SortFix Powered Search Blog

Posts Tagged ‘search’

Here we are again with more improvements to make your search much more precise and effective!

This time we bring you a gesture that has never been implemented before:  the possibility of creating phrases just by dragging and dropping. As you might know, a phrase search looks for multiple words near one another in the exact order in which you wrote them, thus making the query more specific and narrowing the results significantly.

To make a phrase just drag a word to the “add to search” or “remove” box and place it next to another one and it will intuitively give you the possibility to unite them.

To break the phrase apart drag the last word somewhere else (to the “remove” box, back to the “power words” or simply above or below the other words inside the “add to search” box).

This is a very powerful feature that will improve your search in a remarkable way….

Start enjoying the refined results from a much more precise query right away!

Hiya! All good?

It’s I again, bringing more good news.

Lately we’ve been thinking about how we could improve our users’ search experience and suddenly we realized, if you can share blog posts and other things on different social media sites, why not create an option that enables you to directly share the search results you like?

For this reason now, when searching on SortFix, you’ll be able to tweet, buzz or post on facebook any search result you want.

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As usual, we’ve been working very hard trying to make your search better and more fruitful, and this time we expanded the search results making it possible now to search not only on Twitter and Google but also on Bing, Youtube and Image Search. Now you can also use SortFix technology to improve your search and maximize the relevancy of the results on these very popular sites.

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Many have asked us about our ‘Power Words’ and I realized that though most people understand very well that because “Power Words” are related to the search, some should be added to the search query, only few grasp the idea that the “Power Words” can also be used as a negative filter.

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In the last months we have been working hard to provide our users a much more relevant results and we expanded the user’s web search.
Why benefit just from Google’s results?
What are people tweeting about?

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Guest post by Rimmon Lavi, Social Psychologist. Article on web search by the evolution of human kind point of view.

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of Origin of the Species by Charles Darwin. Serious scientists and philosophers alike acknowledge the importance of the theory of evolution for the understanding of life. They praise Darwin’s clear and concise model, whose validity has been confirmed by the genetic and biochemical discoveries made over the last 60 years.

But this year also marks 200 years since the publication of J.B. Lamarck’s Zoological Philosophy. Over the last two decades, we have seen renewed interest in complex evolutionary processes outside the genes. These epigenetic processes neither modify genetic heritage nor create new species or organisms, but they do respond much more rapidly to changes in environmental conditions. The results of these epigenetic processes also transfer through the generations, as assumed by Lamarck’s theory of evolution, without confuting Darwin’s model of genetic evolution, which is based only on natural selection among accidental mutations.

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In the past few years, but especially in the last year, we have started to feel the “breeze” of change in the search engine sector — and more precisely the human-search engine interface and means of communication.

Search engines have been around for more than a decade. In that time, they have transformed our lives by turning us into information hunters and gatherers. I remember as a teenager I tried to learn about radio devices. I asked around; even went to the public library. All I could find were two measly books, one that was too technical and complicated for a beginner like myself; the other oversimplified. In those days, I had a 28 K modem, but it was useless for finding information. That was the end of my information seeking. Then the search engine era dawned. I started using Hotbot, AltaVista, and Ask Jeeves, until ultimately relying on Google.

As the Internet has evolved, and the amount of information has grown and diversified, sites like Wikipedia have cropped up that contain vast amounts of information on almost any subject, in fact, it is just a high information knowledge base. Millions of smaller, more sites are devoted solely to a certain subjects.

So today, learning about radio devices — or any other subject — is just a click away. But when you want to discover more, get exact statistic or data, solve a specific problem or explore “sub-subjects,” that’s when things get more complicated.

Plain Old Text

The search engine companies (Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft [Bing]) have improved coverage power and results-ranking algorithms to enable indexing billions of sites and pages, but until recently the search engine-user interface remained the same: a plain text-based search box that delivers tens, hundreds, and millions of results. The user is left baffled by the results because he doesn’t have the power to sort or to receive the exact relevant results, unless he does another search.

So we need efficient tools to filter the results.

Bring in the Clusters Bring in the clustering engines.

These tools like Vivisimo/Clusty and Carot2 attempt to categorize or “cluster” the results. Each cluster would describe a sub-subject, permitting the user to drill down into exact information to solve the problem.

These clustering engines have been around for quite some time but were outside the main search engine industry. Only search enthusiasts were aware of clustering engines and included these sites as part of their search process.

But in the last year the leading search engines began to embrace the clustering paradigm.

Yahoo! introduced Yahoo Assist!

Yahoo Assist

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On my last post I talked about the progression of GUIs, on this post I will try to different our SUI – search User Interface from a non GUI search engine.

As a child I was always fascinated by computer graphics and especially user interfaces. No, I wasn’t a geek exploring and researching user interfaces, but many of my decisions — which computer game to play, what kind of computer I wanted for my 13th birthday — were based on the design of the computer’s GUI.

All of my friends bought early versions of IBM’s PC XT 286, which had only a CLI and no GUI. I didn’t go with the flow. I preferred the AMIGA computer (Amiga 500),which was far less popular, had less games, but had absolutely stunning graphics, games and resolution. The AMIGA boasted an early edition of a Windows-style operating system.

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Do we really need millions of “possibly related results” or just a few great results to answer our information needs?

Search engine quality is measured by two things: (1) “coverage power,” the number of scanned sites and the scanning frequency, and (2) ability to match the relevant results to each and every searcher’s information needs. Today, coverage power is extremely impressive; however, the problem of “search results mismatch” remains unsolved because of the Internet’s ever-growing complexity and the tremendous increase in the amount of information available.

The source of the “mismatch” may begin with the user’s inability to generate an accurate search query. According to research, the average user’s query length is 2-3 words . Google uses its famous PageRank algorithm to statistically enhance the relevancy of the results (delivering the most likely matches first). But the statistical heuristic algorithm is bounded in part by the user’s search input. Read the rest of this entry »

In these days of the Internet, everybody knows that good design doesn’t necessarily mean the website is good. Websites must also provide an intuitive and simple way for the user to interact and navigate.

The most important innovation in the field of human-computer interaction is the graphical user interface, a.k.a. GUI, which has become the de facto industry standard for communication between us and computers.

GUIs are not only implemented in common operating systems such as Windows and Mac OS, but are used to operate and control handheld devices, portable media players, gaming consoles and much, much more.

From CLI to GUI
Having emerged as an alternative for solving the steep learning curve of command line interfaces (CLIs), GUIs have made computers – and computing — far more accessible in terms of ease of use. CLIs required commands or series of commands to be typed on the keyboard.

MS-DOS's Command Line.

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