December 5, 2006

The Perfect Search Result Is an Encyclopedia Page

The perfect search result should be a small review of a novel, that briefly describes the author, the context of his work, the characters, then comments some important events from the book and gives a verdict.

The perfect result should be an answer to your question, but it should also give you pointers where you could find other information. The answer should be as detailed as you want.

The perfect search result is a page from a book, the annotations and its context.

The perfect search result could be a delicate sunshine, a chart, the smell of a fruit or an algorithm, a part of a movie or an advice.

The perfect search result is an automatically-generated encyclopedia page that gives enough information about a topic to satisfy your curiosity, but also references to the original sources of information.

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7 comments:

  1. AnonymousDecember 5, 2006 at 8:22 AM

    Nice thought on the perfect search result. Who wouldn't want search results that look as though they were prepared by an intelligent and thoughtful professor -- taking the extra effort to simplify and use examples if needed?

    I wonder though if the perfect search result as you described it is universal. Will others agree that this is the perfect result for them too?

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousDecember 5, 2006 at 9:05 AM

    It will be perfect if the search engine can read our mind and know exactly what we are looking for.

    But we are not as that stage yet.

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousDecember 5, 2006 at 9:35 AM

    Well when you want to find out what some certain term means - yeah, sure, that IS the perfect result. And that is exactly why I have a wikipedia search box in my browser.

    But can anyone please give me an encyclopedia page on "libcurl php segmentation fault"?

    ReplyDelete
  4. AnonymousDecember 5, 2006 at 9:36 AM

    Guess this is the closest we can come perfect for the moment. Very nice indeed.

    Googlepedia splits the google search in two with wikipeida article on the left hand side.

    Give it a try. I love it...
    https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2517/

    ReplyDelete
  5. Alex ChituDecember 5, 2006 at 2:32 PM

    For dom:

    Wikipedia is a model (collaboratively edited encyclopedia), Encarta is another model (encyclopedia edited by experts). I was just suggesting an automatically-generated encyclopedia.

    For "libcurl php segmentation fault", I would like to see some information about libcurl, php, how they work together, what "segmentation fault" means and a solution to your specific problem. All in a coherent page that gets information from different sites and shows links to that sites (for details).

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  6. AnonymousDecember 6, 2006 at 12:18 AM

    I'll have to add www.answers.com to the list of sites attempting this goal. In one click you get everything you needed to know about the topic you looked up. Actually, the Google definition link on a search results page links there. It's a nice combination - search engine + fast answers.

    Liz
    Answers.com
    the world's greatest encyclodictionalmanacapedia.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Chen BoFebruary 4, 2007 at 8:23 PM

    totally agree!
    The question left: which cyclopaedic page is the best or, on the other words, how to decide the pagerank of the similar cyclopaedic pages?

    ReplyDelete

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