![\"\"](\"http:\/\/farm4.static.flickr.com\/3240\/3010138009_34ace2b75b.jpg\" "\\"Matthew")
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This is a pretty long post based on a chat with the BBC\u2019s head of search. If you\u2019re interested in search, though, I reckon it\u2019s worth ploughing through. I really learnt a lot from talking to Matt McDonnell: he has a very interesting and very important job working right at the heart of the future BBC.<\/p>\n
Search as a gateway to everything Matt didn\u2019t want me to call him \u2018head of search\u2019. It’s not his job title and it sounded like \u201chagiography\u201d to him. Still, he is in charge of search and I reckon he has a reasonable claim to the title \u2018most important person at the BBC\u2019 right now. I\u2019m pretty sure the BBC org chart doesn\u2019t reflect that, though, and I\u2019m also sure that there are plenty of BBC executives who\u2019ve never heard of him.<\/p>\n As the old ways into BBC content fade, search becomes more important. It\u2019s a reasonable assumption that search will be the primary gateway to all BBC content within a few years, including<\/em> the stuff that goes out on the linear channels (BBC1, BBC2, Radio 1, Radio 2 etc.). The channels themselves are already losing their gateway function. Viewers and listeners are much less likely to use a channel as a way into an evening\u2019s viewing than they were in the pre-digital era. Themes, personalities, strong programme brands: all are becoming more important than channels. This, for instance, is one of the reasons for the BBC\u2019s growing investment in top talent: Jonathan Ross may be an expensive presenter but he\u2019s pretty economical when considered as a gateway to BBC content (at least when he\u2019s not on suspension for being an arse).<\/p>\n On iPlayer, for instance, the channels already play a reduced part in programme selection. Programmes are still organised by channel but that\u2019s an arbitrary echo of the BBC\u2019s org chart: there\u2019s no good reason to classify television content by linear channel once it\u2019s online but nervous channel controllers insist on superimposing the channel name on shows that go out on iPlayer: they fear that their carefully commissioned and scheduled content has been stirred into an undifferentiated soup of shows and that the investment they\u2019ve made in their channel\u2019s brand will be wasted. But users conditioned by exposure to YouTube and MySpace and Google probably don\u2019t even see the channel ident.<\/p>\n Likewise, the BBC\u2019s homepage may be one of the most important in Britain but a growing proportion of users don\u2019t use it to locate content: they find the stuff they want via a search, either using the site\u2019s search field or by searching at Google or Yahoo or ask.com. Sitting next to Matt at his desk in White City it was revealing to watch his own navigation habits: every page he showed me was located via a search, even pages at his own site\u2014no bookmarks, no browsing and no typing in the address field. When search is good enough it replaces all three.<\/p>\n Matt\u2019s just coming to the end of a big programme of work that will sharply reduce the emphasis on web search at bbc.co.uk. The fact is that the BBC\u2019s early ambition to \u2018own\u2019 UK web search has probably held the Corporation back from implementing really good site search and useful content structure so this is a big relief. And here\u2019s a truly fascinating aside: when you search the web at bbc.co.uk, the top three results are often sites selected by BBC editors (here\u2019s an example: asthma<\/a>). Until recently these results were labelled as such (something like \u2018best links\u2019) but Matt\u2019s team just removed the label.<\/p>\n The high quality, editor-selected results are still there<\/em>, right at the top of the list but since the label was removed the click-through rate for these links has actually gone up substantially! Users weren\u2019t clicking on the hand-selected links because they were suspicious that they might be sponsored links. They had learnt from exposure to Google and other search engines that the \u2018special\u2019 links at the top of the list are qualitatively different from the others and were avoiding them for that reason. Fascinating and counter-intuitive.<\/strong><\/p>\n Topics<\/strong><\/p>\n Another major initiative from the search team involves the creation of ‘topics’ pages: useful pages of information assembled from BBC sources and elsewhere about specific subjects. Topics is still in beta: you can check out the handful of hand-coded topics pages here<\/a>. Many more are planned and what’s fascinating is that about 95% of them will be automatically generated.<\/p>\n This is all pretty hardcore semantic web stuff. The BBC topics starts by crawling Wikipedia<\/a> daily and pulling in new pages created since the last visit. Wikipedia provides authority here: confirming that a topic is real (not that it\u2019s relevant or useful: just that it exists) and doing \u2018disambiguation\u2019\u2014sorting out the 19 different places called Rome<\/a>, for instance. If the system finds a new entry at Wikipedia it then searches the BBC for information that\u2019s similar to the Wikipedia entry\u2014using Wikipedia\u2019s text as a \u2018training document\u2019. If it finds none then no page is created: the topic is obviously not of sufficient relevance. If it finds content\u2014news stories, programme pages, whatever\u2014it generates a new topic page. John Muth, one of the developers working on the system, says he expects there to be tens of thousands of topic pages pretty soon after launch.<\/p>\n The result will be thousands of new pages, an extraordinarily rich information asset that exposes a lot of authoritative BBC content that would otherwise have been neglected or even lost. This is going to be a real public service win and – let’s face it – a much better idea than trying to make bbc.co.uk a destination for web search. Live syndication of Wikipedia content will also mean that the topic pages improve as Wikipedia does (although pages needn\u2019t use Wikipedia content). Further (the semantic web is a mighty rich and interwoven thing), people will be able to syndicate the BBC topics pages for their own use: they will be published under a Creative Commons licence like the hundreds of thousands of artist pages in the \/music<\/a> hierarchy. Tools will be provided and schools and libraries or even businesses will be able to build useful information resources of their own by tapping into this clever blend of content from the BBC and the commons.<\/strong><\/p>\n And video too<\/strong><\/p>\n This all gets even more exciting when you add the potential to search the hundreds of thousands of hours of video produced by the BBC annually. Matt\u2019s team is currently testing a system that analyses video files, creating a transcript that can then be indexed and added to the web of content on the topic pages. The transcript can also be used to \u2018chapterise\u2019 the video itself so users can jump to a particular part of the video based on the transcript.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s face it: once the BBC\u2019s audio and video content\u2014the Corporation\u2019s crown jewels obviously\u2014has been opened up to search there\u2019s really no further argument: It\u2019s game over. All other gateways to the BBC\u2019s content will be officially obsolete and search will have won. Maybe I should keep my mouth shut.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This is a pretty long post based on a chat with the BBC\u2019s head of search. If you\u2019re interested in search, though, I reckon it\u2019s worth ploughing through. I really learnt a lot from talking to Matt McDonnell: he has a very interesting and very important job working right at the heart of the future […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[4,8,118,117],"class_list":["post-160","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-bbc","tag-commonplatform","tag-matt-mcdonnell","tag-search"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/commonplatform.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/commonplatform.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/commonplatform.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commonplatform.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commonplatform.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=160"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/commonplatform.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":164,"href":"https:\/\/commonplatform.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160\/revisions\/164"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/commonplatform.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=160"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commonplatform.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=160"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commonplatform.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=160"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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