Comments on: Ramesh Jain: The Search Steering Wheel

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Fri, 24 Sep 2004 14:44:36 +0000

"I have no idea how to refine this list."

Er - following the advanced search link might be one way.

Seriously, I respect his wish to see results delineated by time and space, but who's to say anyone else wants to see them like that? What he means by "space" seems rather opaque to me as well.

This is an issue I have with all these data visualisation musings you read. They all seem to be catering for very specialist, or individual, needs. Give me my share portfolio as a herd of wildebeest so I can see which ones to cull - great idea. But applying that to another form of data might be a complete non starter.

The way I see it, the key is to examine information retrieval from the point of view of end use and allow people choice. He can have his time and space thing. But I like my stack of a million hits (refined a bit by date, or some Boolean criteria) just fine, thanks.

By: Dirk

Dirk — Thu, 23 Sep 2004 15:05:03 +0000

What does he mean by ‘space’? A 3D map of the world with the URLs on it?

By: ID:entity

ID:entity — Thu, 23 Sep 2004 09:51:09 +0000

Well it certainly works on the ipod, and makes me think solutions like vivisimo are a new wave of front end solutions to the backend index problems.

Combine Google + Vivisimo + flash + a touch pad....getting very close.

By: John Battelle

John Battelle — Thu, 23 Sep 2004 01:13:26 +0000

My God! What a great comment! You are so right! Those visionaries at RAND, my hat is off to them. We DO need a steering wheel for navigating information.

By: Ken Norton

Ken Norton — Thu, 23 Sep 2004 01:03:10 +0000

I thought you already posted about a steering wheel for search a few days ago:

http://battellemedia.com/archives/000900.php

By: Mihai Parparita

Mihai Parparita — Thu, 23 Sep 2004 00:50:14 +0000

What about the personalization slider in Google’s Personalized Web Search? Seems like that’s getting there.