Digital Biographer™

This article was originally written for The Next Web Blog and appeared on Saturday, 17th January 2009.

Today, we found out that Google, where search is the core of its business, have added a link to new experimental features to its home page, which show options that can be added to the ‘standard’ search.

The most dramatic of these is probably ‘Alternate views for search results‘ which, due to its nature, gives you different search results and rankings in different views of the same search query. So Search Experts take note: Page 1 of Google now has at least four different results!. Your site can be #1 in one type of search, but be invisible in others.

The standard Google search results page now also has “News about search term” appended to your search results as you can see below.

Google’s New ‘Alternate View’ Search Types

It is worth taking a look at this new feature for searches that include:-

• Search Results in Timelines [try this]
• Search Results on Maps [try this]
• Search Results in ‘Info Views’ which allow further refinement ‘on the fly’ [try this]
• One-click returns you to ‘Standard’ List View

You can obtain these views immediately using the standard google search interface by adding “view:map” “view:timeline” or “view info” following your search term – so rather than a search for ‘the next web’ you search for “the next web view:timeline”.

I’d recommend you check out these new search views, and also ensure that your site’s metadata is structured to ensure you appear in these new formats of search results.

There are also three other experimental search features at present –

• SearchWiki with sound – when you remove a result from your personal results, toy can have a sound effect play along with the animation whenever you remove a result. The sound is recorded by Google co-founder Sergey Brin.
• Keyboard shortcuts – use your keyboard to navigate results – so J Selects the next result, K Selects the previous result, etc.
• Accessible View – As you navigate, items are magnified for easier viewing. If you use a screen reader or talking browser, the relevant information is spoken automatically as you navigate.

Google continues to innovate and to develop its search technology, and in my view these new experimental features show that it’s still the very best at delivering search results. It’s also a wake-up call for you to ensure that the information on your web pages is given proper semantic structure – or meaning – because that will be a crucial differentiatiator as the amount of data online increases.

(Screen shots created by David Petherick using plasq‘s Skitch)

‘Keeber-biograph‘, meaning Cyber-Biographer.

This is a term I came across today when searching through Yandex, the Russian search engine that’s been in the news recently, and which is rightly proud of the fact that, thanks to them, Russia is one of only four countries where Google is not the significantly dominant search engine.

The term came up in a blog by Maya Kim, in the context of an article by Steve Rubel entitled ‘Three Emerging Digital Careers to Watch‘ and I was interested to see that only one of the three terms Steve had used had been expanded and given further clarification using English terms in the context of a Russian blog.

Steve’s Term of Super Cruncher was unchanged, and Chief Customer Experience Officer was simply translated into Russian as ‘Head of the Department of Quality Service for Clients’. But his term ‘Digital Storytellers’ was translated into Russian as ‘Cyber-Biographer’, and also expanded to include the English terms ‘digital storyteller, cyberspace concierge, blog butler, ghost blogger, digital biographer‘.

I recall the terms ‘Cyber Concierge’, ‘Blog Butler’ and ‘Ghost Blogger’ were used when BBC News 24 wrote about my work over a year ago, but I was surprised, and quite delighted, to find this reference being made. (For those of you who may not be aware of the fact, I speak fairly good Russian.)

I like the term Digital Storyteller – it’s a good description of some elements of my work. But I still think that ‘biographer’ is closer to describing things accurately:

biography

noun ( pl. -phies)
an account of someone’s life written by someone else.
• writing of such a type as a branch of literature.
• a human life in its course : although their individual biographies are different, both are motivated by a similar ambition.