[Web4lib] Would an open source Best Bets tool be useful for libraries?

[Ryan Eby]

I think there would likely be some interest. At Code4Lib this year
there were actually two presentations by Tito Sierra of NCSU about
search results. He's doing some best bets but also some experiments
with harvested information from course catalogs (using terms
associated with courses to recommend subject guides). There seemed to
be some interest in the crowd. He's using OpenSearch to make it easier
to use the results on various search pages. Might be something to look
at.

You can watch his 5 minute lightning talk on best bets here:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5085478982072668046

The 20 minute presentation on subjects is here:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4112732280122923177

You can also download the videos from the conference page (MP4's under
a CC license):

http://code4lib.org/2007/schedule

I can also confirm that the MSU best bets have been useful, although
I'm not sure how many from submissions versus search logs.

Ryan Eby

On 3/16/07, Richard Wiggins <richard.wiggins at gmail.com> wrote:
> Lou Rosenfeld and I are working on a book on search analytics.  The first
> chapter of the book describes how I fell into search analytics and the Best
> Bets / search analytics paradigm.  With Best Bets, if someone searches your
> home page for "library hours" or "special collections" or "newspaper
> database" or "JSTOR" you guarantee that the search gives "the" best hit at
> the top of the hit list, because you manually edited the entry into your
> database.
>
> You choose the entries you put in the Best Bets database by analyzing your
> search logs.  You take the top 1000 or so popular searches and you hand-code
> links from each search phrase to the best URLs.
>
> See
> http://www.rosenfeldmedia.com/books/searchanalytics/content/sample_chapter
> for a sample chapter about analytics and Best Bets.
>
> I'm posting to ask if a free Best Bets tool would be of use to libraries in
> general, and research/university libraries in particular.  There are lots of
> alternatives.  Some libraries might make their catalog the default search,
> and insert the Best Bet URLs into the catalog.  Others might use Google
> Appliance. or Ultraseek, or the new Yahoo / IBM Omnifind free search engine
> (up to 500,000 pages), all of which have Best Bets features.  Others might
> use faceted or federated search tools they've implemented.
>