Searching for "love"

Blekko [1] is a search engine that appears to have a fresh new adaptation to search. Their new algorithm is very clearly represented and it is even a clever way to speed up search. Transparency and optimization aside, how do they handle recall?

In a nutshell, their algorithm depends on experts or maybe let's call them selfperts or self-proclaimed experts, to tell you what sites have what you are looking for. In the olden days, if you had a question, you would be keen on hitting up your local librarium or talk it down with your professional colleagues. The system of tubes we colloquially call the inter-net started out as a tight group of peer universities sharing ideas through a few mail programs and maybe more [DARPA reference needed]. Maybe some pubs were opened up for discussion ( both doctoral publications and public pour houses ), but you could not yet know how a teen pop/rocks fan truly felt after listening to some Bon Jovi tunes. It was not until much later after the 1990s [ref.] that you and I asked Jeeves about how stuff works. These days, the Googles ( Project Guttenberg, Amazon ebooks, Google Books, NY Times digitizers and the Asian text book pirating community at large ) are providing virtual and simultaeous viewing access to volumes of works otherwise only available for free in print at your library.

The real challenge of searching engines is to point you to which of those digitized sultry romance novels makes allegorical references to tragic figures through a socio-pathic love-gasmic pop fiction lens. Maybe Blekko.com feels those algorithms are not yet up to snuff and says we need to all help each other out about where best to look. A helping hand will show the way.

My hope is that when I do my looking around online, I can feel empowered when other people find what they want using slashtags I create. Maybe free commerce will vote down the ones that are not good enough or perhaps
Blekko will even downrate the slashtags I forgot to update for over a year.

I know that no matter how many biblical romance novel subject matter experts I support out there, I would still like to form my own opinion with the widest range of sources possible. And for that, I might not tag along on the SHIFT- revolution just yet.

References

[1] blekko.com

Deceptive visualizations

The daily pothole NYC DOT blog shows off this "pretty" summary of potholes covered during the last 31 days [1]. That's great, but because the map is so small, these dots look like they cover a large area while the dots themselves are big so you can see them.






The problem is similar to the one during te Dec 2010 snow storm. It was difficult to know what streets were getting cleaned up and which needed to be cleaned again. The City uses the beautiful 311 system to crowd-source to get updates on potholes and road snow issues. But because that infrmation is not presented along side potholes that were fixed, you do not get a complete picture about the city's overall responsiveness .

I still love the effort they put into this data collection. Makes me proud.


[1]
http://thedailypothole.tumblr.com/photo/1280/3316951936/1/tumblr_lgonom6bBN1qg9dmn