DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Following is an excerpt of a journal entry I attempted to write late last December, about a trip to St. Louis the previous week for my little sister’s wedding.

The rest of the weekend happened meal-to-meal. The only moments we weren’t eating, we were waiting for appetizers. We did take a long walk on Friday, but we were walking to a restaurant.

Here’s a typical fancy dinner entree in St. Louis: eighteen ounces of meat, and an asparagus spear. Vegetables are simply a garnish. I felt like I was back in Germany. Or, worse, Cincinnati.

My family, knowing my self-imposed dietary restrictions, made arrangements for vegetarian and vegan entrees whenever possible. Their good intentions were filtered through the limited capacity of local commercial kitchens: St. Louis chefs don’t know how to cook vegetarian meals. Wedding guests were served poached salmon and a pork chop, two small potatoes, and two or three pieces of garnish. My vegan plate, mercifully free of cheese sauce or other secretions of livestock, consisted of a scoop of bland white rice, a row of bland steamed garnish, and — salvation! — a grilled portobello. I’m not that fond of portobellos, but it was the best thing on the plate. Any portobello in a storm.

Ask Jeeves announced some keen new search technologies at Etech. The main new innovation, which comes from the founder of Teoma (which Ask.com acquired several years ago) won’t be online for two weeks, but it’s compelling: basing relevance rankings on clusters of expert communities rather than on inbound link-count (aka PageRank). It’s a mouthful of buzzwords but it may mean their results are better. Certainly it’s likely to mean the results for ambiguous queries are more diverse, e.g. a search for ‘apple’ should turn up both Apples and apples — which is not the case at Google today.

Jeeves’ new technology can’t be seen for a couple weeks on their text search, but can be seen on their image search. Compare Ask Jeeves’ image search results for John with Google’s image search results for John. The Google results shows a bunch of people you’ve never heard of, with one exception; the Jeeves results page shows Travolta, Elton, Wayne, Kennedy, Cassavettes, etc.

But this may be a corner case. I tried numerous other searches, both ambiguous (bread, cardinals) and not (herman miller aeron chair). Results in all cases were similar. Neither engine showed a picture of a shrub in a search for ‘bush.’

The promise is there, even if the implementation doesn’t yet fulfill the promise. It’s worth watching.

The Union of Concerned Scientists has prepared a print ad in response to the Auto Alliance’s recent ridiculous claim that modern cars are “virtually emissions free”, which I deconstructed last Wednesday.

The UCS weighs in with additional objections to the automakers’ misleading ad on their new Automakers vs. the People campaign.

Unfortunately, the UCS doesn’t have the budget of the big auto makers. Pronounce “money” as “reach.” Throw a few dollars their way by following the link at the bottom of the campaign page.

The A9 team at Amazon.com launched a new extension to their search engine, just in time for ETECH. Jeff Bezos announced it during this morning’s “High-Order Bits” presentations.

By default, A9.com’s search results contain three columns: web results, image results, and a button column that gives one-click access to other types of results, such as Movies and Books. These buttons provide functionality similar to the text links at the top of both Google’s and Yahoo’s results pages, which offer access to images, USENET, news, Yahoo’s directory, Froogal, etc.

A9 allows users to customize their search-result columns. Users can personalize their results pages to show the types of documents they’re most likely to be searching for. This is a cool thing, and will soon be a feature of every major search engine.

But the really cool announcement of the day is that developers can create their own A9 search columns. This allows what Bezos called “domain experts” to syndicate “vertical search” results. For example, I could build an A9 search-results column for debris.com, if in fact I’d written enough about a particular topic that merited a syndicated search feed to a major search engine.

There are already dozens of custom syndicated vertical-search result “columns” available, including the NYTimes, Flickr, PubMed, NASA, etc. I predict the number will grow very quickly, as site owners realize the value of putting their content in front of the eyeballs of A9 users.

In a sense, A9’s OpenSearch technology is like Apple’s Sherlock, which is a search technology that accepts plug-ins to provide vertical search results via syndication. Two key differences are that OpenSearch is built on open standards like RSS, and A9 is a website (available to 100% of web users) whereas Sherlock is a proprietary software product (available to ~5% of computer users).

See also Cory Doctorow’s notes: Bezos on vertical search and A9

The Bush Administration’s assault on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge continues. You can do one small thing to help save it: sign the Citizens’ RollCall to voice your dissent.

ANWR “talking points” from John Kerry:

• The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge’s 19 million acres comprise one of the last places on earth where an intact expanse of arctic and sub arctic lands remains protected.
• Drilling in the Arctic Refuge can’t make even a small dent in meeting America’s energy needs. U.S. Geological Survey scientists estimate that there is very likely only enough oil to supply America’s needs for six months. And oil companies admit that, even that, won’t be available for at least 10 years.
• An irreplaceable natural treasure, the Arctic Refuge is home to caribou, polar bears, grizzly bears, wolves, golden eagles, snow geese and more. Millions of other birds use the Arctic Refuge to nest and as a critical staging area on their migratory journeys.
• Of course, the Arctic Refuge supports more than wildlife. For a thousand generations, the Gwich’in people of Northeast Alaska and Northwest Canada have depended on it and lived in harmony with it. To them, the Arctic Coastal Plain is sacred ground.

See also my previous entries about ANWR.