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SIGIA-L: a little something on search in press release archivesFrom: Jonas Söderström (jonas_at_xkom.se)Date: Thu Aug 30 2001 - 04:14:03 EDT
I was interviewing users for a project involving a new search engine when an experienced journalist showed me one organization's press release archive that she was particularly frustrated with.
She often had to use the search function to locate old press releases.
It was usually hard to see which the right one was, in the list of hits. She tried one of them, which URL could look something like www.someorganization.se/pressreleases/99/january/352687.htm
If that wasn't the exact document she was looking for, she often had reason to assume that the right one had been published a few days before or after. So instead of going back to do a new search (time-consuming), she looked at the URL, and found something that seemed to make sense. So she truncated the URL and tried
www. someorganization.se/pressreleases/99/january/
- presuming she would find some kind of list of all January release... but only got a strange kind of "access denied" message!
In this data-base driven system, a catalogue or page "january" did not exist. It was just a computer-generated URL with no corresponding entity. However clever this girl was in searching, that was not clear to her, and she was terribly angry and could not understand why a simple list of press releases should be "forbidden".
I was stunned. Of course, URL truncation is nothing new. Yes, I use it myself when exploring/searching a web site. But I willingly admit I had not thought about it in this context - search function, CM-systems - before.
Old truth repeated 1: people try to extract meaning everywhere - even in database-generated URLs.
Lesson: when designing a database-driven content system of some kind, make URL truncation give sensible results.
Jonas Söderström
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For the lesson lies in learning and by teaching I'll be taught
Här ligger Cross (stockholmskarta): http://www.karthotellet.com/map/?id=1104
Hem:
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Sun Nov 23 2003 - 22:54:48 EST
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