Whatever happened to Advanced search?

I was mulling this over the other day while looking for a present for my Dad’s birthday on Amazon. OK, you can refine your search, and browse by category. But is it just me, or is Advanced search within sites becoming less and less easy to find, if they exist at all?

Organising the future

How should media companies best organise their content online?

 

I’ve been enjoying Martin Belam’s series of articles* comparing and contrasting the BBC’s new Topics pages, with The Guardian’s Keyword hierarchies. 

 

With the latter, you have to click through to a specific area in guardian.co.uk to see them.  See business for example, (with its subsections: Markets, Credit crunch, Economics, Interest rates etc.), in the local navigation across the top of the screen**.

Is the Telegraph up to no good?

Hmmm.

 

Last week The Telegraph ran a ‘review’ of ‘potential’ challengers to Google in online search.

 

The article has since raised one or two eyebrows in the online PR community – here.

‘Googlebombing’ Amazon: publishers get smart

So it seems even book publishers are getting in on the SEO game these days, according to this piece of speculation in today’s Torygraph.

Its frankly amazing (if true) that we are moving from a period in which librarians and archivists had to make the best of whatever information trickled through from publishers, to an era in which the very creation of fiction incorporates its ease of finding online.

Google falling apart at the seams: so where next?

Last week I posted something about what library catalogues can learn from commercial search engines, as the academic community struggles with getting academic information out to a generation of students used to using Google to answer all their problems.

Yet today I read a fascinating article about the future of search, suggesting in fact that its the commercial search engines who fall down in areas where the public library sector does well.