Financial Times Debuts Trends
Briefly, Guy Valerio (Information Architect, Financial Times), just dropped me a note describing the FT's newest addition to their search interface. Using an idiom similar to Sphere's blog search and Topix's news search, the interface indicates the volume of FT articles (or those from other licensed sources) and allows for manipulation of the graph to narrow the search by date. Below is an example search for 'iraq'.
As can be seen from this example, the service provides a full 5 years of results. It is fascinating to look at examples like 'flu', 'snow', etc. - where there is seasonality, but also some unpredictable spikes.
I went to the FT site and used this feature and to be quite honest it has no real use to the end users. Not sure if the feature is complete or not, but i don't really care to see a visual representation of how many articles FT has...I just want relevant results on the keyword.
Posted by: Rik | January 29, 2007 at 04:00 PM
Rik's partially right -- it may not be relevant to search results, but the graph does provide context, and context is valuable.
Posted by: Joe Murphy | February 08, 2007 at 08:50 PM