"Good decisions are born of experience. Experience is born of bad decisions."-- Unknown
Don't let the techie title throw you -- heuristic is just a ten-dollar word for learning, and algorithms are just collections of computer commands that accomplish a certain task, much like a recipe. In fact, computer algorithm books are often called cookbooks. So what we're talking about here are computer searches that improve as you use them.
As an example, take Amazon.com's recommendation feature. (If you've read this blog before, you probably saw that coming!) Amazon tracks your browsing behavior on their site using magic browser cookies, and based on the information they collect, guesses what other pages might interest you. BTW, the recommendations I get aren't particularly focussed, since I crawl all over Amazon looking for niche market products. The heuristic algorithm therefore assumes that I'm interested in just about anything. Come to think of it, that's exactly what its supposed to do.
Another familiar example is the Yahoo! Search suggestions feature. If, for example, you enter the search term "router," a box of suggestions will appear after a brief delay. These might include "woodworking routers" or "ethernet routers" or "Netgear routers". I'm not using actual examples from Yahoo! since those are subject to change, but these examples should be sufficient to illustrate the point. I like the fact that Yahoo! merely suggests possible refinements -- Microsoft has an irritating tendency to assume that they know what you want better than you do.
StumbleUpon.com is a social-networking site and search engine that allows you to select up to 127 interests that will be used to customize your search results. As you use the service, you can click on one of two buttons (Thumbs Up) I like this or (Thumbs Down). Simple. If you're ambivalent, you don't have to rate a page. I've seen a lot of rating systems, but this is probably my favorite because you're not ruining somebody's day by giving them the thumbs down -- and they can't ruin yours. All you are doing is demoting the page and others like it in your own search results. People who think Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld are great American patriots are unaffected.
I looked at this service a couple of years ago and wasn't very impressed, but I don't recall the search feature being present then. I may have overlooked it, but I think you just had to "stumble" from page to page. That might be alright for casual surfing, but it's not very focussed. The database is now a lot bigger too. To try Stumbling, go to the Getting Started page, where you will learn all you need to know. If you have trouble adding pages with the toolbar because of your firewall settings, old or weird browser, or whatever, you can use the form below:
Submit Page to StumbleUpon.com
Last, but certainly not least, your StumbleUpon history generates your own personal StumbleUpon blog, which is visible to the major search engines if you're just looking for backlinks, and to other stumblers, of course, if you are more interested in the social networking aspects of the site. You are cordially invited to subscribe to my StumbleUpon blog at any time.
