Visual Search Implications:

1.       “Millennials” visual search orientation

2.       Copyright Concerns

3.       Beyond Mainstream Searching

1. Marketing the Millennials – Patricia Duck & Randi Koeske[1]

Millennials          1981-2000            29% of population (Boomers also 29%)[2]

-having grown up in an era of TV & video games,

                -bored with sequential tasks

                -short attention spans

Over 50% of respondents in a 2003 library survey at University of Pittsburgh felt that DB’s were confusing or difficult to use. Seemed to confirm that although millennials are technologically savvy, their visual orientation and short attention spans may hinder their efforts in doing research.

Implications for Academic Information Services: leverage Google search popularity towards a simple search experience. Factiva and EBSCO have responded. (EBSCO Visual Search & Factiva Search 2.0)

2. Legal/Copyright Concerns – William Fisher & Dequan Wang[3]

Deep Linking     

-Under some circumstances, a link may undermine the rights/interests of a “target” site.

e.g  “X” has a homepage with advertisements (from which “X” hopes to make money)

 “Y’’ ‘s search engine links to “X” ’s subordinate pages (deep linking)to pages containing images that have been indexed by a crawler and put in an image data base. ….a searcher can gain access to “X” ‘s material without going to the homepage where the advertisements are placed.

1999: Kelly versus Ditto – ruling – Plaintiff had shown no evidence of any harm or adverse impact from the Defendant’s activity.

A robots.txt.file – recognized standard used to stop search engines from crawling a website. (de facto automatic copyright notice for spiders).

The question is:

Should website owners have to employ technical solutions before they seek legal redress?

3. Beyond Mainstream Searching – Ron Miller[4]

Greg Notess of Notess.com (website on search engine research) says

- visual search engines still face bandwidth issues.

Danny Sullivan, editor of searchenginewatch.com says

– people are used to getting search results in a certain way – when you change that it throws people off

Both think visual SEs have a place outside of mainstream searching as a research tool. Where there’s data that needs to be plotted in a certain way, make it come up graphically.

Example: Inxight Software

-          helps a user find and use business information that is locked-up in unstructured sources such as web pages, email, and datasets

-          various products that allow dynamic exploration of

·         relationships/correlations

·         trends/patterns

·         timelines

through visual orientation of large information collections of structured and unstructured data.

One of their products: Timewall

http://www.inxight.com/products/sdks/tw/

·         users can see patterns over long time horizons as well as focussing in on a particular time segment. Filters (numeric, geographic, categorical) can narrow down the information.

·         Can analyze past activities for cause-effect correlation to develop new predictive theories. E.g. Terrorism, disease, criminal activity