Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Writing for Searching

Author:Dave Winer
Posted:1/19/1999; 7:46:55 AM
Topic:Writing for Searching
Msg #:2237
Prev/Next:2236 / 2238

This morning I posted this message to our Support-Associates mail list. Since it's an important step in the evolution of our writing system here on userland.com, I wanted to get it on the record and indexed by the search engine.

Writing for Searching

Thanks for all the positive messages yesterday on my proposal that we get systematic about accumulating knowledge about Frontier in search.userland.com.

I'm now, in this message, going to propose how we take the next step. I think we have enough software and people to make this work now, there's nothing to wait for.

  1. When you see a question asked on one of the mail lists and you think the information might be in the search engine, the first thing to do is look for it on search.userland.com. If you find it, send a reply to the list containing a pointer to the page, and if you feel like it, tell them how you found it, paste the search engine query itself into the response.

  2. If you didn't find it in the search engine, post a DG message saying that someone asked the question on one of the mail lists and you looked in the search engine and didn't find the info. If someone else beat you to it, don't post another message, no need to start two threads.

  3. Let the responses come in. I or others may send you a private email to ask you to clarify the question. Edit the posting so that it's clearer. You can use private email in conjunction with the DG. There's no need for the full process to be indexed by the search engine. But there's not much harm in it either. Basically use the communication channel you're most comfortable with, but try to remember that useful information won't be indexed if it's hidden in your outbox. That's the number one thing to avoid.

  4. Keep editing the message as more information comes in. Add links to other pages that contain information that helped solve the problem. Repeat this process until you feel the question has been completely answered. This could take anywhere from an hour to a couple of days.

Example

Seth's posting yesterday serves as a great prototype for what I have in mind. It contains all of the elements I described above, he even came up with a subject that was likely to match a search query for the information the message contained. This is excellence! Very nice.

http://discuss.userland.com/msgReader$2203

Summary

There are two sides to the program. Let's teach everyone to rely on the search engine. And let's invest in the search engine so that it becomes more reliable, so that as people ask for information, it will contain more information. This is how we grow.

Dividend for the community

Aside from the obvious benefit of having a better flow of information, there's another payoff for the Frontier community. The search engine, which is an integral part of the server-side now, will keep getting more and more revolutionary.

One of my goals is that it understand context, and has heuristics that make it more likely that it will return the info you want near the top of the results list. The people using the SE are smart. They like to figure out puzzles. We want them to become fascinated with conversing with it and to suggest ways it could work better. Then we will ship the results in an upgrade.

This is just a step in the process. Once we get this working, we'll go more towards distributed search engines. This is when the power of the Frontier community will become much more evident to those outside the community.

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