Puzzlepieces – 2005

pc4media: Compiled 2006 Predictions - I haven’t even finished reading it - but Peter’s “predictions” beat everyone else’s a thousand times over.

Windows Search Guide - a (very beta) page is up for adding search engines to the search box in Internet Explorer 7. Note that at the time of this writing the OpenSearch Description files they’re using are in v1.1 draft 1, which they’ll hopefully upgrade appropriately. Also they’re declaring that the results are in RSS, when they are actually in HTML.

Anyhow, now that there are two browsers (okay, so IE7 hasn’t been released yet…) that support adding search engines via javascript, here’s a single javascript function that handles both of them. It assumes you have three files - .src plugin file and a 16x16 icon, and an OpenSearch Description file. There’s a .src to OpenSearch Description file converter I wrote on A9.com.

function addEngine() {
  try {
    window.sidebar.addSearchEngine('http://example.com/plugin.src',
      'http://example.com/plugin.png', 'Example Search Engine', 'Category Name');
  }
  catch (e) {
    try {
      window.external.AddSearchProvider('http://example.com/opensearch.xml');
    }
    catch (e) {
      alert('Internet Explorer 7, Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape 6 or higher,
        or Camino is needed to install a search engine.');
    }
  }
}

personal notes for later:

Opera:
Manually Editing Opera Searches using search.ini
Opera Search.ini Editor 1.25

Safari
Add Mozilla-like keyword functionality to Safari’s search bar (a hack)
AcidSearch 0.61

Can I Crash? - a service that lets you lend your sofa to travelling bloggers! - a great idea. Via Jeremy Zawodny.

Scott Johnson, Feedster’s recently-departed co-founder, lets us know that François, Feedster’s other co-founder has posted on the Feedster blog: The Story of Feedster: A Word From Feedster’s Co-Founder. He hasn’t maintained his own blog in quite a long time, so it’s nice to hear some public words from him.

It even includes a photo of the Feedster team - my it’s changed (and grown) since my internship there ended in April of this year. François is the one front and centre.

Someone please explain to me why the Google Homepage API is a small XML format that includes an HTML bit, instead of just HTML itself?

Okay, so they introduce a few bits of meta data. The links, such as screenshot can be handled by <link /> with rel=”screenshot” and such. The other bits of data can be handled by <meta />, except for the title… there’s already one of those in HTML

Note that I haven’t taken a good look at any of the Microsoft Live Gadgets, Google Sidebar API, Yahoo! Widgets (Konfabulator), or Dashboard.

FeedBurner offers a very attractive service, and their new FeedFlare is just one part of that. But please, FeedBurner… when a user changes some settings, record the time of that change and only allow that change to affect new items. Not that it isn’t fun to see a whole lot of my subscriptions suddenly all marked as unread.

I’ve been hard at work at A9.com, working on the OpenSearch website.

Here’s some of what’s new:

OpenSearch 1.1 Draft 2

The first draft went up in September - hopefully the second draft will become final within a few weeks. A9.com already supports it. The biggest change since the first draft? A fourth component to the specification: OpenSearch Query which allows you to reference a query. It may not sound like a big deal, but I think it is. Right now you can use it to provide spelling suggestions, related searches, etc. to A9. While not yet supported by A9, it allows for any of search parameters to be used - so it can establish a dialog between an opensearch producer and consumer using extended search parameters, even if the consumer doesn’t know anything about them. Another change is the addition of autodiscovery - imagine doing that with search tools!

Improved documentation and developer resources

New and/or improved: General FAQ, Developer FAQ, Developer How-to, specification changelog, guide to upgrading from 1.0 to 1.1, an index of elements and attributes, general tips. There are also listings of tools/software for producing and consuming OpenSearch feeds. This includes an OpenSearch-to-XHTML stylesheet (XSLT - very comprehensive), a converter for any XML into OpenSearch, and a converter from Sherlock plugins (used in Firefox).

Mailing List

OpenSearch isn’t called “open” for no reason. And to further that cause there is now a mailing list for discussing the specification, software for reading and writing it, etc.

That’s the gist of it. Although it isn’t yet, I think OpenSearch is very much on the road to become ubiquitous, just as RSS/Atom is becoming so. The support by Internet Explorer 7 gives that a huge push.

It’s amazing that I’ve been given the opportunity to put so much work into an open format, that benefits the entire industry, not just A9.com. You can be sure I’ll be saying more about OpenSearch in the future - if not in this blog, then on the mailing list, on other blogs, etc.

And for those who have no idea what I’m talking about - the homepage of the OpenSearch website is hopefully much clearer now at explaining it

NDP talking about tax cuts… Conservatives talking about child care….

so all the parties are going to win over voters from the other parties by being more like them… that’s a good plan, right?

since there are three main parties… and the leftmost is moving right and the rightmost moving left… everyone’s a Liberal? Seems like a good way to defeat the Liberal party, uh, right?

some definitions of ‘tag’

tag (noun)

A string (text) that is associated with something else (eg a book, web page, even another ‘tags’). The specifics depend on the implemenation, but a ‘tag’ usually may not contain spaces, and often may only contain [A-za-z] or even [a-z], but sometimes it can contain anything, such as quotation marks or non-ASCII unicode characters. When referring to a ‘tag,’ one is usually referring to a specific string, but sometimes one is actually referring to a set of normalized ‘tags’; i.e. with plural words stemmed.

An XML or HTML ‘tag’… these are the basic building blocks of XML

tag (verb)

To apply a ‘tags’ (see first noun definition) or multiple tags to something

To apply any type of metadata (such as ‘tags’ see first noun defintion) to something… this may or may not be done using ‘tags’ in the XML sense.

does this clarify the situation? gotta love the last defition

Update December 5: Tag formats: Can�t we all just get along?

I was thinking of a really long rant, but instead I’ll make a short comment.

Google Base leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth, in more ways than one. You?

If you want to enact positive change, work with the millions of Americans that disagree with their government. Same goes for other countries.

Bombing a tourist spot in the middle east only kills innocent citizens of that country and of others, some/all of which may be on your side. And it kills the tourism industry, which is a major contributor to the economies of some middle eastern countries, and provides that salaries that many poor people depend on.

New Kids Search � Interface Enhances Access to EBSCO�s K-6 Databases - “oh, so they’ve decided to pay attention to kids,” is my first reaction. Then I see the screenshot. My suggestion: don’t call it “kids search” in huge letters at the top. Kids don’t want to be belittled, is what I think. Via Resourceshelf.

From metasearch to distributed information environments (Lorcan Dempsy) is a good overview on metasearch in the academic enviroment, and search/metadata APIs.

I looked at a number of the documents, including the first two PowerPoint files and the information on MXG. All worth looking at.

In terms of meta/federated search, those schools (first two PowerPoints) are definitely making leaps forward. The commercial and academic worlds are beginning to learn from each other. The improvements are great, but need to be much greater.

The MXG (.doc file) proposal looks to me like an attempt to make a simpler but not as great version of SRU, which tried to do the same for Z39.50. Which is good news, the authors seem to have the right attitude. I also like how they’ve made levels of the specification, each of which is more complicated, and thus closer to SRU (that last is SRU).

If I were them I’d think hard about OpenSearch. It is a much simpler specification (clearly not originating from the academic world) which accomplishes less than even MXG Level 1. But not that much less, considering how much easier it is to use.

One specific thing that OpenSearch does that the other specifications don’t, is allow search engines to use their own URL variables instead of predefined ones. It looks fairly trivial to me for this concept to be integrated into the SRU/MXG specifications.

Back to academic ‘multi’ search tools, there is UWhub, my personal project. Right now it does web search and image search (just added that this week), but I would definitely like to expand this to include searching within the school’s library, among other things.

Second p0st: Work at Broadband Mechanics - fantastic job if you can get it.

Is Google soft-launching some of their own translation software?

As you may know, Google uses (used?) Systran for their translation software, as do quite a few other major players. Google has also been working on their own translation software. I won’t go into the details of that, but if you conduct translations on Google and Systran now, the results seem different.

So is Google testing out their own translation software without announcing it? When Google launches it officially, you can be sure that it’ll be a huge announcement. Anyone want to run some tests on different translators to uncover more information?

Thanks to DeWitt, for (sorta) being the first to notice this.

This is a very significant move. Need I say more? Events and calendaring are gearing up to be huge. Does this deal have anything to do with the Google Calendar rumours? Via Software Only.

Join the Revolution - okay I planned on blogging this infinity ago (that’s internet time for you). Peter Caputa’s Whizspark is making a bold move. If you’re into running or promoting events - take a look.

Ning | Home: Front Page - I haven’t thoroughly delved into this yet, but it definitely deserves its own post. Looks to me like they’ve done a fantastic job so far. And “they” includes my friend Mike, who faithfully didn’t tell me what they were doing at all

By an odd coincidence today is the first day I looked at the Michael Fagan article on Wikipedia… and apparently several hours ago someone added me to it. Checking the user’s IP address through IP2Location lets me know the user is in Toronto. So confess, who was it… Matt?

Also today my dad sends me photos on Flickr of me, from tuesday, that I didn’t know about

The Elements of Meaningful XHTML - excellent presentation by Tantek. Which I suppose is why I didn’t see him at Tag Tuesday.

IEBlog : Hello from LA! - placeholder until tomorrow when I comment on this

Google Hurricane Katrina Resources - anyone want to explain to me why rel="nofollow" is used on those links?

Tomorrow is my first day interning at A9.com. Got back to California Friday and now have a vague general idea of the layout of Menlo Park and Palo Alto. I don’t really know yet what I’ll be working on there.

Also I’m finally launching UWhub, a search engine for content related to my university. I’ve worked on it for quite a while. Not really much in the last few days, but the “launch” is to coincide with the start of classes. Most people reading this won’t have any use for it, but I intend to generalize it later for searching any collection of sites. I’m sure I’ll have lots of time to work on that, what with the new job

Kiko Calendar Beta - well, it’s definitely beta, but when they add a couple of things, it may just be the app I’ve been hoping someone would make for quite a long time now. we’ll see…

News from Luigi about RSS search from MSN leads me to think MSN Search knows what they’re doing. Or not.

They are putting RSS/Atom search integrated right in with their web search. This is good. But… they’re displaying RSS feeds as regular search results, without modification. That means that when you click on a RSS feed result, you are taken to (surprise) the RSS feed, which, most of the time, is not in a human-readable format. Hello usability? This is acceptable for a major engine to put out for average web users?? Additionally, the ‘cache’ link for RSS feed results displays a somewhat more human-readable display, but it could definitely be improved.

Virtually all, if not all RSS feeds today are representations of existing web pages. It would make a little more sense to point to those, and provide an additional link to the actual RSS feed. This is essentially what all the major RSS search engines are smart enough to do, including Feedster, Blogdigger, and Bloglines.

Actually those engines are all smarter still, since they’re indexing individual RSS items rather than whole RSS feeds as if they were a single document. That’s a huge benefit of RSS; that the individual items have been separated, and usually come with important metadata, like the date. MSN doesn’t seem to make use of this at all, although admittedly their implementation is new.

It does appear that Yahoo has got some of this right, linking to web pages (and sometimes the web pages of the individual items). However, the same does not apply to their search API, which does use RSS feed URLs as the main link for each search result, and it does not provide the web page alternative. Which leads me to the news today of Yahoo Weather in RSS. They’re even including some excellent data in there, but, they’ve defined a new namespace for some of this data, which points to http://xml.weather.yahoo.com/ns/rss/1.0, which returns a 404 now. Also it’d be nice if they labeled their namespace ‘weather,’ rather than ‘yweather.’ And I strongly suspect that there are existing weather vocabularies they may have been able to use instead.

Anyway, back to MSN Search, they’ve introduced two new syntaxes, feed:, to specify to look for RSS feeds, and hasfeed: to specify that the results are web pages that have RSS feeds. That seems okay, but the way to use the syntax is odd. For example feed: site:bbc.co.uk. It has been semi-standard for a while to use syntax like syntax:foo, as in the site: keyword used, however the new syntax seems to be syntax: by itself. Confusing. Let’s just assume that this is temporary, until there’s a web-based interface for choosing to find RSS feeds.

</rant>