Regular Expression Tutorial - Learn How to Use Regular Expressions

Basically, a regular expression is a pattern describing a certain amount of text. Their name comes from the mathematical theory on which they are based. In this tutorial, I will teach you all you need to know to be able to craft powerful time-saving regular expressions. I will start with the most basic concepts, so that you can follow this tutorial even if you know nothing at all about regular expressions yet.

RegularExpressions.info. Reference>Editing>Search>Regular Expressions

Regular Expression

regular expressions provide a concise and flexible means for identifying strings of text of interest, such as particular characters, words, or patterns of characters. Regular expressions (abbreviated as regex or regexp, with plural forms regexes, regexps, or regexen) are written in a formal language that can be interpreted by a regular expression processor, a program that either serves as a parser generator or examines text and identifies parts that match the provided specification.

Wikipedia. Reference>Editing>Search>Regular Expressions

Regular Expressions - a Simple User Guide

There is no gentle beginning to regular expressions. You are either into hieroglyphics big time - in which case you will love this stuff - or you need to use them in which case a headache may be your only reward.

Zytrax (2009). Articles>Editing>Search>Regular Expressions

Searching Help: Don’t Even Go There

Web site user assistance that consistently exceeds customer’s expectations can catapult your company to legendary status and create brand equity you can measure in billions of dollars. However, making Help a strategic asset for your company is an arduous task. To shed light on this important topic, I have teamed up with Tricia Clement, a renowned cognitive psychologist and Web site user assistance expert. In this month’s Search Matters column, we’ll deliver actionable insights about Web site user assistance.

Nudelman, Greg and Tricia Clement. UXmatters (2009). Articles>Documentation>Help>Search

Web Object Retrieval  

The primary function of current Web search engines is essentially relevance ranking at the document level. However, myriad structured information about real-world objects is embedded in static Web pages and online Web databases. Document-level information retrieval can unfortunately lead to highly inaccurate relevance ranking in answering object-oriented queries. In this paper, we propose a paradigm shift to enable searching at the object level. In traditional information retrieval models, documents are taken as the retrieval units and the content of a document is considered reliable. However, this reliability assumption is no longer valid in the object retrieval context when multiple copies of information about the same object typically exist. These copies may be inconsistent because of diversity of Web site qualities and the limited performance of current information extraction techniques. If we simply combine the noisy and inaccurate attribute information extracted from different sources, we may not be able to achieve satisfactory retrieval performance. In this paper, we propose several language models for Web object retrieval, namely an unstructured object retrieval model, a structured object retrieval model, and a hybrid model with both structured and unstructured retrieval features. We test these models on a paper search engine and compare their performances. We conclude that the hybrid model is the superior by taking into account the extraction errors at varying levels.

Nie, Zaiqing, Yunxiao Ma, Shuming Shi, Ji-Rong Wen and Wei-Ying Ma. WWW 2007 (2007). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Search

The Discoverability of the Web  

Previous studies have highlighted the high arrival rate of new content on the web. We study the extent to which this new content can be efficiently discovered by a crawler. Our study has two parts. First, we study the inherent difficulty of the discovery problem using a maximum cover formulation, under an assumption of perfect estimates of likely sources of links to new content. Second, we relax this assumption and study a more realistic setting in which algorithms must use historical statistics to estimate which pages are most likely to yield links to new content. We recommend a simple algorithm that performs comparably to all approaches we consider. We measure the overhead of discovering new content, de- fined as the average number of fetches required to discover one new page. We show first that with perfect foreknowledge of where to explore for links to new content, it is possible to discover 90% of all new content with under 3% overhead, and 100% of new content with 9% overhead. But actual algorithms, which do not have access to perfect foreknowl- edge, face a more difficult task: one quarter of new content is simply not amenable to efficient discovery. Of the re- maining three quarters, 80% of new content during a given week may be discovered with 160% overhead if content is recrawled fully on a monthly basis.

Dasgupta, Anirban, Arpita Ghosh, Ravi Kumar, Christopher Olston, Sandeep Pandey and Andrew Tomkins. WWW 2007 (2007). Articles>Web Design>Search>Information Design

Analysis, Plus Synthesis: Turning Data into Insights

In this article, I will outline an approach to gleaning insights from primary qualitative research data. This article is not a how-to for creating the design tools that are often the outputs of primary qualitative user research—such as personas, mental models, or user scenarios. Instead, it identifies an approach to generating overarching insights, regardless of the design tool you want to create.

Ellerby, Lindsay. UXmatters (2009). Articles>User Centered Design>Interviewing>Research

What's Cognitive About Rhetoric?

Our capacity for mimesis -- the capacity to represent experiences and states-of-affairs in iconic and indexical formats under strict bodily control -- molds later symbolic thought and action. Culture is not the initial product of language, language is the product of a particular manifestation of Mimetic Culture.

Van Evera Oakley, Todd. Social Science Research Network (2008). Articles>Rhetoric>Research>Cognitive Psychology

Making $10,000 a Pixel: Optimizing Thumbnail Images in Search Results

In search results, the old adage a picture is worth a thousand words rings true. When it comes to making your search results more efficient to use, more relevant, and more attractive, images reign supreme. There is simply nothing else on your search results pages that can come close to offering the same potential as thumbnail images for dramatically increasing your conversion rates and revenues.

Nudelman, Greg. UXmatters (2009). Articles>Web Design>Graphic Design>Search

So What IS User Requirements Gathering?

Requirements gathering is all about aiming at the right target. It doesn't matter how accurate you are, if you aim at the wrong target, you miss.

Frontend Infocentre (2009). Articles>Usability>Research>Functional Specifications

Ten Remarkably Effective Strategies for Driving Traffic

In the last six months, we've been lucky enough to help quite a few companies and websites drive significant traffic to their sites. Many of these campaigns have been constructed around the goal of building search engine rankings, as this is our primary business, but we've also found that our ability has given us great power in the fields of brand-awareness and marketing overall. Thus, the following ten processes are primarily about building traffic and through it, attention.

SEOmoz (2006). Articles>Web Design>Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Ranking Factors

This document represents the collective wisdom of 37 leaders in the world of organic search engine optimization. Together, they have voted on the various factors that are estimated to comprise Google's ranking algorithm (the method by which the search engine orders results). The result is a resource of incredible value - although not every one of the estimated 200+ ranking elements are included, it is my opinion that 90-95% of the knowledge required about Google's algorithm is contained below.

SEOmoz (2008). Articles>Web Design>Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization Through Accessibility: How Designing Accessible Websites Leads to Automatic SEO

This presentation describes how creating an accessible website takes care of its (organic) search engine optimization to a very appreciable extent taking reference from the WCAG 2.0 working draft and the Google webmaster guidelines.This presentation was created and presented by Abhay Rautela to the Sapient creative community at the New Delhi office in February 2007.

Rautela, Abhay. Cone Trees (2007). Presentations>Web Design>Accessibility>Search Engine Optimization

Guesses vs. Data as Basis for Design Recommendations

Even the tiniest amount of empirical facts (say, observing 2 users) vastly improves the probability of making correct UI design decisions.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2009). Articles>Web Design>Usability>Research

Designing for Faceted Search

Faceted search, or guided navigation, has become the de facto standard for e-commerce and product-related websites, from big box stores to product review sites. But e-commerce sites aren’t the only ones joining the facets club. Other content-heavy sites such as media publishers (e.g. Financial Times: ft.com), libraries (e.g. NCSU Libraries: lib.ncsu.edu/), and even non-profits (e.g. Urban Land Institute: uli.org) are tapping into faceted search to make their often broad-range of content more findable. Essentially, faceted search has become so ubiquitous that users are not only getting used to it, they are coming to expect it.

Lemieux, Stephanie. User Interface Engineering (2009). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Search

Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship    

Online journals promise to serve more information to more dispersed audiences and are more efficiently searched and recalled. But because they are used differently than print—scientists and scholars tend to search electronically and follow hyperlinks rather than browse or peruse—electronically available journals may portend an ironic change for science. Using a database of 34 million articles, their citations (1945 to 2005), and online availability (1998 to 2005), I show that as more journal issues came online, the articles referenced tended to be more recent, fewer journals and articles were cited, and more of those citations were to fewer journals and articles. The forced browsing of print archives may have stretched scientists and scholars to anchor findings deeply into past and present scholarship. Searching online is more efficient and following hyperlinks quickly puts researchers in touch with prevailing opinion, but this may accelerate consensus and narrow the range of findings and ideas built upon.

Evans, James A. Science (2008). Articles>Research>Publishing>Online

Blasts from the Past

It does not matter if they were published 10 years ago or 100 years ago, old scientific papers may be more important than you think.

Marx, Werner and Manuel Cardona. Physics World (2004). Articles>Scientific Communication>History>Research

Moving into User Research: Establishing Design Guidelines

The best technical writers do user research to understand the audience for their documentation, create user profiles or personas, perform task analyses, and do usability testing to ensure that their documentation meets users’ needs. All of these are activities in which a user researcher engages. Thus, as a technical writer, you can start amassing experience in user research and building a portfolio of user research documentation.

Six, Janet M. UXmatters (2009). Articles>User Experience>Research>Technical Writing

Indexing the Web—It’s Not Just Google’s Business

Web databases do much more than passively store information. Part of their power comes from indexing records efficiently. An index serves as a map, identifying the precise location of a small piece of data in a much larger pile. For example, when I search for “web development,” Google identifies two hundred million results and displays the first ten—in a quarter of a second. But Google isn’t loading every one of those pages and scanning their contents when I perform my search: they’ve analyzed the pages ahead of time and matched my search terms against an index that only references the original content.

Mullican, Lyle. List Apart, A (2009). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Search Engine Optimization

Your Website is a Satellite. Contextual Search is the Sun

The internet is more like the heliocentric model championed by Galileo, with search as the sun. It is an ever-growing collection of distribution channels, each with their own audience, revolving around an increasingly contextual search experience. It’s time to expand your perspective to account for this. But, like Galileo, you may have a hard time with the authorities as you start to act on this understanding.

Tipping Point Labs (2009). Articles>Web Design>Search>Search Engine Optimization

The Illusion of SEO vs. the Reality of Great Content

SEO techniques will increase your search rankings and SEM will get you traffic on the top search engines. But a boatload of quality content will also accomplish these things and prepare you for the more contextual future of search.

Tipping Point Labs (2009). Articles>Web Design>Content Management>Search Engine Optimization

Is Your Key Content Drowning in News?

Many web editors spend a lot of their time writing news stories for the company web site. However, traffic analysis frequently reveals that this content is not very popular - and that users may in fact miss the key content they come to find (product data, addresses etc.) because it's practically drowning in news stories.

Furu, Nina. Content Strategy (2005). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Search Engine Optimization

How To Get Better Search Engine Rankings

If your company web site is currently not ranking well at search engines, you are missing out on a vital source of web traffic. Here are some tips for improving your search engine rankings yourself (without hiring a search engine optimization company).

Content Strategy (2007). Articles>Web Design>Search Engine Optimization

The Web Developer's SEO Cheat Sheet

The ten essential categories for good optimization are: important HTML tags, search engine indexing limits, title tag syntax, common canonical issues, 301 redirects on Apache, search engine robot user agents, common robot traps to avoid, robot meta tags syntax, robots.txt syntax and site map syntax.

Dover, Danny. SEOmoz (2008). Articles>Web Design>Search Engine Optimization