Clay

Adding a Social Networking Twist To Searching for Chocolate on the Internet

user image 2008-02-04
By: Clay Gordon
Posted in:
If you look across the navigation tabs, you'll see that I have moved the search widget from the left-hand column after the Latest Activity section to its own page. I did this to speed up page loads.. The widget searches for text, images, and videos related to chocolate and aggregates them all on one page of search results.

What makes this widget cool is that I get to train it by specifying sites that are related to chocolate and giving it keywords that define the "tag cloud" or "buzz cloud." And you can help me train the widget.

You can help make this THE best chocolate search widget on the Internet by:

  • Rating the search results. When you use the widget you get to cote on the relevance of the search results. If you see a result that does not pertain to the topic of your search, give it a NO vote. If you find a page that really does a good job of answering your search request, give it a YES vote.
  • Suggesting a word for the tag cloud. Not all the words I have entered are displayed, but feel free to recommend anyway. Add your suggestions as a comment to this post.
  • Suggesting a "model" site. You don't get to see these, but the widget enables me to select sites that are related to chocolate and the search engine uses those to help determine the relevancy of the results. If you know of a really good site about chocolate that might not be well-known, add your suggestion as a comment to this post.
At the moment, the use of the search widget is supported by advertising that is displayed on the results pages. As with the ads that are displayed on this site, once it gets to the point that this is a really useful and well-used capability, I will take the site and the search widget "private" and get rid of the ads. Until then, I hope you will understand that this is a necessary evil during the early stages of the development of this site.

Have fun!

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