A true story from Troop 14 at Camp Oljato in summer 2007.
As the Scouts were getting ready for bed, I heard a yell from inside one of the tents, followed by some scuffling and “Mr. Underwood, I think we have a problem!” I asked what sort of problem, but just heard more muffled thumps, then things quieted down. “Did you take care of it?” “It was a nickel.”
As I reconstructed it, the Scout slid into his sleeping bag and his bare foot touched a cold nickel. I’m not sure what he thought it was, but it scared him. He jumped out and stomped the nickel until it wasn’t dangerous.
I’m just glad it wasn’t a quarter.
Amidst the usual creative spellings and phonetic thrashing around (“napolinian dynomite”) that I see in the search logs, I’ve noticed a small but distinctive subclass of searcher behavior. People type as much as they are sure of then, instead of making a mistake, they stop typing and submit the fragment to the search engine. Said that way, it kinda makes sense, but search algorithms are tuned for complete, if imperfect, attempts instead of exact prefixes.
Here are some selected examples from logs.
The “coonskin” query may seem bizarre, but that is exactly what phonetic search is tuned to solve. Unfortunately, people don’t seem to be that brave or that deluded. Querying for “mimsy” instead of “mimzy” is a typical, supported phonetic match.
The Koyaanisqatsi example is the one that tipped me to this other behavior, with additional evidence from Frank Gehry and Baron Munchausen. Note how they get the double-“a” in Koyaanisqatsi, but freak out at the “q” not followed by “u”. They are almost there, then punt because they are not sure what to type next.
Is this behavior learned from auto-completion, from texting completion, or is it caused by our reluctance to make mistakes? Maybe it doesn’t matter, since I need to help these folks regardless.
This is probably best addressed with auto-completion, not matching in the engine.
Marc Siry posts about Job Descriptions from the Future: Director of Metadata, but it sure sounds like a cataloging librarian to me. Here are the key parts of the job description:
A 1200 word post on managing metadata with no mention of librarians. It looks like NBC Universal is going to be reinventing a lot of stuff. To reword Isaac Newton’s famous comment, this is standing on the toes of giants, not their shoulders.