Topix’ Innovation Both Narrows and Deepens Basic News Search
Important Details: Recency/Relevance. Relevance/Recency.
Tired of the toggle? The ubiquitous search box has seeped into our collective consciousness. Though it often produces inadequate results and endless lists, users are now conditioned to entering the words and perusing the lists. Users are usually offered, but seldom use, one choice at the top of the page: Recency/Relevance.
Recency is the default – we all like to be current. But it’s often a rough, rough cut. Relevance sounds good, but often seems to incorporate a sense of currency poorly, if at all. Of course, all users want is something that’s fairly current and fairly relevant. Current technology – or at least user interface into it – doesn’t seem to be providing it.
Enter Topix.net with an advance in the field.
Check out the new “click-o-gram” on Topix news search pages. Sure, it could have a name that would be more whimsical – the Time Machine? – or more specific, but the histogram widget is a simple move forward. It takes a search term and applies it against the past year of results. Pick a month and the results start with that month and then work backward from there.
We tried out a “Barry Bonds” search. Sure enough the full results produced a plethora of stories, all along the lines of the recency or relevance choices. But when a month was chosen, in this case March, (when the San Francisco Chronicle writers’ "Game of Shadows" book was published), search results narrowed considerably. No surprise there: the technology in effect narrows relevance with some sense of timeline. So it’s a tool that moves search forward, reducing some frustration and providing a bit more control for users.
Of course, the click-o-gram wouldn’t work well without a deeper archive, which is the other part of Topix’ announcement. Topix now routinely exposes a year’s worth of indexed archives from its 10,000 sources, including blogs. So in picking a point six months back, users can get at lots of content. In the Barry Bonds search results, we expected to run into lots of “404 page not found” errors and pay walls, prodding users to check out publishers’ paid archives. The results did contain both, but relatively few. While newspaper site results were most likely to erect such walls or return such errors, there were a surprising number of broadcast (WTOP.com) sites, league (MLB) sites, vertical (FoxSports) sites, and international (Taipei Times) sites that returned results that were good enough.
With similar “Barry Bonds” searches on Google and Yahoo!, it was more difficult to get to a greater choice of results as quickly, if at all. Those two sites and most others specialize in the here and now, meaning today, days, maybe weeks. Their time horizons may soon expand.
Two other related Topix innovations stand out. One allows users to toggle on and choose either blog content or news content (default is both). The other new choice at the top of the search page is de-duplication – although it’s not clear how much impact that has on top search results. Topix has been working with The Associated Press – a prime source of duplicated material as its licensed content cascades through thousands of Web sites. Now Topix looks like it has extended de-duping farther, and that’s a potential plus for all users tired of hacking through 87 “related stories” without a machete.
In Outsell’s Opinion: It’s good to see some innovation in basic news search. Outsell’s own research has indicated a rising frustration in basic search. As Google and Yahoo! gallop ahead in the paid search sweepstakes, users need a better free search experience. It reminds us that the Web is about small as much as it is about big, and that the Topixes of this world have an important place in innovation.
For publishers, Topix’ new one-year archive is further reason to consider how best to maximize the value of their archives. As consumers find more free archival content – content that may not be “as good as” but is “good enough,” publishers and their archive partners like NewsBank and ProQuest must put their heads together to profit from search innovation.
For traditional aggregators like LexisNexis, Dialog, and Factiva, the offering of a one-year archive is likely to send a chill down their spines. Sure, they are in the business of providing premium news and information with premium tools. But as the age of free, good-enough information ravages traditional publishing, aggregators, too, must rethink their positions in the marketplace and their products.