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Google enhances search results to include page sections in snippets

Google announced yesterday that they’ve enhanced their search results page to include page sections of long pages in the snippets area. Here is an example they’ve given.

The rationale is that we can do directly to a section in the page if that’s what we’re interested in. That’s a nice idea—it’s an attempt at auto-indexing the page using page sections. It provides more information on the page, assuming that the page sections are labeled properly.

But what’s really interesting that is the fact that this is another opportunity to reveal sequence, like in a table of contents. Showing a sequence in a page really gets to the guts of what the page is all about. Google already shows a sitemap in the search results, which gets to what a site is all about.

Now the only thing Google needs to figure out is how to reveal sequence across pages and sites. So for example, if I were to search for “diabetes” then I should get a sequence that links to different pages and sites and the sequence includes what is diabetes to treatments to living with a diabetic to home remedies. Guess that was what the Knol was supposed to do.

information architecture, taxonomy, google Add tag Permalink | Saturday, September 26, 2009

Creating user-centered taxonomies

James Kelway from User Pathways tackles the creation and use of navigational taxonomies.

"This two-part article is a step-by-step guide for those wishing to create new taxonomies for their business unit or client. It will outline the many different elements that make up a quality taxonomy and the pitfalls you should be aware of when starting a new project."

Part 1, Part 2

taxonomy Add tag Permalink | Thursday, September 25, 2008

Better Living Through Taxonomies

Heather Hedden writes about taxonomies for Digital Web Magazine:

"It goes without saying, then, that developing a good hierarchical structure is important for creating a well-designed and easy to navigate website. By understanding the fundamentals and best practices of taxonomy development, web designers and information architects can design better websites. This involves knowing whether concepts or topics are indeed of a broader-narrower (parent-child) relationship and not merely an associated relationship. A concept can be narrower to another concept only if it is a kind of, instance of, or part of the broader concept."

taxonomy Add tag Permalink | Thursday, February 07, 2008

Taxonomy Warehouse

This website, maintained by Factiva, provides a collection of taxonomies that can be reused.

"We are the only site on the Internet dedicated to taxonomies for corporations. Get the information you need to effectively categorize internal and external data collections and ensure users find the information they need with speed and precision."

taxonomy Add tag Permalink | Wednesday, October 25, 2006

How to Kill a Knowledge Environment with a Taxonomy

Patrick Lambe has written a post on aiming for a balance when it comes to taxonomy and folksonomy and he does so by referencing Jane Jacobs's "The death and life of great American cities":

"The task of the taxonomist or information architect is not to provide absolute consistency and standardization, maximum tidiness, and complete information efficiency. Optimizing efficiency in a complex system, as Jacobs noted in regard to cities, destroys the resilience of that system and its capacity to adapt to new circumstances. So the task of the taxonomist or information architect is not to optimize efficiency, but to optimize effectiveness, and that always means sub-optimal efficiency. Consistency and standardization must be sufficient for effectiveness and the meeting or your goals and no more than sufficient."

taxonomy Add tag Permalink | Thursday, October 12, 2006

Defining “Taxonomy”

Patrick Lambe has written a nice article on taxonomy. He describes 3 characteristics of useful taxonomies:

A taxonomy is a form of classification scheme
Taxonomies are semantic
A taxonomy is a kind of knowledge map

[Disclaimer: My company PebbleRoad designed both his corporate website as well as his blog, Green Chameleon. I will write an in-depth article on using a simple CMS to manage both corporate information as well as fluid information such as blogs.]

taxonomy Add tag Permalink | Wednesday, April 26, 2006

The corporate taxonomy: creating a new order

Introductory look at corporate taxonomies: "A simple definition of a taxonomy is that it is a hierarchy of categories used to classify documents and other information. A corporate taxonomy is a way of representing the information available within an enterprise."

taxonomy Add tag Permalink | Thursday, August 12, 2004

Metadata? Thesauri? Taxonomies? Topic Maps!

"Topic maps are a relative newcomer to this area and bring with them the promise of better-organized web sites, compared to what is possible with existing techniques. However, it is not generally understood how topic maps relate to the traditional techniques, and what advantages and disadvantages they have, compared to these techniques. The aim of this paper is to help build a better understanding of these issues." [Thanks ColumnTwo]

taxonomy, metadata Add tag Permalink | Thursday, March 25, 2004

TaxonomyStrategies: Bibliography of resources

Nice list of resources covering Information Architecture, Information Management, Taxonomy, Knowledge Management, etc.

taxonomy Add tag Permalink | Monday, March 01, 2004

Transform Magazine: Putting it Together: Taxonomy, Classification & Search

This article tries to make the argument that having a taxonomy, classifying documents into the taxonomy, and having a search function to mine through both is a necessity for large intranets.

intranets, taxonomy Add tag Permalink | Wednesday, September 17, 2003

theOtherMedia: Why you need your very own taxonomy

theOtherMedia: Why you need your very own taxonomy
"Making a taxonomy is an act of communication. They basically capture an essence of the knowledge that resides in your organization. A conceptual short-hand overview that describes what's important and how things you are interested in relate to each other. Creating a taxonomy, like anything that worthwhile can be hard work, time-consuming and require considerable domain expertise and creativity."

taxonomy Add tag Permalink | Tuesday, March 18, 2003

Metamodel: What are the differences between a vocabulary, a taxonomy, a thesaurus, an ontology, and

Metamodel: What are the differences between a vocabulary, a taxonomy, a thesaurus, an ontology, and a meta-model?
"This excellent overview was contributed by Woody Pidcock of the Boeing company. Many organizations and companies are struggling with these terms and the ideas behind them; this set of definitions will help to clarify."

taxonomy Add tag Permalink | Thursday, March 06, 2003

Montague Institute: Ten taxonomy myths

Montague Institute: Ten taxonomy myths
"Taxonomies have recently emerged from the quiet backwaters of biology, book indexing, and library science into the corporate limelight. They are supposed to be the silver bullets that will help users find the needle in the intranet haystack, reduce "friction" in electronic commerce, facilitate scientific research, and promote global collaboration. But before this can happen, practitioners need to dispel the myths and confusion, created in part by the multi-disciplinary nature of the task and the hype surrounding content management technologies."

taxonomy Add tag Permalink | Monday, December 09, 2002

ERCIM: Extended Faceted Taxonomies for Web Catalogs

ERCIM: Extended Faceted Taxonomies for Web Catalogs
"A faceted taxonomy is actually a set of taxonomies, called facets, each of which is a set of terms structured by a specialisation/generalisation relation. Using a faceted taxonomy, the indexing of objects is done by associating each object with a compound term, ie with a combination of terms coming from different facets. It was recognised long ago that a faceted taxonomy has several advantages over a single hierarchical taxonomy, including conceptual clarity, compactness and scalability."

taxonomy Add tag Permalink | Monday, December 02, 2002

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