I implemented a full text search "searching in tags", using SQL server 2005,
I want to describe for the client what i did, what what full text search means by simple examples?
My Client is not a programmer but a good internet user.
I find when describing something to clients use a metaphor or use a very concrete domain specific example.
As a metaphor you could say that Full Text Search is like Google for your site. It looks at everything and anything to try and help you. Whereas, what we had before was more like using the Find feature in XP. It works, but works well if you know a lot about what you are searching for. And isn't Google better than Find :)
Or just give them an example of something they couldn't do before that they can do now! Experience and results always convey the message more than words. Show them how you made their lives easier and they will immediately understand.
Best of luck.
"It now finds stuff much much faster."
Everything else is technical details not interesting to a user.
"Finds information using non exact matches"
Give some examples.
"finds stuff faster, and works more like google".
Gotta toss in a comparison to a search engine--hell, I can't even really describe what "full text search" means. "Full Text Search" is a technical term, really.
I can describe what I dislike about search. Requiring me to type in boolean junk like "cat AND dog" or not offering me alternative queries. In other words, maybe think about what what was wrong with the old way and why this one is better.
Related
I have found that one of the keywords I would like to be found in the search engine has a domain that I can register. This is not a good name for the general project, and so not for all the web, but it is a good definition or explanation of a part. Is it a good idea to register something like this just to point it to a section of the web? I mean is this effective from the SEO point of view? but most important, is it a good practice?
Interesting question, in therms of SEO, this is NOT a good practice, and google can punish your website (so i'd not recommend it), but...
...if this word is really easy to remember and you think the user will try it to access your site without needing to search for it, it may be "acceptable", because you won't lose online visits.
Anyway.. you should avoid black hat techniques.
Google updates "Panda", "Penguin" later versions discourage this type of technique. Naming your domain as same to the specific research like www.healthcaremedicine.com. That means if someone search for the products health care medicine. Your website is shown at top.
I think that is what you mean.
In past years people name their website closer to the search result but now it is not recommended. It may for some time take your site to top. But that will not last long. Your site should have to provide what it promise its visitors. At least they have to spend some time.
Exact Match Domain is what you are referring to, as answered above is not advisable, but if you find it useful you can register and go ahead.
How to keep you off from penalties.
Do not stuff KW's in title and descriptions, as your domain already has the KW
When doing off-page SEO, Do not choose anchor text as your Main KW, instead use URL itself as anchor text and some generic anchor text like click here, more info, read more.
These can save you from penalty. I still see a lot of EMD's ranking just by being careful with the usage of KW's and anchor text.
This was asked in an interview.
I think the answer can be done by constructing a trie of all valid words and then suggestions can be made based on a possible valid path which was otherwise given as incorrect.
Say if user types apfle, and system would detect that after ap a possible valid path was app, which would then satisfy apple.
Is there any better solution than this? Perhaps the one implemented by spell checkers.
See:
How does the Google "Did you mean?" Algorithm work?
How do I approximate "Did you mean?" without using Google?
How to write a spelling corrector
Youtube Video: Search 101
Within typical search engines you will find a lot of Analyzer stuff, which directs to the same underlying problem. A very popular Analyzer would be the n-gram Analyzer.
Perhaps this helps.
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I am writing a user manual and I have come to a discussion with a colleague. He says I cannot use the word "you" anywhere in the manual. Now I remember something about this at school but that was not for writing procedures. Also, doing some googling I observed that most tutorials where using it a lot. I would prefer using it but only if this is considered good practice. what do you think?
The alternatives that I know of are:
'You' (second person singular) - "You should put the plate on the table."
Imperative - "Put the plate on the table."
'We' (first person plural) - "We should put the plate on the table."
'The user' (third person singular) - "The user should put the plate on the table."
Passive - "The plate should be put on the table."
My own preferences are:
I prefer the imperative as the default mode, because it's the briefest (least verbiage).
I avoid the passive, and the first person plural.
I use the second person pronoun ("you") or a third person noun (e.g. "your system administrator") when I want an explicit subject instead of the imperative.
Some people believe that manuals should be written as if they were scientific papers. Others believe that technical accuracy and readability is more important. I'm of the latter persuasion - use "you" if it fits with your overall style, but be consistent in your usage - I find documents that switches between "you" and "we" are irritating (and it's a sin I've been guilty of myself).
Which is easier to understand?
Click the button. You will see a dialog box where you can type your name.
or
The action of clicking the button will cause the appearance of a dialog box allowing the possibility for the user to enter his or her name.
The first is much easier to grasp. (Using "you" can sometimes be sloppy, but that tends to be in cases where it's used as a substitute for "one", or "some people", or "people in general". It's fine to use it where you are actually referring to the person reading the text.)
If you want, you can avoid the
you-style by writing in the
passive/imperative style. You can
also try the 'we' approach, but that
might sound a bit childish. You're
doing nothing wrong with using you
though.
To avoid writing in the you-style,
use the passive/imperative style. The
we-approach might also work, though
it might sound a bit childish. There
is nothing wrong with using you
though.
We can avoid writing in the you-style
by employing the passive/imperative
style. Or we could use the
we-approach, though we might sound a
bit childish. One could try the one
approach, but risk sounding to
stiff-upper-lip and alienating the
reader. We don't mind using you once
in a while, though.
I myself do prefer the second line. A series of commands is easier to follow then a story in the you-form.
You should be writing explantions in the third person.
The Java streams model is a classic Decorator pattern example.
You should write instructions in the second person, but even then, it's still not a good idea to refer to the reader as "you".
Create a constructor that can initialize lists based on a given list of lists.
Now, how did you feel after I issued 2 commands to you, my reader?
Technical Writing Enforce the rule of using passive text only. which mean avoiding "you" will be a good idea to stay in the safe side. that's based on how i do it personally.
I would do what Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc do. Here's a random Help page from Google:
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=8494
shows that "you" is being used. You can check how Microsoft writes their User Manual too.
As a side note, I wouldn't use "I" or "we".
I think if you are providing imperatives, such as "Open the door", or otherwise directly addressing the reader, then you should use "you" instead of making yourself more difficult to comprehend by talking about some abstract user.
Even in scientific papers, some of the most formal writing I can think of, it is debatable whether or not I, we and other first person language is permissible. As much as high school grammar teachers might like you to think otherwise, there is no universally appropriate scheme.
I would say just be careful. It could come across as too casual. If the intended audience is business-y, I would avoid it. However, if it's a home user scenario or the marketing is casual (think Southwest Airlines), I'd say go with it.
Just don't overuse. Then it becomes taxing on the reader.
Sample of how it's intended to be used?
It all depends on the tone and style of your writing. Formal approaches discourage the use of "you". Personally, I like
to use a style that is concise, to the point and relatively informal. I have no problem with the "you" word when used sparingly.
Avoid over usage as in:
When you want to start the application you have to enter your password and then you have to select the function you want to use.
From the Handbook of Technical Writing. 8th Edition (p. 262):
You can make sentences shorter by leaving out some articles(a, an, the), some pronouns (you, this, these), and some verbs, but such sentences may result in telegraphics style and be harder to understand.
So, I'd say it's OK to use you, but like Gilbert Le Blanc said in his comment, it's often better to write 'then click the button' instead of 'then you click the button'.
Impersonal form should be preferred. The use of 'you' would be too clear, and most of your clients will believe you are not professional. A clear manual will also reduce the need for post-sale customer support, and cause losses to the company.
He is good programmer (won some competitions) but he absolutely ignores formatting.
He consider i, j, k beautiful... I hope he won't find out about existence of goto keyword.
Write some code in his "style" and then ask him to read it and explain to you what it is doing.
What's good for the goose and all...
I told my students (post-secondary) that they had the choice of writing code well or of me writing their assignments in the same sort of way that they wrote their code. I told them I would write the following program:
take the text of the assignment
lookup a number of the words in a thesaurus and replace them with obscure versions
remove all punctuation
remove all whitespace
convert everything to lower case
insert random whitespace
capitalize random letters
They could then have the assignment... hey its "right" (all of the words are there) good luck understanding what the assignment is though.
Oddly the complaints stopped at that point :-)
I also compared it to English. We use paragraph breaks, capitalizations, etc... as a convention. When someone chooses not to follow the conventions it makes reading much harder.
tell him about python :)
Make him maintain somebody else's code that's written the way he writes. Then make him maintain somebody else's code that was written with good style.
A combination of FORTRAN77 and Python should sort him out.
Code maintainability
Stuff I didn't care in high school neither :)
Write a bunch of "his" code and ask him to find a particular piece of code.
Give him some badly written code with a bug in it and ask him to find the bug.
Well, if he plans to do this for a living just explain that he will have a very rough life on a real team if he doesn't at least make some effort to follow the team standards. If he doesn't plan to do it for a living, don't worry about it.
You also might determine if there is anyone(s) that he admires. If there is then there is a pretty good chance that they follow standards.
I would point out that having clean code is a sign of a organized and intelligent mind. However, the real killer will be when he writes a large amount of code. I doubt you will be able to convince him because more than likely he is getting excited about the logic of the app and not the process. It will take experience to teach him a harsh lesson. So here are my suggestions.
Give him a project full of messy unformatted poorly named code and let him suffer.
Encourage him to work on a project with a large code base and let him see how well he remembers his own variable names after the 1,000th source file.
You probably can't.
Some people just don't get it.
I use self-describing variable names both at work and in private where noone tells me to. I also got some appreciation at work for using long and understandable names.
If a guy does not do it neither for himself or for your project then you've got that kind of guy. Show him some docs on the source code style policy. Explain why this is important.
You begin to use the right naming convention after you've got some experience and you see how and why this was useful. Without experience it's just an abstract talk.
P.S. Sometimes I get stuck with variable names because I'm not sure if this particular name does conform to the common linguistic style I use in the current project or how would the name scale on the high litterature language. The problem of using bool b1 vs. bool IsSomePropertyAvailable has never come up since the first university years.
I'm pretty sure you can misconfigure a code beautifier to present such horrible output. Obfuscaters are common, and do essentially the same thing (short useless variable names, no indenting, poor use of whitespace).
Give him the assignment of taking an existing program with his style and adding a trivial feature.
Also, take code he wrote 6 months or more ago and give the same assignment.
-Adam
Maybe he's not ignorant, maybe he's just inspired by Kernighan & Pike.
i,j,k is fine for loops.
I personally prefer using 1 letter vars in iterations...
foreach ($test as $t)
{
}
beautiful :D
Of all the forms of CAPTCHA available, which one is the "least crackable" while remaining fairly human readable?
I believe that CAPTCHA is dying. If someone really wants to break it, it will be broken. I read (somewhere, don't remember where) about a site that gave you free porn in exchange for answering CAPTCHAs to they can be rendered obsolete by bots. So, why bother?
Anyone who really wants to break this padlock can use a pair of bolt cutters, so why bother with the lock?
Anyone who really wants to steal this car can drive up with a tow truck, so why bother locking my car?
Anyone who really wants to open this safe can cut it open with an oxyacetylene torch, so why bother putting things in the safe?
Because using the padlock, locking your car, putting valuables in a safe, and using a CAPTCHA weeds out a large spectrum of relatively unsophisticated or unmotivated attackers. The fact that it doesn't stop sophisticated, highly motivated attackers doesn't mean that it doesn't work at all. Using a CAPTCHA isn't going to stop all spammers, but it's going to tremendously reduce the amount that requires filtering or manual intervention.
Heck look at the lame CAPTCHA that Jeff uses on his blog. Even a wimpy barrier like that still provides a lot of protection.
I agree with Thomas. Captcha is on its way out. But if you must use it, reCAPTCHA is a pretty good provider with a simple API.
I believe that CAPTCHA is dying. If someone really wants to break it, it will be broken. I read (somewhere, don't remember where) about a site that gave you free porn in exchange for answering CAPTCHAs to they can be rendered obsolete by bots. So, why bother?
If you're a small enough site, no one would bother.
If you're still looking for a CAPTCHA, I like tEABAG_3D by the OCR Research Team. It's complicated to break and uses your 3D vision. Plus, it being developed by people who break CAPTCHAs for fun.
If you're just looking for a captcha to prevent spammers from bombing your blog, the best option is something simple but unique. For example, ask to write the word "Cat" into a box. The advantage of this is that no targeted captcha-breaker was developed for this solution, and your small blog isn't important enough for someone to actually develop one. I've used such a captcha on my blog with some success for a couple of years now.
This information is hard to really know because I believe a CAPTCHA gets broken long before anybody knows about it. There is economic incentive for those that break them to keep it quiet.
I used to work with a guy whose job revolved mostly around breaking CAPTCHA's and I can tell you the one giving them fits currently is reCAPTCHA.
Now, does that mean it will forever, call me skeptical.
I wonder if a CAPTCHA mechanism that uses collage made of pictures and asks human to type what he sees in the collage image will be much more crack-proof than the text and number image one. Imagine that the mechanism stitches pictures of cat, cup and car into a collage image and expects human visitor to tick (checkboxes) cat, cup, and car. How long do you think will hackers and crackers will come up with an algorithm to crack the mechanism (i.e. extract image elements from the collage and recognize the object depicted by each picture) ...
If you wanted you could try out the Microsoft Research project Asirra: http://research.microsoft.com/asirra/
CAPTCHAS, I believe should start being considered heavily when designing the UX. They're slow, cumbersome, and a very poor user experience. They are useful, don't get me wrong but perhaps you should look into designing a honeypot.
A honeypot is created by adding a hiddenfield at the bottom of the form. Because spam bots will fill in all the fields on the page blindly you can do a check:
If honeypotfield <> Empty Then
"No Spam TY"
Else
//Proceed with the form
End If
This works until there is a specifically designed spambot for your site, so they can choose to fill out selected input fields.
For more information: http://haacked.com/archive/2007/09/11/honeypot-captcha.aspx/
As far as I know, the Google's one is the best that there is. It hasn't been broken by computer programs yet. What I know that the crackers have been doing is to copy the image and then send it to many phishing websites where humans solve them to enter those websites.
It doesn't matter if captchas are broken or not now -- there are Indian firms that do nothing but process captchas. I'm with the rest of the group in saying that Captchas are on their way out.
Here is a cool link to create CAPTCHA..... http://www.codeproject.com/aspnet/CaptchaImage.asp
Just.. don't.. There are several reasons use of captcha is not advised.
http://www.interfacegeek.com/dont-ever-use-captchas/
I use uniqpin.com - it's easy to use and not annoying for users. So, bots can recognise a text, but can't recognize a image.
Death by Captcha can solve any Regular CAPTCHA (incude reCAPTCHA), but not Speedcoin Cryptocurrency Captcha.
Death by Captcha - http://deathbycaptcha.com
Speedcoin Captcha - http://speedcoin.co/info/captcha/Speedcoin_Captcha.html