I uploaded some changes to the Ask Olli Search today that will really improve the quality of the results. It’s not even on Google’s scale, but you will now find the most relevant results at the top of any search.

I also uploaded a lot of other smaller changes. They mostly make the site more intuitive or just look better.

I won’t list them all here because I can’t remember all of the changes, but the search results page got a lot of improvements. Not only does it look better, but you can go directly to the relevant sites. Even I found it annoying that you had to go through the profile page to reach the actual site.

There’s still a lot of work to do. I think there are a number of usability problems. I’ll be slowly fixing the usability annoyances myself.

The number of records that search uses is still a little limited. I think it’s now somewhere around 3500. Instead of adding records by hand, I would like to get a developer to implement basic podcast search and web crawling. It’s not going to happen soon, but it is definitely a priority.

Hope you like the changes.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 at 11:03 pm and is filed under Miscellany. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.