Wow, beta 16, 75% of the way. Just thought I’d come by to add some of my thoughts again. Firstly, it’s slightly disappointing that most of the searches I pointed out a little while ago (http://blog.hakia.com/?p=151), still haven’t been sorted out. However, I’m you’ve done a lot of other work in this regard, so I guess these are just things you’ll probably sort out given time. The main point I wanted to make here though, is just to draw your attention to what I would call the worrying number of ‘inaccessible’ websites (pages that cannot be displayed or found) that I seem to keep finding (for quite a while now as well). I’ll give you a few of the obligatory examples, but please note that I have found them far more widely than this relatively small cross section. In addition, be aware that while I may not always mention a specific number, the webpage(s) I’m talking about will always be on the first page of the results:
First of all, there is still the ‘404’ webpage cannot be found frame, which is taking up the first unmarked result slot for the term physorg (http://www.hakia.com/search.aspx?q=physorg), that I mentioned previously.
Additionally, while I’ve noticed that yahoos beta site does in fact rank (near the bottom) of the first page for the term ‘alpha yahoo’ (http://www.hakia.com/search.aspx?q=alpha+yahoo) – must have missed it the first time – apparently a webpage that ‘cannot be displayed’ ranks ahead of it.
Similarly, typing in the term call of duty (http://www.hakia.com/search.aspx?q=call+of+duty) brings up both a page cannot be displayed and a 404 error, while far cry (http://www.hakia.com/search.aspx?q=far+cry) also brings up a 404.
The word buffy (http://www.hakia.com/search.aspx?q=buffy) brings up two page cannot be displayed signs.
Another couple of interesting examples can be found by going to the galleries for either England (http://www.hakia.com/search.aspx?q=England), or Northern Ireland (http://www.hakia.com/search.aspx?q=Northern+Ireland). Try clicking on the flags that are displayed by either and you’ll get 404 page errors for both (though interestingly not for anywhere else that I’ve tried – including the galleries for the UK and Ireland).
Anyways, I’m not sure if I’ve just been really unlucky with the queries that I’ve run, but it has been enough for me to build up the perception that there is a higher instance of these inaccessible sites on hakia than on the other major search engines (possibly because they tend to keep cropping up on right there on the first page). Now, I really hope this will be something that you will address before the end of the beta phase, as it doesn’t make for a very good user experience when someone keeps hitting ‘non’-results (especially when the first page has – quite rightly – come to signify the most relevant set of results you have).

The other point that I wanted to make is regarding the spell-checker. If you will remember, I brought it to your attention that it was missing quite a few spelling errors. Now, I did this way back when (http://blog.hakia.com/?p=87), and you (claimed) to be aware of it even at the time, but despite this, I literally cannot see where the improvements have been made, even given many months and several beta versions. I re-went through the initial list of spelling errors I gave and found that only one (mihgt – might) gets flagged up. Plus, I have of course continued to do more searching on hakia and in doing so have continued to notice other mistakes that are missed here, but picked up by other spell checkers on rival search engines.
I would also like to draw particular attention to the ‘might’ example I just gave. The funny thing here is that entering the spelling error seems to produce results, even though it is clearly wrong (and indeed does suggests the correct spelling, as I have mentioned), but entering the correct word (or following the suggestion), seems to stump hakia into producing no results (http://www.hakia.com/search.aspx?q=might), huh?! Yes, I know it’s not much of a query to begin with, but when faced with either a clear spelling error (which I’m very, very sure is not even a word), or its actual spelling, I would have thought that the latter should have been the one to produce the results.

On a final note, is there any word on the release schedule of some of the features you talked about in the blog I just mentioned above (e.g. dedicated image, news and other types of searches – not to mention some of the ‘never before seen features’, I believe you talked about near the beginning of the year). I only ask, because – like you guys mention yourself – you are now 75% of the way through your beta phase. I just would have thought that if you where going to test some of these things out during this period (which to me seems the most logical period to do so), it just feels that you’ve left it a little late in the day. My question is whether you’ve been intentionally holding these features back till the final part of your beta for some reason, or if you intend to add them once your site goes live (possibly in beta form themselves).
Of the few things that I did notice that you’ve added for beta 16 (and sorry, but I don’t count the new homepage layout, and only found that comparison feature mildly diverting), I have to say I wasn’t the biggest fan of what you’ve done in the galleries – linking to others through words found in the webpage descriptions. While I believe that a system which directs a user to other potentially relevant galleries, based upon what they are currently reading is certainly a nice idea (giving a user a wider perspective and more info on a subject), I really feel that your current implementation is seriously flawed for several reasons. Firstly, I found out from a very early stage that due to its nature, the links to the other galleries are usually distributed unevenly, all the way down the (sometimes very long) galleries. This forces a user to scroll right down to the end of a page, scanning as they go to take them all in, not the best user experience in my book. The other problem with this in my book, is that a lot of times it feels more like luck than judgement that it has included the stuff that might actually be relevant to the gallery at hand. This is because while the websites themselves are related to whatever the gallery is about, which does help there can be many very pertinent galleries missing, or indeed completely irrelevant ones included, all because these words have happened to turn up in the description. Take the example of the internet gallery (http://www.hakia.com/search.aspx?q=internet), now given the subject at hand I have to say I’m not sure how relevant the galleries for ‘history’, or ‘war’ are, nor can I see the connection with actual surfing (the kind involving water and waves), but these are all in there because the site owner – or whoever – has included them (quite innocuously) within his/her site description. Not only that, but would the same words that are there still be included (even the relevant ones) if put differently, for example if ‘technology’ had shortened to ‘tech’, would it still produce the link to the gallery. This, I hope will help to highlight the often hit and miss nature of the current system (surfing, if you where wondering also fails to appears anywhere within the ‘beach’ gallery), but my other point here is that it also can cause some words to receive a disproportionate showing over others (again completely unrelated their relevancy to the current query). Sticking with the internet gallery, you’ll notice that (to my count) ‘games’ (within the internet games section) gets a total of 19 links due to the number of times it is mentioned, while something like emailing only has one link to it, right near the bottom of the page.
Anyway, for these reasons I would have thought that if you where going to introduce a feature like this, it would have been through a dedicated ‘related gallery’ feature, as I believe it would have numerous advantages over your current system. Not least is the fact that if you introduced it in a similar fashion to the table of contents each gallery has (possibly coming in just beneath it), then it would require far less scrolling and searching of the page by the user – which can only be a good thing as far as usability goes. Additionally, while it may mean that some galleries got more or less links than others, depending on the broadness of the subject, it would mean that they are all in some way connected to what the user is currently looking at, increasing the chances of click through. Plus, with them being essentially being in list format, it would allow you to rank them according to exactly how relevant you feel they are. For example, still staying the internet gallery, while technology probably would remain, due to it being a more generic gallery, it may well be further down the list under things like search engines, domain names, topix.net, etc.

Phew, sorry about the long post and I know my last few ones maybe haven’t seemed the most positive, but I am only mentioning this stuff in the hopes it will help, and I truly do wish you luck in what you are doing. Stay strong in the fight, lol.