Capital idea – or it certainly would be

Nothing rhymes with ‘orange’.

But when it comes to search there is an altogether different problem with this word (and many others).

If you’re searching for the colour orange, it’s likely that references to the company of the same name, will be relevant to you.

And if that’s the case, wouldn’t it be grand if your search engine took steps to differentiate colour from company?  Afterall, the latest Find- option in IE8 allows you to do it on individual pages.

Providing surfers with a means of case-sensitive searching is one such option – and it used to be available in some free engines (notably Alta Vista).  Today though, only semantic search engines factor in case-sensitivity in search – which is understandable, given they *understand* the difference between orange the colour (and fruit), and Orange the company.

I suppose it could fairly be argued that some aspects of semantic search should obviate the problem of case-sensitivity in any search, but given how far away a reliable, general purpose semantic engine seems at present, wouldn’t it make sense to incorporate this option into the Googles, Bings and Yahoos of this world?

While there has previously been some confusion about case-sensitivity in Google results, (since resolved) it is nonetheless possible to try case-sensitive searching in Google via this bespoke appengine.

That said, there is an important caveat  – those titles or sentences which start with the word Orange are (of course) capitalised, so it can be a bit of a fuzzy way to do things.

Still, it’s an interesting project, and well worth a look.

 

MP with majority of 920 vows to clean up Parliament

Strong words from Tory backbencher Douglas Carswell in The Indy today.

He’s not pleased.  Not pleased at all with the whole MPs expenses debacle.

So displeased is he, that the above polemic was run to coincide with his submission of a no-confidence motion in Speaker Martin in Parliament earlier today.

Here he lays out his stall:

It is time for change. Progressive reformers on all sides of the chamber need to come together and elect a new Speaker by secret ballot. The new Speaker – owing their position to the legislature, rather than to government whips – needs to clean up Westminster and to ensure our political class is made truly accountable again.

Truly accountable again?  When precisely in modern history was Westminster ever ’truly accountable’ in it’s oversight of expenses?

But I digress – the key bit in this article occurs a couple of paragraphs up:

Without proper accountability to the voters, our politicians have become a caste apart. They have exempted themselves from the rules that they impose on the rest of us, including tax-free incomes off-balance sheet expenses; opt-outs from Freedom of Information laws, and dispensation not to apply equality legislation to political parties.

…which is a laudable sentiment ,I’m sure we’d all agree.

…were it not for Mr Carswell’s less than sterling voting record on a transparent Parliament – as outlined on his page on the They Work For You site. 

No votes since 2001 on this issue isn’t the proudest record for a self-styled ‘progressive reformer’.

Now there’s some opportunism that would put Mussolini to shame.

Heffer Stampedes as Flat Earth Newsgate left open

Simon Heffer’s RSS-ready style guide notes distracted Media Monkey last week – and well they might.

But not, I would argue, because they shed light on the inner workings of a man long since morphed into a self-parody of everything wrong with the English public school system.

Though the thought of Heffer slowly braising Telegraph staff with these modern world-weary missives is vaguely amusing, they do raise two important issues in the wider context of where news is heading.

First off, isn’t there something slightly incongruous about a 19^th Century stuckist like Heffer publishing conventions established for printed media via RSS?

Of course print- and online- styleguides aren’t mutually exclusive (certainly not in terms of basic grammar), but perhaps when it comes to marrying searchability to hard-copy, Heffer might have a word with his Communities Editor Shane Richmond, Communities Editor of Telegraph.co.uk, who knows a thing or two about how journalism is already changing in this regard.

Secondly, I spotted an intriguing quote in his latest diktat – a public disclaimer of sorts, for many of the horrid mistakes which blight his life (and no doubt those of his readers), namely:

It seems that many of the style errors in the paper are in stories based on agency copy. The agencies we use do not follow our style book. It is therefore crucial that the desk staff or reporters who use these stories ensure that they are style compliant before sending them to the subs.

In these days of shrinking newsrooms and booming churnalism, it is heartening to know that The Heff is adding value to copy his readers can pick up from a thousand other sources by ensuring the ’i’s are dotted and the ‘t’s crossed.

Improve your search + avoid misleading results

While running a training search today I stumbled across a use for the + operator in Google I’d completely forgotten about.

Normally when I’m running a search theory session, I’ll focus on how adding a + to a search term will prevent Google from automatically stemming that term, which can be useful if you are interested in a certain word occurring in a certain case (also useful for when you’re looking for a surname, which also happens to be a common everyday word – and so preventing Google from conjugating your term).

But today during a practical excercise, I was reminded of another search need it can be applied well to.

Say you are interested in finding out what the Home Secretary’s upcoming schedule (or diary, or appointments or etc.) are. You might like to try the following search:

schedule “home secretary”

See the cached page for the first result (from the home office), and consider how irritating it is to be told:

These search terms are highlighted: home secretary These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: schedule  

So, to stop Google fobbing you off with search results that don’t feature all the words you’ve searched for (as above), just put the + sign before any term you want to ensure appears in your results, like this:

+schedule “home secretary”

Is Google News ignoring meta “description” tags?

Once you’ve put all the hard work into ensuring your copy scans well on the page, and have devised appropriate keywords so that it can be found, how would you feel if some of your hard work was being ignored by one particular search engine you rely on for traffic?

Much is made of capturing the aboutness of news copy in html tags – and rightly so. It’s no secret that online newspapers receive significant amounts of traffic from search engines, and search engines in turn rely upon metadata to rank and present results from their indices.

So it came as a surprise this morning when I found that the short, punchy meta “description”text used to summarise some news articles, is not being displayed in their Google News results summaries.