Comments on: Search weblogs on Global Voices

By: Spreading The Word … There, Not Here at Thermo[SAT]

Spreading The Word … There, Not Here at Thermo[SAT] — Sun, 24 Dec 2006 22:56:12 +0000

[...] My colleagues Ethan Zuckerman and Boris Anthony have put together a new "Global Voices Web" search using the new Google Co-op platform which enables you to create your own search engine. Check it out. You can find it in the yellow search bar near the top of the page right under the infamous "tag cloud" (which will likely change in the upcoming redesign). [...]

By: Mary

Mary — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 20:05:44 +0000

This is a very neat idea. I like that GV is always trying to improve itself and innovate in practical ways.

By: Ethan

Ethan — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 17:40:53 +0000

Ange, there’s no relationship between search and those photos in the top banner – they’re rotated at random through a set of images given to us by GV authors. They repeat too often because not enough authors have given us their pictures…

It’s an intriguing suggestion to link search and images – it’s something we might take more seriously when there’s more image content on the site. At present, I don’t know if matching authors to country searches is something we’d use developer time to put together. But if we’re at a point where we’ve got a photo editor and are doing a lot more image content, I can see this making sense.

By: ange

ange — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 23:52:42 +0000

Guys, i’ve got a question:

has the keyword field of the search feature been tied in any way to the images’ rotator? is there some image tagging going on behind the scenes that brings up GV authors’ images along with search results which corresponds to the keyword a user types in?

was test driving the search field a few minutes ago with various keywords along the lines of an adult theme (see url for more screencap) and for about two of the keywords i used out came two of the same people.. so for example i ran a search for porn and out came the images for gv author a, b &, performed another search for pr0n, out came the images for gv author a & c. So are the images tagged somehow with the search key word field?

If not.. well it would be sweet think to have it happen.. well obviously not for keywords like porn and the like.. for example if someone were to search for south asia, pakistan, quake, the search results page would pull up results accordingly along with images of gv authors (variant of four images specific to those keywords) who cover those regions/topics :) and when one clicks upon each image they go to the author’s page as is now..

i think there’s two ways of doing this, one would be a simple keyword matching image tag + blog tags and feeds, i guess another way would be to match the gv authors’ feeds + blog tags.

Any of this making sense? seriously interested here :)

Cheers & keep up the great work!

By: frizzyLogic » Superb new search

frizzyLogic » Superb new search — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 11:52:15 +0000

[...] Global Voices has a brilliant new search function. It’s in the yellow strip towards the top of the page. It’s the work of the planet-sized-brains of our tech maestros, Boris and Ethan. The latter has his own post on the heart-warming involvement of a large internet company in the development process. [...]

By: Boris Anthony

Boris Anthony — Sat, 09 Dec 2006 23:15:59 +0000

Thought I’d give some details of what very interesting future functionality we’re looking at by integrating our aggregator’s subscription lists with the Google CSE service:
- The CSE allows us attach labels to sites in our index, meaning we can allow you to search for a term against the blogs we watch in, say, only a specific region, or country, or on of our topics.
- we can also give sources “weights”, which we could calculate a number of ways: how often we’ve linked to a source, what kind of star-rating the source gets on our aggregator from our editors/visitors, etc… this promotes (or demotes) the the sources’ weights in the search results.
- I’ve just inquired if we will be able to toggle the search into a “Sorted by date” results setting, as Google News has. (Remember, Google is more about Google Rank/Authoritativeness than explicit freshness)

Fun stuff! :)

By: Global Voices Online » Blog Archive » Global Voices launches new search function!

Sat, 09 Dec 2006 22:21:53 +0000

[...] Global Voices co-founder Ethan Zuckerman and tech guru Boris Anthony have put together a new “Global Voices Web” search using the new Google Co-op platform which enables you to create your own search engine. Check it out – it’s in the yellow search bar near the top of the page right under the “tag cloud.” [...]