's what I've been doing ever since. Teaching, writing, talking about the internet to librarians is a dream job. I've been around the world twice, I've visited about 20% of the countries in the world and had some interesting experiences. (Get me a drink sometime and I'll tell you all about Turkey, Australia, Russia, and my adventures in the Far East. But I'm not writing 'em down, put it that way!)

Am I a librarian? I think so. Being a librarian is not a job, it's a passion and a vocation. Perhaps 'librarian' isn't the most accurate word, I think 'information professional' might work slightly better, but I'm not that fussy. I think I've got a great job - I play around on the net trying out new stuff, playing with it, writing and talking about it, teaching it to other people, and I get paid for it! Just how cool is that? And of course I get to spend time with other librarians as well. Wouldn't want it any other way.

Bing fiascos continue

I really want to like Bing. Really I do. However, they insist on ensuring that I can regard them as nothing more than also rans in the search game. They are *still* censoring UK results - my martin luther king search still gives me this:

I have asked Microsoft several times for a reason for this. They don't know. Imagine that - Bing has NO IDEA why it's giving the results that it is. You don't get this with other versions - it's just the UK version. However Bing does censor results in other countries for different searches. Try the Indian version for example - a search for 'sex' gives us this:

 

Bing is blocking *the entire term*. This ineptitude is astonishing; it's only the most basic and amateur engines that work in this way. Wait though, it gets better - much better. A search for 'penis' also gives no results but 'vagina' returns 131 million results. A search in the Image section for the word 'Adult' gives us the message "The search adult may return explicit adult content." No kidding! However, a search for 'vagina' gives us 39,000 results, and while I've not looked through them in any detail, there certainly seemed to be some adult content. I'm not sure if it's madness, incompetence or stupidity that Microsoft is showing, so let's be generous and say that it's all three.

So, what's the latest disaster that Bing is involved with? Why... none other than Twitter. Bing's got an agreement with Twitter to take their 'firehose' of tweets. First point to make is that if you're using Bing you need to be using the US version, since it doesn't work if you're using a country version. Why is this the case? God knows. Microsoft makes such a big play over the country versions, and for why? If you're in India and you want to see porn, use another country version. If I don't want to see the UK censored results, just use the US version. But still, sense and competence really aren't Microsoft's strong suits are they?

So, let's go to the Bing Twitter site which is http://www.bing.com/twitter. First thing that we see is a tag cloud of hot topics on Twitter. This is NOT the same as the trending topics you see in Twitter - there are differences. So clearly Bing is already doing different things to the data that they're getting. Let's try the Windows 7 search as that's a hot topic of the moment. This is what we get from Bing:

Isn't that '2 minutes ago' a bit worrying? Let's look at the Twitter version that I did a couple of seconds after getting this screenshot:

Half a minute ago. That sounds more sensible to me. Moreover, in the time that it's taken me to edit the images, cut and paste and so on, there are another 376 new tweets over at Twitter.
What have I got over at Bing Twitter?

The SAME results, and I'm kindly told that they're now 7 minutes old. I wouldn't mind that much, but there's a Pause button, so that I don't get overwhelmed with the results from Bing. Refreshing the page brings up new tweets, but once again, they're listed as 2 minutes old. Not acceptable Bing, not by a long shot. Now, to be fair, there is that 'see more Tweets' option, and this does give me more results. Nothing more recent than a minute old however. Within that option there's a 'Most recent' and a 'Best match' choice. I'd love to tell you the difference between the two, but all that I get is this:

It's been 'loading new tweets' for the last few minutes. I've not got this to work ever. Maybe it's just me and my browser - maybe the world doesn't like me, but *it doesn't work*.

OK, let's try something different. I'll try an ego search - they're always fun. A search in Bing for @philbradley returns 1 result - from my sister in law posted about 52 minutes ago. Same search over at Twitter? Dozens of results. Same search over at Brizzly (a different Twitter interface), gives the same as Twitter - dozens of results. This happens over and over again. Twitter finds results, Bing doesn't. Of course, it doesn't help that Bing is throwing away content older than a week. Why? I have no clue. Maybe they can't afford the storage space, maybe they never thought to program it in, maybe they're just clueless. Whatever the reason - Bing's Twitter engine is pointless to use for any type of archival work.

What else can I try and do with this search engine? Going back to the Windows 7 search there's an option to see 'top links shared in tweets' which is kinda handy and it's leading me to the CNN site. I'd prefer something with a little more authority, such as a Microsoft site, but if that's not where people are linking, that's not where they're linking.

Of course, it helps if you know what the link is to. Bing is supposed to break open short URLs to tell you where you're going to be clicking, which is a great idea. It looks something like this:

 
See the (softpedia.com) there? Helpful. However, see the other bit.ly link - the one that they've not broken out? That takes you to a website that's offering some sort of nonsense, and includes pop up boxes and a confusing 'cancel to stay here' kind of message, trying to get me to speak to an 'advisor'. Gee thanks Bing - that's really helpful isn't it. Danny Sullivan found the same thing when he was doing his review of Bing Twitter and I'd suggest you take a look at it, since it's very helpful - according to Bing they told him it was a 'glitch'. Danny found spam, I found something similar, so it's an impressively large glitch.

Look, maybe this is all just me. Maybe I'm just a bit of a bully who doesn't like Microsoft. Let's see what other people think - Karen Blakeman did a review of Bing Twitter recently as well. Her opinion is summed up in her last line: "Bing have yet again snatched defeat from the jaws of victory." Don't take our word for it though - go and take a look for yourself and let me know what you think.

Average Internet User Now Spends 68 Hours Per Month Online

Average Internet User Now Spends 68 Hours Per Month Online. Although that sounds like a lot, it's only about 2.15 hours a day. Which as far as I'm concerned is but a drop in the ocean. Our mythical average user also visits 2,700 websites for an average of less than a minute per site.1 hour 53 minutes a month is spent on Google, and 5 hours 24 minutes on Facebook.

Quick potted guide to RSS

RSS isn't a difficult subject to master - at least once you know what it is. That seems to be the difficult bit, as it does appear to be a subject that can be hard to grasp. This is a nice presentation that hopefully makes it a little easier.

A Potted Guide to RSS

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Twitoaster

Twitoaster is a Twitter service. It threads and archives your twitter conversations, bringing you all the background, context and statistics you need. In other words, it's all about improving and optimizing the way you communicate with your followers on Twitter.

Clicker - What's On Online

Clicker - What's On Online. This is an irritating resource, through no fault of its own. Basically it allows users to watch television programmes, movies, web based material and so on for free, either on their website or through links to other sites. It's right up to date, with the latest episodes of new series such as Flashforward for example, and it's smooth and easy to use. Unfortunately, the vast majority of resources won't play if you're not in the US - hence my 'irritating' comment.

I have spent some time playing around though, and there are a few things that the rest of us can look at - lots of TED material, 57 'Meet the Author' interviews which were enjoyable, material from the History Channel, several university based videos and so on. Sure, most of this stuff is available from source, but Clicker is doing a good job of pulling it together. My main criticism is that, given the US/Rest of the World divide, it would be helpful if they could introduce a method of screening so that I don't have to go all through the video player launching before getting the 'nyah, nyah, you can't watch this!' message.

Clicker is in closed beta at the moment, prior to a full launch, but if you're interested I have been given 5 invites to give out. Just go to http://www.clicker.com/invite/9f86EtkXqSAVkBr4tUju9A
You'll be able to create an account there and then. Be quick though, because after all 5 invites are gone that's it, and I don't have any more available.