Search Enhancements, March 2009
Apr 14th, 2009 by sharbrough
Aye Aye Captain
One other change in the search experience is the use of a black panel with white type, that goes with the EU Banner. Any time you refine your search, you’ll see that box, with a message such as “Narrowing your results by including Title or Collection: Social Security Death Index” or “Broadening your search by removing Title or Collection: Social Security Death Index.”
I hear the talk on the bridge of the submarine.
Make your depth 150.
Depth 150. Aye.
Come to course 270.
Course 270. Aye.
It fills the time. And the time needs filling. Search result pages at Footnote are “heavy.” I mentioned earlier that search designers try to anticipate the path that users will take through the search to the information they seek. One of the ways that designers allow for this is to load the page with information that you might need next. So they search through the surnames, and produce a list showing how many of the results have each surname. This takes extra computation. Any time that we add extra work to the preparation of a page, we say that the page is “heavier.”
Some times I feel like a heavy result, and some times I don’t. I like the way it works here, because I want the flexibility more than I want the speed (and I am just childish enough to imagine a kind of McHale’s Navy thing with the EU Logos).
If I have keyword “George Bush”, surname “Bush”, and Title “Social Security Death Index” I will see 425 matches. In the search refinement box, if I click on STATE, a panel opens showing the 48 states found in the 425 matches, listed in descending order of frequency. A click on PLACE produces the message that there are more than 100 places to choose from, and no list is given. If I begin to type a place, such as Houston, typing the “H” will produce a list of the 19 places that begin with H in the 425 results I have (no frequencies are shown in this type of result list).
From there, I can see that two people named George Bush last resided in Houston. I can see their birthdates and deathdates, too.
It’s fairly easy to narrow a search for a common name. In this example, we were able to beat the bushes and turn 450,000 matches into one submarine report, and two SSDI records.
Wrap It Up
Oh, and if searching for information about George Bush #41 doesn’t interest you, consider searching for his father. Senator Prescott Bush is often credited with standing up to the McCarthy Commission. S search for “Prescott Bush” gives 4663 matches. Refining by surname Bush gives 46 matches from 8 titles, including his SSDI record. Notice that we lost 4606 newspaper matches when we chose the last name.
If you want to search newspapers, you’ll probably do better if you stick to keywords. If I search the 4606 newspapers for the keyword “prescott bush” with quotation marks around the name, I get 12 hits. “Prescott S. Bush” gets 10 matches.
Presidential Relations
John Adams was father to John Adams Jr (2) was grandfather to John Quincy Adams (6).
Benjamin Harrison, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, was father to William Henry Harrison (9) and great-grandfather to Benjamin Harrison (23).
Prescott Bush was father of George Bush (41) and grandfather of George Bush (43).
Teddy (26) and Frank Roosevelt (32) were related, but not closer than 5th cousins. Teddy was Eleanor Roosevelt’s uncle. These guys were also related to Martin Van Buren (8) and Zachary Taylor (12).
George Haworth descendents include Presidents Taft, Pierce, Hoover (31) and Richard Nixon (37). Hoover gets a raw deal in pop history. The man fed a billion people, and is remembered for an economic event that was more like weather than it was like bad performance. Nice dam, though.
Wikipedia has a detailed list of related US Presidents, but if you want the straight stuff, you should just ask Gary Boyd Roberts.
