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The following speech notes were compiled by Lyn Amidon amidon@stevms.enet.dec.com, based on a presentation Richard Seltzer delivered to Digital Shared Engineering Services organization in Littleton, MA, September 12, 1997.
Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim electronic copies of this script for non-commercial purposes provided this permission notice is preserved on all copies. All other rights, including print publication and delivery of speeches for profit based on this material, are reserved. To correspond with Richard Seltzer, send email to: seltzer@samizdat.com
These notes attempt to flesh out the slides Richard used, which were sometimes just shorthand reminders of what he wanted to say.
The actual slides can be found at:
Social Web http://www.samizdat.com/oak/atitle.htm
AltaVista http://www.samizdat.com/ses/title.htm (with live links to pre-constructed AltaVista searches) or http://www.samizdat.com/brazil/title.htm (with local links for the examples)
A few disclaimers and suggestions:
o The talk on the Social Web was longer so notes on it are more complete than notes on the AltaVista Search. In both cases, we had to skip parts of the presentation because of time.
o Some slides are repeated between the two talks
o Some of the actual slides, (especially in the AltaVista Search Revolution) include links to AltaVista searches that explain the process better than any annotation could. In these notes, these links are shown as bold, underlined text.
Lyn
Richard Seltzer, Internet Evangelist
Richard hosts a weekly chat - Business Opportunities on the Web - The chat takes place at http://www.web-net.org on Thursdays from 12 noon to 1 PM Eastern Time. The edited transcripts are available at http://www.samzidat.com/#chat .
He is also the author of a book, the AltaVista Revolution, which describes how to make sure your web site is visible to web browsers, particularly AltaVista.
Richard urges everyone to create personal web pages as a test ground using free internet space from Web providers. This would allow us to test ideas that we could not test in a controlled corporate environment.
Richard says "Much of what I am saying is heresy. Carry on the dialog and push the company in the right direction. Brand is not a logo (graphics). It is what people think of your company."
What is Unique (about the WEB)?
Originally, the Web connected document to document. Now the Web connects people to documents. But more importantly, the social web connect people to people, creating online communities.
Web community model - Welcome to Oz, a world with different dynamics
Gravity is in the middle, enabling the creation of the social web.
Expect unintended results
Many individuals with their own sense of direction, colliding
What's going on ?
These are great concepts, but nothing is happening.
Escalating Web-site operating costs - The average cost of a commercial site is $1 million per year. The old adage that online is cheaper than paper is only true if online is kept simple. The bells and whistles that are being added now make it more expensive, and harder to update.
Document Web to Social Web
Use documents on a personal Web page as the starting point of dialog
With DIGITAL Notes, we had one place to look, which led to loyalty, sharing, and community (similar to the community that exists in a church). It is not practical to imagine that you can build that kind of a business community. In business, loyalty is more like loyalty to a particular gas station. We go for a known product but do not interact with the people in the station.
Free Web site providers: Geo Cities has 935,000 web sites. AOL provides free web space. You can usually get 2 - 10 MB of space when you pay for a dial up connection. Create a personal page and use it to test your business ideas.
Flypaper - rather than a fly swatter.
Attract users to you. Richard talks about his Web site, and the unexpected connections people have made to it and to him.
People look for themselves and find you if your site mentions them.
Ebooks Multimedia makes interactive CD ROMs for children, found Richard's book The Lizard of Oz at his Web site, and will be making a CD ROM of it.
In addition to posting his own fiction at the Web site, Richard provides classic books in electronic text form on diskette (primarily for the blind). The point is that electronic texts are easily copied and distributed, but ordinary people don't read complete books on-line today because of limitations of the display. You aren't going to cuddle up with one in bed. And printing out an on-line book is slow and far more expensive than buying a printed one. Yes, the only people who read on-line books are the blind, who use text to voice converters.
How a producer in Iceland found one of Richards scripts.
His daughter got an audition for a TV show in a trade for a copy of an old Gary Trudeau book
His wife's resume was picked up from their Web site by a headhunter and she got a job. There are over 3,500 job related sites. And over 300,000 resumes are posted on the public Web (separate from those sites). The point here is that many of these sites create databases of job seekers and job opportunities. Data bases are not searchable by browsers like AltaVista. But a well-drafted resume on your personal Web page is.
Bill Ransom is a scifi author (co-authored books with Frank Herbert, of Dune fame). Deanne Rink is a producer with PBS, who has done the LIVE FROM ANTARCTICA shows. Both contacted Richard due to his lists of books.
Richard described his site, which has no graphics, 80 KB for home page, with many links, 700 docs, some of them books. He made the following points:
Implications of full-text search
AltaVista is an essential part of how the web becomes social
Users don't come in by the front door
Trying to manage a user's experience does not work because full text search takes users directly to what they want to know.
allows you to save a search construct so you can regenerate indexes.
Yahoo goes to the home page. But AltaVista doesn't. Only 13% of people at Richard's Web site look at his home page. Richard used the analogy of the old Burma shave signs, where the meaning was only clear if you saw all the signs in sequence as you drove along the road. Using the Internet usually brings you in at the third or fourth sign.
Simpler is better - What AltaVista can't find
Rule of thumb -- design for the blind,
Roll Rocks Downhill - Richard's main Web page design suggestions
(To find sites that link to your site, use a +link: search using AltaVista )
(user centric rather than designer centric)
Other suggestions:
Go to a provider for things you need, like audio. Add pointers to your site. As the world changes, you can add glitz, but do it in a modular fashion. In other words, different parts of your site (text pages, chat, realaudio files, etc.) could reside on different servers, with different Internet providers. But through the use of links and a common look and feel it would all be like one site.
Don't try to take an existing brochure and copy it verbatim to the Web. You need to use different styles because it is a different environment. Brochures tease. The Web informs.
AltaVista Ranking rules (so you'll appear higher on results lists)
Adding and Subtracting URLs - At the AltaVista home page
From Document to dialogue
Put early drafts on your Web page and solicit responses. Then put the responses on the Web page, too, to create a dialog.
Recognize your best customer or employee. But not on your home page.
Do what needs to be done; don't wait for technology
Learning environment - parallel to early childhood education
On the Web, personal contact rather works better than automation.
The Web makes distance education possible. But remember that the human side is more important than the technology.
Save everything, find everything, share everything
Plus it takes energy to make ice.
When you organize information, you make it less useful because finding things depends on how an individual looks at things, which changes from one person to another or even over time.
AltaVista lets you extract order when you need it.
The future is now
Software engineers in Russia and elsewhere in the world are willing to work, at a distance, for about $2/hour.
Find ways to make Web sites beneficial, people-oriented.
Future bandwidth will be much better.
Followup and Future Reference
Richard Seltzer -- seltzer@mail.dec.com, seltzer@samizdat.com
http://www.digital.com/info/internet
Business on the World Wide Web, live chat sessions, Thursdays, noon to 1 PM Eastern Daylight Time (GMT -4), http://www.web-net.org
AltaVista newsletter (Cobb Group)http://www.cobb.com/alt
What you might not realize about AltaVista Search
use AltaVista Help. It provides a lot of information.
Simple Search
Use + in front of a word to require that the word appear in the results.
Use - in front of a word to exclude it from the results.
Example: You can list all the sites that link to yours by entering +link:domainname
and exclude your own site by entering -host:domainname
e.g., +link:samizdat.com -host:samizdat.com
For example, "Richard Seltzer", "to be or not to be"
If you use capitalization, you get only sites that use exactly that capitalization. This provides a good way to find names that use capitalization in a distinct way, for example eXcursion.
A space is equal to "or" . Richard Seltzer = Richard or Seltzer
There must be three characters before the *, and it can stand for up to 5 characters. For example gold* would return goldfinch, goldbug, and golden.
Advanced Search
200 is the default number of index entries you can search in a simple search, although there may be many more matches. To get more than that with advanced, leave the "ranking" box empty. Then you can keep clicking on Next to see more matches.
Example: Richard NEAR Seltzer
Use dates to limit your search. You can have a query that you submit frequently and limit it with dates to get only the most recent hits that you have not yet seen.
Boolean logic terms to include or exclude
For example, (link:digital.com OR link:dec.com) AND NOT (host:digital.com OR host:dec.com)
AltaVista is best at finding rare things.
Bookmark complex search queries so you can reuse them with current start and end dates to get pointers to only new topics.
You can use AltaVista as a style checker for terminology to see what format most of the world uses.
Web search - terms that can be used to focus the search.
The following descriptions come from the AltaVista Advanced search help.
text:text -- Finds pages that contain the specified text in any part of the page other than an image tag, link, or URL. The search text:cow9 would find all pages with the term cow9 in them.
link:ULRtext -- Finds pages with a link to a page with the specified URL text. Use link:altavista.digital.com to find all pages linking to AltaVista.
url:text -- Finds pages with a specific word or phrase in the URL. Use url:altavista to find all pages on all servers that have the word altavista in the host name, path, or filename (the complete URL, in other words.)
domain:domainname -- Finds pages within the specified domain. use domain:de to find pages from Germany, or use domain:org to find pages from organizations.
title:text -- Finds pages that contain the specified wordor phrase in the page title (which appears in the title bar of most browsers). The search title:Elvis would find pageswith Elvis in the title.estimate
anchor:text -- Finds pages that contain the specified word or phrase in the text of a hyperlink. anchor: "Click here to visit AltaVista" would find pages with "Click here to visit AltaVista" as a link.
host:name: -- Finds pages on a specific computer. The search host:altavista.digital.com would find pages on the AltaVista computer, and host:dilbert.unitedmedia.com would ind pages on the computer called dilbert at unitedmedia.com
image:filename Finds pages with images having a specific filename. Use image:elvis to find pages with images called elvis.
object: Not described in AltaVista Help, but Richard says you
can use this to find active X objects. Likewise, applet: finds
java applets
Newsgroup search - In the Search list, choose Usenet.
News Keywords: from the AltaVista Advanced search help
from:username@address Finds articles posted with the specified e-mail address. For example, use from:president@whitehouse.gov to find presidential postings.
subject:text Finds articles with the specified word or phrase in the Subject field. Use subject:"basketball playoffs" to find postings with "basketball playoffs" in the subject.
newsgroups:groupname Finds articles posted in the specified newsgroup. Use just part of the group name to match a range of groups, like newsgroups:nl to match all groups from the Netherlands.
summary:text Finds articles with the specified word or phrase in the Summary field. Use summary:playoffs to find postings with playoffs in the summary field.
keywords:text Finds articles containing keywords matching the specified word or portion of a word. Use keywords:beta to find postings with beta in the keywords field.
Putting it all together
The more unique a query is, the better the results returned by AltaVista
[I refined the main entry to recipe AND cup because on my first try I got the menus of a lot of pizza places, as well as recipes. Lyn]
If you create complex queries that you want to reuse (for example, you want to use the search results to determine trends), you can set a bookmark so you don't have to reenter the query.
This is a regular browser bookmark, which will take you to AltaVista
with the query in the Search Box.
"Refine" (AKA Live Topics)
lets you make your search more specific. AltaVista will list sub-categories of the search topic. You can choose categories to include or exclude from your search.
You can see the categories in a list, or choose a graphic view that shows how the topics relate to each other.
Help in Finding Anything - Your Way
In the next several topics, if you access Richard's slides via the Web, by way of http://www.samizdat.com/ses/title.htm you can click on the bolded, underlined topics and they will take you to actual queries that illustrate the AltaVista queries he describes.
see the categories (list), see the x-ray (graphic)
Information X-Rays - The views you can get using Refine give you:
Portraits
You can use refine to limit the search
Web-site analysis
Internet trend analysis
AltaVista Search for Information Providers - summary of next eight slides
How AltaVista Works
Richard described how you can use a metatag in your html file to provide keywords that browsers will use to index your document. You can associate words with your document even if they are not in the document.
Two kinds of metatags are relevant for AltaVista. One is the description-- words to be used instead of the default, which is the first couple lines of text on your page. The other is for keywords, giving you an opportunity to enter words that people looking for this page might think of -- synonyms for words that in fact appear on the page.
Remember -- All words on the page are indexed by AltaVista -- not just what you put in a keyword metatag. And it's always best to simply and clearly state what your page is about in the text itself (with special emphasis on the HTML title and the first couple lines of text).
That's much better than using metatags.
AltaVista does not index comments.
Implications of full-text search
- you don't control the context, the user's experience
- need to provide navigation buttons on every page
- AltaVista provides index of your site or any subset of the Internet
Tool to Fix Web Sites
lets you see what is at your site so you can check the following for errors
Adding and Subtracting URLs
Need to get rid of old information. When you add the URL of the old address, AltaVista gets a 404 error message and cleans up right away.
Then you should do an AltaVista search with link:oldaddress to
find out who had linked to your site and contact them so they
can fix the links.
Tool to Improve Web Sites
search using the keyword link:URLtext use an Advanced search and no rank to get all. To find out who links to old pages, old addresses, etc.
- up-to-date indices of your site and/or others
- complex AltaVista searches tailored for your audience
What AltaVista Doesn't Index (importance of plain text)
To have index entries show up, you have to have a parallel non-frames version
Rule of thumb
Ranking rules (so you'll be found and appear higher on results lists)
Metatags - use them to add searchable words that are not in your text
Exclusion - ways to keep crawlers from finding your site
If you index only the first page, users can't find the 2nd page except from the first page It's a one-two punch. Make sure the first page is indexed, and use an exclusion command to keep web crawlers away from the second one.
Flypaper - rather than a fly swatter.
Attract users to you. Richard talks about his Web site, and the unexpected connections people have made to it and to him.
Friends find me - why? What are they really looking for?
People look for themselves and find you if your site mentions them.
Ebooks Multimedia makes interactive CD ROMs for children, found Richard's book The Lizard of Oz at his Web site, and will be making a CD ROM of it.
In addition to posting his own fiction at the Web site, Richard provides classic books in electronic text form on diskette (primarily for the blind). The point is that electronic texts are easily copied and distributed, but ordinary people don't read complete books on-line today because of limitations of the display. You aren't going to cuddle up with one in bed. And printing out an on-line book is slow and far more expensive than buying a printed one. Yes, the only people who read on-line books are the blind, who use text to voice converters.
How a producer in Iceland found one of Richards scripts.
His daughter got an audition for a TV show in a trade for a copy of an old Gary Trudeau book
His wife's resume was picked up from their Web site by a headhunter and she got a job. There are over 3,500 job related sites. And over 300,000 resumes are posted on the public Web (separate from those sites). The point here is that many of these sites create databases of job seekers and job opportunities. Data bases are not searchable by browsers like AltaVista. But a well-drafted resume on your personal Web page is.
Bill Ransom is a scifi author (co-authored books with Frank Herbert, of Dune fame). Deanne Rink is a producer with PBS, who has done the LIVE FROM ANTARCTICA shows. Both contacted Richard due to his lists of books.
Richard described his site, which has no graphics, 80 KB for home page, with many links, 700 docs, some of them books. He made the following points:
Followup and Future Reference
Richard Seltzer -- seltzer@mail.dec.com, seltzer@samizdat.com
http://www.digital.com/info/internet
Business on the World Wide Web, live chat sessions, Thursdays, noon to 1 PM Eastern Daylight Time (GMT -4), http://www.web-net.org
AltaVista newsletter (Cobb Group)http://www.cobb.com/alt