By Alice Swanberg, of Searchme’s Search Quality department. Alice is a librarian who is responsible for creating, organizing and training the categories that you see on Searchme.

In the last post, I described how categorization has worked in the past. When we started to build the categories for Searchme, we knew that we didn’t want to make users climb up and down branches on a tree to find their sites. Instead, the categories needed to come to them. Furthermore, the categories needed to be useful to web searchers, not academics or search engine employees. Finally, we decided that our categories should not be based on what had gone before, nor on topics that we felt we should have, nor on topics of which we were very fond.

Instead, we went to the Web to look at sites where users were contributing content and tags. This information told us which words people used to describe things, what they were interested in, and where the most interest was. We aggregated all of the tags, common searches, and “folksonomy” data that we could find and spent some time organizing and studying it.

The next step was to decide which of these categories were mutually exclusive and which went together. Then we pulled them all into a category structure that could be used to help the classification system make sense of our search index.

The categories that you see while using Searchme represent just the tip of the iceberg. Each one is being supported by a batch of subcategories that work to clarify, expand, and constrain its meaning. And we can keep building these out as we note problems with a particular category’s breadth or precision.

How will we spot these problems, you ask? We’re watching your feedback! Thank you to everyone who has sent us praise, but especially to those who tell us what we could do better. We’re also watching the searches as they come in, so we can identify the searches in which the categories are not disambiguating well enough.

It’s exciting stuff, and it means that over time, our categories will get even better. We’ll improve the categories we already have, and we’ll add the categories that can help out searches. So please keep sending us feedback!