The Lexicographer's Rules

“An autopsy, or postmortem, as it is called in Belize, was done and the cause of death was described as traumatic shock.”

(Source Link)

A little more than a week ago I posted a list of all the books on my “want” list that I couldn’t find on Amazon.com. One of those was Le pornithorynque est un salopare by Alain Créhange. It’s a dictionary of French portmanteau words.

Today I received a package in the mail postmarked “Paris Saint Laurent.” It’s a copy of the book from the author himself, signed and everything! Alain writes in a note that he saw on this web site that I wanted it, so…

The book has an attractive cover featuring ink drawings of two platypuses doing it doggy-style.

Another victory for the Internets!

I find it interesting that four years after the last French Francs were withdrawn from circulation, La Poste still gives the price in Francs on the postage sticker under the price in Euros.

Very interesting article on the curious custom of Brazilians in the U.S. creating and selling house-cleaning routes to other immigrants. “In classified advertisements in Portuguese-language newspapers such as Ta Na Mao, (slang for ‘you got it!’), and on Internet postings, Brazilians use the English word ‘schedule’ for cleaning routes. Notices declaring, ‘I want schedule’ or ‘I’m selling schedule,’ flutter from walls wherever Brazilians shop or eat. Buyers easily outnumber sellers.” (Source Link)

“In Cuba they have only what is cheap or free—rum, music, sex, pride. And hope. They don’t pin their hopes on Fidel Castro; they expect him to die still clutching his slingshot and staring north. What they hope, even seem to firmly believe, is that the United States under some half-imagined future leader will see the light and embrace them. They will travel, they will drive Chevy trucks, they will eat and eat.” (Source Link)

I spend a large part of my day using data searches. Not just Google, but Google Groups, Factiva, Proquest, LexisNexis, Icerocket, Feedster, Newspaperarchive.com, the Oxford English Dictionary, OneLook, JSTOR, A9, Google Print, and a slew of other search front ends. I also grep against a couple gigs of XML, use my own site search, and constantly access two private custom-built data searches, all of them of varying complexity.

I can give you a dozen problems with any one of them—things they do poorly, stupidly, or not at all. Common mistakes include not using true Boolean, not permitting any Boolean, not storing raw text in image-based PDF files so that terms can be searched for within the files, timing out too quickly when a user is idle, having too many stop words, not listing stop words, having very poor text created by optical character recognition, not allowing true phrase searching, not allowing searching by date, using frames, not allowing bookmarking of results, etc., etc., etc.

But what I want to piss on at the moment is Technorati. It searches blogs. Or at least, that’s what it’s supposed to do. They keep adding all this tag junk and favorites crap when they still haven’t mastered the art of simply returning decent results.

When I search for a term and results summaries are provided, the search term must appear in context in each of the search summaries. The point of a summary is to help people judge whether or not the linked item is worth visiting. If the search term doesn’t appear in the summary, then what the hell’s the point?

It’s the same with the RSS feeds that are created from searches. RSS aggregators are all about the summary. All about it. Why would any site deliver to me a customized RSS feed based upon a search for a single word and not always include that word in all of the summaries of all of the articles returned for that RSS feed?

The thing that irritates me the most? Technorati used to do this right. What possibly could be a good reason for changing that?