17 Mar 05 Amazon’s new feature - SIPs
A colleague was showing me this new feature on Amazon.com. It is called SIPs.
Amazon.com’s Statistically Improbable Phrases, or “SIPs”, show you the interesting, distinctive, or unlikely phrases that occur in the text of books in Search Inside the Book. Our computers scan the text of all books in the Search Inside program. If they find a phrase that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to how many times it occurs across all Search Inside books, that phrase is a SIP in that book.
We were wondering if SIPs could be used to automatically produce keywords for a blog or website.
Reader's Comments
Leave a Comment
Interestingly, this may be a subset of Jeff Bezos’ Amazon OpenSearch movement. See http://opensearch.a9.com/
The idea of determining keyword combinations that led to unique search results may help us to be found on the Internet. For example, my blog doesn’t get regular readers (must be really bad), but I get a lot of visits via google and other search engines. Certain articles I posted are ranked up in google because of the unique title and wording I use.
On another note:
I read your about page that you’re a teacher interested in blogs. If you are interested in social learning technology, especially on pedagogical uses of blogs, do check out Alex Halavais’ blog at http://alex.halavias.net/news/
He’s my academic advisor in the School of Informatics here in the University at Buffalo (SUNY) and we are working on a research grant that allowed us to: 1) Study the meaningfulness of blogs in teaching and learning, 2) Produce a modified blog system based on WordPress that would enable teachers to deploy for their students. It’s currently work in progress, but stay tuned.
Interesting, your project to modify Wordpress to be used in Education. One of the reasons I am interested in Blogs is because they offer such a cost effective alternative to dreamweaver that are expensive or pirated. One of the other reason is that I want my teacher and student friends in Asia talk to each other. Kids from Thailand and China could work on a project together using a wiki, Kids from India and Singapore could maintain a joint blog. These tools inherently offer collaboration.