RSS feeds for search results

I did a web search for ‘RSS feeds for search results’ and found a Live Search blog entry dating from 1995 that talks about the alpha feature of providing RSS feeds from search results: just add ‘&format=rss’ to the URL of the results and copy the full URL into your RSS Reader.

This still works on the main Live search site and is made easier by just clicking on the orange RSS icon in the URL. Here’s the ‘RSSed’ URL for Flooding information from the UK government: http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=flooding+site%3agov.uk&format=rss

Very nifty, but interestingly, Live don’t seem to draw users’ attention to it or even provide information in Help.

Yahoo! offers the similar features to Live, with different syntax, but the RSS icon.

In contrast, Google only offers RSS feeds (RSS and Atom) for its news results but does publicise it clearly. Similarly, the BBC offers RSS of its news and sports results.

Other web search engines such as Ask, Exalead and Clusty do not appear to offer RSS at all.

Visibility of government information

“Yet government websites rarely fit the way that people actually use the internet. A Google search for ‘UK‘ ‘government’ ‘childhood’ ‘obesity’ and ‘“help’ brings up a site that links to some mildly interesting statistics, but the excellent ‘children and healthy weight’ page on directgov does not come up among the first 100 results.” says Edward Lucas in an Economist special report “Look it up on the web“

I’d comment on two fronts:

• If you search for his keywords on Google (searching the whole web) there are relevant Directgov results at #7 and #11 - although not the article he refers to, they are relevant results. A search on Google restricted to UK gives the same results at #5 and #6. From these pages you can get to the article he refers to.
• He seems, like many commentators, not to understand Directgov’s proposition to write content in the general public’s language. If you change the search to ‘UK government childhood weight’ or ‘children healthy weight’, the “Children and healthy weight” article comes top in whole web and UK. So the article is optimised for general language, rather than more official language.

Nevertheless, it is vital for government to recognise the importance of web search when citizens are looking for information and to start taking visibility in search engines seriously.

Search behaviour patterns

John Ferrara writes an excellent piece at Boxes and Arrows on designing for different Search behaviour patterns. He argues that the simple model of search; enter search term/get matching results/read and select ‘best’ result’ overlooks complex human behaviours and differing information needs according to many factors.

He lists six factors, among others, that influence search behavior:

1. Domain expertise
2. Search experience
3. Cognitive style (global thinkers <—-> analytical thinkers)
4. Goal type: navigational searches (to reach a particular location), informational searches (to seek out any documents relating to a topic), Transactional searches (to achieve something online)
5. Mode of searching - browsing and ‘berrypicking’
6. Situational idiosyncracies - search behavior may vary due to mood, workin context, time pressures etc.

Despite the wide variety of variables, Ferrara has observed six behaviour patterns that should be accommodated in design:

1. Alternating between search and browse - have robust cross-linking and hierarchical clues such as crumb trails
2. Minimizing the results set - let users filter search results by categories, include a numeric count of the total number of results and the total number for each category , use “and” as the default operator rather than “or,” so the number of results narrows instead of growing as the user adds more terms
3. Surveying quickly - ensure that result titles are comprehensible at a glance, including application files like PDFs, highlight the terms that match the words originally submitted, let users change the number of results shown per page
4. Making immediate judgments - optimise results for common queries and use best bets
5. Agonizing over the query - provide suggestions as user types, show ‘top’ searches, store user’s previous searches
6. Pogosticking - where user’s bounce around - clear titles and descriptions, show visited links on the results page and consider preview windows of the landing page

This is a really useful reference piece and I’d agree with nearly all of it, except “Highlighting the terms that match the words originally submitted to help people scan the titles and descriptions more easily.”