24 September 2005

Structured search-results

I've been saying for years
that what search-engines ought to do (someday)
is sort thru the results of your search
and compose a page that lays out
all the different types of resources being offered

so if you search for 'james joyce'
the results-page should say:

biographies: url1 url2 etc
timelines: url1 url2 etc

works: ulysses
etexts: url1 url2 etc
reviews: url1 url2 etc
annotations: url1 url2 etc
composition: url1 url2 etc
critical reaction: url1 url2 etc
works-it-influenced: url1 url2 etc

family: url1 url2 etc
friends: url1 url2 etc

places:Ireland
maps: url1 url2 etc
history: url1 url2 etc


and so on

Now, is it possible that disciplined use of tags in del.icio.us
could help bootstrap that structuring?

If we agreed on how to choose tags:

jamesjoyce works:ulysses etext
jamesjoyce places:ireland history



So then del.icio.us would just need a template-layer
that sorts by specific, privileged structure-tags...?




PS: Here's an even older, farther-out idea:

Way back when I did an experiment on my blog
intended at the time to cope with linkrot
by adding to each blog-entry
a link to Google (or maybe Altavista, back then)
with pre-selected searchterms
chosen to pull up the closest possible range of matches
to the blogged url's article

Now if del.icio.us added one more field to their database
called "searchterms"
it might overlap the tags field a bit
but would consist only of words and phrases
expected to appear in every relevant article

these could be used by a spider/bot
to search for new fillers for a given slot in the structure-template