Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

Now this is neat.

The latest version of Windows Live Search for Mobile adds speech recognition - so if you're somewhere you can't type your search, all you need to do is speak it. I've been trying it out on some of the harder items to recognise, especially words with sibilants - and was impressed that it handled both "Cinema" and "Sushi" first time.



Of course map search is a relatively closed domain, so the range of terms that are going to be used is small (and most queries are going to be single words or short phrases). That means that it's going to be easier to build an effective recogniser, but even so, this is running on a low powered mobile device. It's not even one of this year's phones...

Well worth a try if you're using Windows Mobile 5 or 6.

[Update: Speech recognition is done on the server, not the device. That makes more sense - all the device needs to do is encode the speech and send it back to the server - a much lower power job. The servers can be as powerful as you like...]

I'm helping marypcb work on a Tom's Hardware piece on mobile mapping software. As it's for an international audience she needs to be able to show some US specific features, like the traffic tools. That's fine with Google Maps for Mobile or Yahoo! Go - both have one installer for wherever you are in the world, and you can map US traffic from the UK quite happily.

Unfortunately there are two different versions of Windows Live Search for Mobile. One US, with traffic data, and a UK version for the rest of the world, without. It doesn't matter which version you try to download, the site will download one standard installer no matter which country you select.

The first time the application runs, it checks the device location, and if you're not using a US phone it gives you the Rest of the World version. You can be in the US with a UK device and you won't be able to get the traffic data - so you could get stuck on an LA freeway without knowing how to escape the jam. Now Microsoft rarely makes two binaries where one will do, so I suspected that what we were seeing was something in the application configuration. I first used a mobile device registry inspector to see if the application was using the registry.

It wasn't. So it was time to pour through the Windows Mobile file system to see if there was anything there. There was. Sat right next to the application executable was a preferences.xml file. I copied it across to my desktop, and had a look through with an XML-aware text editor. The file contained some canned searches, details of most of my last few searches, as well as some slightly less obvious sections. In one, <R>, was the text GB. I changed it to US, and put the file back on the mobile device.

I reopened Windows Live Search. Bingo! The traffic option was now available, and I could see the state of the LA rush hour. At least I won't get stuck on that stretch of 110...

Over at IT Pro I've been writing about Danyel Fisher's "How we watch the city" paper. It's a fascinating look at how we can use geographical search data to see how places grab our attention. I'm becoming more and more fascinated by the idea of "attention", and how we can work with collections of attention data. I suspect it's going to become one of the key approaches to understanding interaction context.

I've been reading a fascinating paper by Danyel Fisher, of Microsoft Research. He's one of the folk behind the SNARF email triage tool, and is currently looking at how people use online maps.

"How we watch the City" is surprisingly beautiful (in the way many computer-mediated visualisations are). To show how people and searches gravitate to specific places he's created an application that draws a heat map over Microsoft's Virtual Earth, letting him zoom into the "hottest" searches, bright clusters that illuminate the virtual space of the search engine. With access to the services search logs, he can show just how searches relate to geography.

Here's one of his images, a look at how map searches of Las Vegas focus on the Strip.



Our eyes are bright in the digital world.

Or perhaps we do.

Here's Google's library of more than 600 new search buttons you can add to the newly customisable Google browser toolbar. There's a nice selection of reference sources, and buttons that'll search many other search engines.

Useful...

..at least in the web advertising space. I just spotted a Google Adwords advertisement for MSN Search...



You know you've won when the competition sees you as the best way of getting to their target audience.

I still don't think Google advertising is an adequate substitute for a business model...

I have something of a love/hate relationship with desktop search tools.

They're something I need - often desperately, but I just can't get on with their user interfaces. They're all the same, just variations on the old folder view. If I wanted that, I'd be using Vista's library views or spending my time working with Mac OS X's Spotlight. Instead, I'm after something that will find contextual links between my various emails and documents, and help me find the most relevant file.

Blinkx comes close to doing what I want, but that final step is a gaping chasm, and "almost" is worse than "not at all". So at the moment I'm using an unholy mix of Lookout and Yahoo! Desktop Search. Two tools that together give me a semblance of what I'm after. But I'm considering dropping them both for Windows Desktop Search, thanks to PHLAT.

PHLAT is a new interface for Windows Desktop Search (enabling search through a user's own email, files, and viewed web pages). PHLAT lets you easily specify queries and filters, attempting to integrate search and browse in one intuitive interface. In addition, Phlat supports a unified tagging (labeling) scheme for organizing personal content across storage systems (files, email, etc.).

It's the closest I've seen to the UI I want - and it gives me the ability to add my own tag-based folksonomy to my files, providing me with my own metadata for my own files. Worth giving a spin, I think...

...or at least Scoble's little blogsearch experiment...

If you run a search engine, here's an idea for free.

I like being able to search the web - for web pages, for map information, for local information. It's become a default action for me, I keep wireless PCs in all the rooms of the house, and my phone has Google bookmarked and ready to use wherever I am. I can concoct search queries that get me to the information I want quickly and easily, avoiding paid search results and catalogue aggregation sites. Boolean search logic is just another language now. However, sometimes I'd like to search by date.

This is where the utopia of the search engine suddenly comes to a screaming halt.

Yesterdaymarypcb and I were planning a US trip (which is starting to look like it will fill most of March). As we were using the British Airways sale to book tickets, flights were limited - and the longer we stayed, the better the deal. So I tried to see if there were any interesting events we could visit whilst we were over.

And that's where everything fell apart.

Could I get a search term to let me know if there where any conferences we could visit? No matter how I tweaked the search terms I kept getting the same list that I had to page through to track down the information I needed. I couldn't sort it, filter it, or even tune the search.

The trouble is: search engines don't really like you trying to look for date ranges. A search term like "technology conference march 2006" doesn't really mean anything to Google. You'll get lots of results, but nothing to help you order results by date or by location. Date-based searching is as important as location-based search (and the two combine together very well indeed). As more and more people use, and rely on, search engines, the queries they use will become more and more complex.

Of course there are issues with the semantics of date (let alone with date formatting). Are you asking for web pages created on a certain date, or containing information about that date? Are you specifying a date range, or are you looking for a specific date? These are complex questions - and I wonder if they're the reason why the oft-rumoured Google Calendar is yet to appear.

Microformats are one approach that could help here. Technorati has defined hCalendar as a web page-embedded XML-tagged equivalent for the familiar iCalendar format, which would allow search engines to build arrays of calendar data for search that could be linked to web content. Alternatively iCalendar-driven calendars are appearing all over the web. Apple's iCal uses the format to publish web calendars to .Mac , as does Outlook and the new calendar tool in Windows Vista - and there are plenty of open source iCalendar servers, as well as desktop calendaring applications that can handle iCalendar data.

What's to stop these tools being used to ping a date registry when calendar information is posted in a public space?

So, Apple, Microsoft, Technorati, Google, FAST, Yahoo! and MSN, get together and give us time-based search. The UI doesn't really matter (though a calendar grid would work really well for drill down), as long as we can sort results by date...

My friends at Eurekster have launched their Swicki search tool today.

It's a small search engine portal with a tagcloud (they call it a buzzcloud) that you can can customise, and then embed in a web page. What's really neat is that in customising a Swicki tag cloud you actually tune the search. I set one up on my other blog during the beta, which I focussed on SOA.

I found it easier to use (and install in my blog's template HTML) than Google's options - and by searching with a Swicki you add new tags to the cloud, and change the size of the tags based on the number of relevant queries and their usage. The idea is that the community that builds around a site or a blog builds and trains the search engine through their search actions. It's the logical extension of the collaborative search ranking engine that Eurekster have built.

Now, if they can get blog hosting services like LJ to support Swickis...

Oh, and they're based out of two of my favourite places.

...site of the day. Possible, the week, the month or even the year.

Just send it on when someone asks you a stupid question...