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You are currently browsing the Bogle’s Blog weblog archives for the day Thursday, March 31st, 2005.

Adding an editorial voice to Google Search Results

In my post on Is Google Vulnerable in the search platform war, I incorrectly stated the following:

“Suppose you have compiled a list of the 20 best sources of reviews on the web, and you want to leverage Google’s full text index to search these. This isn’t possible to do, because Google allows only a single “site:” specified in a query.”

This, my friend, may have once been true, but it’s not true now. Google allows multiple site: specifiers to separated by an OR, and they have upped the number of terms allowed in a query to 32.

This enables people to layer an editorial voice on top of Google by specifying a set of sites that they think are authoritative on a particular topic. For example, in the sidebar to the right of this page, you can search the web pages of my friends and colleagues to find out what they think on any topic. View source on this page to see the simple Javascript that was used to combine the user query with site specifiers.

See what my colleagues know about marketing

A multi-site query is quite a useful feature and one that I think blog and web page authors will tap into widely once it becomes known. I can imagine tools that will automatically construct the appropriate query given a blogroll or favorites list.

posted on 03.31.05 @ 10:07 pm | 1 Comment

Jobster V1 launched in San Diego!

One reasons my free time is something less than ample (in addition to two daughers) has been getting ready for the Jobster Launch, which took place on March 30 at the ERE Expo in San Diego.

It’s always incredibly busy before ship but I feel a great sense of excitement when something I’ve helped to create is about to reach the hands of users. Our launch event, which you can view here, including a live demo which was well received by the recruiters in attendance.

Jobster will be an invitation only service for professionals to begin with; this is part of our strategy of focusing on connecting companies with the best people rather than the most active job seekers. V1 is just the beginning, we’ve got many things in the works and there is much to come that will be of interest to every professional.

posted on 03.31.05 @ 9:12 pm | 0 Comments

Side Projects for my ample free time

At any given time I have a set of fun little hacks I’m working on or wish I was working on. Here are the things I’m currently thinking about; in part I’m writing in the hope that someone will tell me that what I want already exists.

  • XBMC extensions for photo viewing and tagging: XBox media center is a great way to view computer content in the living room, and it’s open source and support for python scripting make it easy to extend. One extension I’d like to add is a way to make photo viewing interactive– I’d like to be able to hit a button to flag the best pictures for printing or tag them as a favorite. Another extension I’d like is Flickr for XBMC– a way to browse my Flickr collection on the Xbox. Given their web services API, this could probably be done entirely in Python.
  • Universal search plugin for Firefox: I like the search toolbar in Firefox, but it’s actually a bit of drag to have to select a search engine from the dropdown. Also, many sources of intranet content don’t yet have plugins, like Jobster’s corporate knowledge base in Confluence or our bug tracking database in JIRA. I’ve written a plugin that defers to a web page to intelligent select the appropriate search engine to based on the user’s query. If the search page doesn’t recognize the user’s query, it will default to Google, with a set of tabs across the top that allow you to run the same query on other search engines. If it recognizes the issue as a JIRA bug id, it will automatically go to that bug page in Jira. Special keywords allow the user to specify other search engines. All of the logic is in the web page, not the toolbar, so it’s easy to extend. Geeky but good.
  • Berry attachments: The Blackberry gives me instant, secure access to corporate email, but web pages inside the corporate firewall are off limits to me. I have also have no way to remotely search my Google Desktop. This program will be an Outlook plugin that recognizes specially formatted emails from me and replies back to me with the desired results, like the contents of the web page or the results of the Google Desktop search. This would be a bit like the Itrezzo, but hosted on your own PC, open source, extensible, and free.

    A potential security nightmare but I think I can make it safe enough for my purposes. The SpamBayes plugin, written in Python, will make a good starting point for this.

  • Berry Bloglines 2.0: Berry Bloglines has some unique content reformatting features, but many user’s have reported compatability problem with their Blackberries, probably having to do with the way cookies are handled. I’d like to fix this with a smart frontend to the browser based pages.

    • posted on 03.31.05 @ 8:48 pm | 3 Comments