[Esip-discovery] time for new challenges?

[Lynnes, Christopher S. (GSFC-6102)]

On Dec 20, 2012, at 9:12 AM, "Lynnes, Christopher S. (GSFC-6102)" <christopher.s.lynnes at nasa.gov> wrote:

>> Yep, this is the classic difference between "vertical" (specialized) and
>> "horizontal" (general) search engines. This is why e.g., Fandango has its
>> own *way* better search for movies, than e.g., Google would for the same.
> 
> However, newbie data users don't know to go to the vertical search engine in the first place.  The bottom line, therefore is this:
> 
> How can I make my web application / portal show up in the first page of a Google or Bing search, assuming a minimum amount of user pre-knowledge and using fairly general words like "rainfall", "snow", etc.  (i.e., without specific acronyms).
> 
> That said, I think Pedro and Ruth may be onto something with the ideas of datacasting (to increase the static universe of pages likely to be indexed and thus more chance of coming up top in the hits) and rich OpenSearch responses (which again, may be simply static datacasts as well.
> 
> (As a side note:  I'm also happy to report that this discussion has made me realize how we can provide a fully open API to Giovanni as a service. Which now seems so blindingly obvious, I just want to say "Duh".)
> 
> Anyway, we are going to talk Grand Challenges at ESIP, so I would like to put this out there as a possibility.  Also, keeping in mind that as good as the suggestions in this discussion are, I would be interested in seeing how we might obtain numerical evidence as to how well they work in real life with Google and Bing.

To carry this just one step further, I had an email conversation with Faisal Hossain (author of the BAMS editorial), where he noted that other sites (JPL's DRIP) are also difficult to find with general terms in Google, and asked me if I could do anything about them too.  My initial response was "only so much" based on the theory that there's no reason the other sites should listen to me, they don't all participate in ESIP, blah, blah, blah.  

But maybe that is a cop-out on my part.  Is there any reason why a third party (like, I don't know, ESIP?) can't put content out on the web referencing such portals / applications with rich metadata content, thus raising their profile in the Google search results? This might be a way to tackle the "long tail" of portal / application providers, without requiring too much of said long-tail, who by definition have limited resources.

We have a couple ways we could do it, such as:
o  data casting (collection level)
o  ESIP Geoportal
o  maybe even an ESIP OpenSearch reference implementation (no, does not exist yet, but might be useful on two counts)
--
Dr. Christopher Lynnes, NASA/GSFC, ph: 301-614-5185