Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

May 14, 2012

Sorting and Filtering Results in Custom Search

Filed under: Google CSE,Searching — Patrick Durusau @ 5:51 pm

Sorting and Filtering Results in Custom Search

From the post:

Using Custom Search Engine (CSE), you can create rich search experiences that make it easier for visitors to find the information they’re looking for on your site. Today we’re announcing two improvements to sorting and filtering of search results in CSE.

First, CSE now supports UI-based results sorting, which you can enable in the Basics tab of the CSE control panel. Once you’ve updated the CSE element code on your site, a “sort by” picker will become visible at the top of the results section.

I am not sure I would call this a “rich search experience” but I suppose any improvement is better than none at all.

Curious how you evaluate the use of “product rich snippets” as being similar to Newcomb’s conferral of properties? (see the post for “product rich snippets”).

Or for that matter, how you would in an indexing context, “confer” additional information on an index entry that does not appear in the document?

To be used when the index is searched.

Comments?

January 14, 2012

Custom Search JavaScript API is now fully documented!

Filed under: Google CSE,Javascript,Search Engines,Searching — Patrick Durusau @ 7:33 pm

Custom Search JavaScript API is now fully documented!

Riona MacNamara writes:

The Custom Search engineers spent 2011 launching great features. But we still hear from our users that our documentation could do with improvement. We hear you. Today we’re launching some updates to our docs:

  • Comprehensive JavaScript reference for the Custom Search Element. We’ve completely overhauled our Custom Search Element API documentation to provide a comprehensive overview of all the JavaScript methods available. We can’t wait to see what you build with it.

  • More languages. The Help Center is now available in Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swedish.

  • Easier navigation and cleaner design. We’ve reorganized the Help Center to make it easier to find the information you’re looking for. Navigation is simpler and more streamlined. Individual articles have been revised and updated, and designed to be more readable.

Documentation is an ongoing effort, and we’ll be continuing to improve both our Help Center and our developer documentation. If you have comments or suggestions, we’d love to see them in our user forum.

Granting that a Google CSE could give you more focused results (along with ads), but don’t you still have the problem of re-using search results?

It’s a good thing that users can more quickly find relevant content in a particular domain, but do you really want your users searching for the same information over and over again?

Hmmm, what if you kept a search log with the “successful” results as chosen by your users? That could be a start in terms of locating subjects and information about them that is important to your users. Subjects that could then be entered into your topic map.

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