Is Spock the Logical Choice for People Search? - Getting a Profile
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So let's say we're fans of classic Star Trek, and decide to click on William Shatner. Here's a screen shot of the page that greets us when we do:
I'm afraid the screen shot really doesn't do this profile justice. You'll notice there are multiple parts. At the upper left of course is Shatner's name. Just under that is a section for the tags that everyone has given him. Below that is a section that shows web sites that are related to him. Beneath that is a section for related people. Then, at the upper right, is his picture, with a few vital statistics (his age, gender, how many times the profile has been viewed and any other names by which he is known). Right above his name are links to Tags, Pictures, Related People, and Contact Info, which take you to the full information in each section.
I'm barely scratching the surface here though. Every tag is clickable; every website is clickable; every related person (when there are related people) shows up in the related people section with a picture with a clickable name. So you can potentially find out a lot about a person in a relatively short amount of time, which makes this great for researchers.
With a celebrity like William Shatner, though, not everything fits neatly onto one page. For example, if you think that list of tags looks a little short for a former captain of the U.S.S. Enterprise, just click on the tags title and you'll see you were right:
The blue link at the bottom that's hard to make out in this image says "show tags with negative scores." These are the tags that have been voted down as not being relevant to the person in the profile; when you click to show the tags, they appear on the page in red, just below the rest of the tags.
You can click on the titles of the appropriate sections to show all the websites related to this person, and all the relevant people related to this person. Or if you don't feel like clicking on the titles of the sections, in the lower right hand corner of each section is a blue link that takes you to the same place (all tags, or all websites, or all related people). Of course, you can also click on the links I pointed out that appear above Shatner's picture to take you where you want to go. I think it's great that Spock is using this approach; if visitors can get to the same place in multiple ways, there's less chance that a user will get frustrated from being unable to find something.
Okay, there's one more thing I'd like to draw your attention to before I finish this part. Up near the top of this profile, between William Shatner's name and his picture, is a link that says "Forward." Yes, I know, it's a little hard to make out in the image. There was also a "Forward" link in the upper right corner of the search results. When you click that link, it pops up a fresh email from your email application, with the link already put in. The link is accompanied by a descriptive phrase, so whoever receives your email knows what he or she is getting. For example, if I'd used "Forward" right after I did my earlier search, the email would say "Hey, check out the link below - it's a really cool search result for "Star Trek actor" on Spock."
Now this much alone would make Spock pretty cool and useful as a search engine. But there's a lot more going on here. Can you say web 2.0? In my next article, I'm going to continue this review by showing you how you can add and vote on tags, websites, and related people; claim your profile; and explain all those links at the upper right (your name, Favorites, History, and Settings at least; Logout should be obvious). So until tomorrow...
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