New Acronym Finder search features!

Happy New Year everyone! We've just rolled out several new and improved search features for Acronym Finder.

Rank
One change you'll see to an acronym search result is a new column called "Rank". Rank is our measure of the relative "commonness", "popularity" or "relevance" of the meaning of an acronym. You'll see that the results are sorted by decreasing rank, which means the most commonly used meanings will be listed first. You can re-sort the list with an alphabetical sort if you like and you'll still be able to see each meaning's rank.

Rank is available in normal acronym searches, and "word in meaning" (reverse lookup) searches.

Categories
Though we've had a good bit of our database categorized for awhile, we didn't have very effective ways of using these categories to filter the results. The table of search results now has tabs at the top showing the categories and how many definitions we have in each category. The default search shows all definitions. Click on the text in a category to show only the definitions from that category using the default rank order, as above.

The ranking of terms also applies within each Category filter. The category tabs also work in both acronym and word in meaning searches.

Summary
We think these new search features will dramatically improve your ability to quickly find what you're looking for at Acronym Finder. Try a few searches to see how to combine the ranking and filters.

Please let us know if there are improvements we can make to these search features or if you have any ideas about new features to improve the usefulness of Acronym Finder.

Improved results paging

We've improved the way you can page through our search results.

In addition to the Next page and Previous page we had previously, you can now jump to any result page just by clicking on the page number. You can see the links for paging through results at the bottom of the table of acronyms/meanings.

Thanks to a number of users for suggesting this feature!

Louisville Technology Acronym Bee (LTAB)

Recently we were excited to learn of a very cool fund-raising event for the National Center for Family Literacy (NCFL), based in Louisville, Kentucky.

The Peak 10 Louisville Technology Acronym Bee (LTAB) is similar to the numerous successful corporate spelling bees held in communities around the nation every year. However, instead of spelling obscure words, adults participating in LTAB define obscure technology acronyms! The participants are made up of corporate teams and compete for a winning title, prizes, the LTAB Champion Trophy Cup and bragging rights. All of the proceeds will benefit Louisville’s own nationally recognized National Center for Family Literacy.

The Third Annual Peak 10 LTAB was held on October 20th at Louisville Slugger Field. More than 200 peole attended the event that raised more than $15,000 for the National Center for Family Literacy. For the third year in a row, Appriss Inc. won the competition against a field of 21 corporate teams. Click here for a photo.

We're very interested in becoming a sponsor for this event in 2006. Watch this space!

Another new spam-related acronym: Splog

There's a new variation of spam appearing, called splog. Splogs are blogs created purely to promote a product or website, in other words, spam.

I noticed this the very first time I used Google's relatively new Blog Search. I got hundreds of hits from "blogs" that were nothing more than scraped content published in a blog. This will be a very serious problem for blog application providers, blog publishers and blog search engines. Google's own free Blogger/BlogSpot has become a haven for spammers who use blogs for spamming purposes. Google's Blogger API made it possible for spammers to recently create 13,000 splogs, creating huge problems for blogosphere search engines and users alike.

Here's an article from the Wall Street Journal about splog: 'Splogs' Roil Web, and Some Blame Google

Here's another recent article from eWEEK: Blog Spammers Take Aim at Google

The other spam-related problem with regard to blogs is the link spam or comment spam; visitors (or bots) leaving spam comments or links on legitimate blogs.

The term is described in more detail at Wikipedia

Seen a UFO lately?

OK, who hasn't heard of UFO meaning Unidentified Flying Object? We just added a new definition for UFO today. In this case UFO stands for United Flying Octogenarians.

UFO is a national organization of pilots in their eighties. The organization was started in California in 1982 with 16 charter members, who, unfortunately are no longer with us. The group currently has almost 500 members all over the US, but also has members in Canada and several other countries. There is also a growing number of women in the group. The oldest actively flying member will turn 100 in December 2005!

UFO is now informally run by retired Air Force member Herbert Sloane in Montgomery, Alabama. Mr. Sloane estimates that the total number of flying hours of all members of UFO is probably over 500,000 hours. Now that's what I call experience!

UFO has a brand new website, but as I write this, it doesn't have any content yet. You can visit United Flying Octogenarians at http://www.unitedflyingoctogenarians.org/