Outgoing

Quick searching -- the movie

When the new version of Google desktop came out a couple of weeks ago I thought it would be interesting to see whether there was some way a bibliographic file could be integrated with it for quick searching, somewhat akin to how Art Rhyno is trying to make his library's catalog part of the PC environment.

I took the 3,000,000 records we exposed to Yahoo (each of which is the most commonly held record for the top three million works in WorldCat) and indexed all of the common phrases (up to five words) in the author, title, and subject headings.  This results in an index that can fit into main memory, along with a short citation from each record.  This is up under a Web server, and as you type the results are displayed.  The citations link into Open WorldCat, so you can locate the item, see subject headings, and other editions.

I didn't really get to any integration with Google Desktop, as I started exploring the possibilities of quick response from a web server, but the index is quite compact so there's still the possibility of doing that with the indexes, although a fast web service would probably be easier to integrate.

We don't have a public version of this yet, so I made a movie.  Using Windows Media Encoder 9 (free from Microsoft and I only had to reboot my machine 6 times before I got it all installed and working).  It probably should be done slower and really needs a voice-over explaining what is happening, but I thought I'd put it up here and get some reactions.  The format is Windows Media Video (WMV).  Hope that doesn't stop too many people from viewing it.  Suggestions for more appropriate formats are welcome.

We're not sure where this approach to bibliographic search is going, but I find the almost instantaneous feedback to be so compelling that I can't stop working on it.

Thanks to Lance Osborne who helped with screen design (well, he really did the whole thing).  Also thanks to Cliff Snyder who wrote the JavaScript which watches for pauses in typing.

--Th

AJAX and standards

The initial impetus for changing to AJAX for Web applications is to improve the user experience by avoiding screen refreshes and increasing the speed of interaction.  Another benefit, however, is that others can take the services your application is built on and build new ones.  I reported earlier on an experiment by Mike Teets with Google maps.  His first prototype broke after two days because Google changed something in their implementation.  This is the sort of thing that an implementation based on standard protocols would help avoid.

Although one of the basic techniques in AJAX is to use a JavaScript method called XMLHttpRequest, the applications I've looked at don't use XML at all (contrary to what the current Wikipedia entry would have you believe).  I wanted to try something like Google suggest for the VIAF project and wondered if it is possible to do that in standards-based way.