If you already read the previous post -- two good reasons to kill yourself (but you haven't yet) -- then the first couple grafs below will be recap. However, I've subtly modified them to test if you're really paying attention. Now, class, #2 pencils at the ready? All right then, let us proceed... There are two fundamental ways of measuring the usefulness of search results. One is technically termed precision, the other recall. In a search that could be characterized as having optimum precision, every document returned is a document you want. However, not all  the relevant documents you want are returned. It's so simple, it's a bit hard to grasp at first. Example: let's say you search for...

narcissism "new age" race

...as I just did (we'll get to why soon), and you get six hits, every one of which is relevant. Wow! You're happy. I'm happy (we'll get to why soon). However, the thing of it is, there are actually 50 documents in the database (let's pretend) that you would have liked to see, so you're missing 44 relevant documents that you may never find -- without a lot more effort. But OK, you're tough, you're determined, you're rarin' ta go. Say you're willing to put in that extra effort.

What you want is something like Total Recall. You want to make sure that you're going to get all 50 of those relevant documents. There's a way to do this, theoretically, if you come up with the right search terms and expand them using a very well organized thesaurus of semantically related terms and don't screw up the Boolean logic of your query. Such queries begin to look a lot like LISP -- the AI programming language of choice -- lots of deeply nested parentheses and ANDs and ORs and NOTs. Usually, these queries take considerable skill to build, and even then, it's something of a crapshoot.

But lets say you're able to construct the perfect query and get that total recall -- meaning that you do in fact retrieve all 50 of those relevant docs. Great! Except not so great. Because along with them you're going to get maybe 500 documents that are just noise. They are not what you want. So now you do "have" those 50 gems, but you're going to have to laboriously sift through all of those 550 things to determine which things are the gems.

This tradeoff is essentially reciprocal: greater precision means lower recall; greater recall means lower precision. Although search researchers come up with all kinds of slick algorithms to defeat this frustrating tradeoff -- and many schemes are quite slick; Google's probably got a ton of em -- the basic law of recall v. precision stands almost as firmly as the Second Law of Thermodynamics. (We'll skip over whether entropy can, in fact, be reversed; that's grist for another blog somewhere else.)

Enough theory. Those terms above -- narcissism "new age" race -- are what I just used to search the Highbeam database. Here, you can try it yourself -- though you won't be able to read the full articles unless you've subscribed. Ah well, console yourself with this: there are no stupid queries.

I feel like a total idiot for continuing with this, but OK (if you're still tracking here), my query returns 46 documents, and the first hit is -- for my purposes anyway -- pure gold! Titled "God, the future of American politics, and dieting" by Margaret Talbot in the December 8, 1997, issue of The New Republic, it's about the babe in the previous post, Marianne Faithful Williamson. I'll be quoting from it in a minute. Or two. Or next week. As David Weinberger says at the top of his blog: "Let's just see how it goes."

But before we get to that, now let me run the exact same search -- narcissism "new age" race -- on google. That returns (as of today) 947 documents. Let's see if I can figure out if the hit I got from Highbeam is among them. I can use google's "search within results" feature to do this. I'll query for...

god future politics dieting Margaret Talbot New Republic

Bingo! Here it is -- and you didn't even need to subscribe to HighBeam to find it! Now, Patrick Spain, CEO of that illustrious organization may want to shoot me for sharing that freebee workaround with this slice of Highbeam's intended "target market" (that would be you). But I doubt it. And here are three reasons why...

1. You wouldn't have known what to query google for in the first place without the free Highbeam precis. And that might not be -- probably isn't -- enough to tell you whether the article is a gemstone or a dirt clod.
2. Yes, you will find some of the Highbeam articles free on the web -- especially news stories in large city dailies. But a) you likely won't find stories going back years unless you pay for them on a one-time or subscription basis, and b) many you won't find at all.
3. Whether or not you're successful in finding what you go looking for on google this way, it's a lot of extra work -- with no assurance it'll pay off at all.

Consider. When I first did this test last Friday night, I was a bit um confused about what the article title was. This is understandable given the way it's called out in The New Republic, which is:

So, I used other search terms (which I now can't remember), and this is a record of what happened in the rat hole I went down -- a far cry from that "Bingo!" I got above.

Begin narrative transcript...

That [meaning whatever search terms I fed to google] ought to find it if it's there. Nope. Well, OK, let's try just the author's name, Talbot. That leaves 16 of the original 947 standing. I look through them for the New Republic piece or anything that looks related. Nah. I try "Margaret Talbot" as a qualifier to whittle down the 947, and this time I get one hit. Aha! This could be it. But nothing doing. Damn.

OK, let's get more specific. Let's search directly into the New Republic site. I try this...

http://google.com/search?q=site:tnr.com+Margaret+Talbot

...and it gives me all kindsa stuff Margaret Talbot has written, but not the article I'm looking for. Double damn!

End narrative transcript.

Notice that in those 947 docs my original query returned on google, there may have been a lot more articles I would have found useful. Better recall. However, to find them, I'd have to hunt through a lot of junk I'm not even marginally interested in.

Obviously, the better recall has a lot to do with the fact that google has about a jillion more documents than does the HighBeam Research database. But HighBeam's better precision -- recall that the "pure gold" article I initially found there was hit #1 -- has a lot to do with where its documents came from: published articles.

Look, there is no bigger fan of the wild and wooly web than myself. Or damn few. But there is a hurdle to getting published, and sometimes (granted, not always, but sometimes) clearing that hurdle suggests a degree of quality that is not automatically conferred on x-random blogger with x-random opinion on x-random topic. Granted moreover that there's much of wonder and high quality on the web that will never make it into print -- and I search that stuff too. I'm not trying to be elitist here (perhaps it just comes naturally), but there is high value in finding just the thing that speaks to concerns you are -- or in my case, I am -- researching.

---

I could go on with this. In fact, I did. For days and days. But I'm a search geek. To me it's a perverse form of fun. Most people would far rather pay the 99 bucks for a year and get what they're looking for the first time.

As to the "stealth advertising" in the title of this post, it should be obvious by now that the whole thing is a pitch to subscribe to Highbeam. Not only will you be glad you did, but even more important, I'll  be glad you did. As Highbeam underwrites this blog (think $$$), it will mean that the cat and I will continue to eat and not have to go squat in the dumpster compound.

But there's another, even more stealthy, form of advertising going on here. I've been on the lookout for images I can use here on CBO without the Kopyright Kops coming after me.

So I became an affiliate at allposters.com. Therefore, the cool images you see here -- I'm particularly fond of the Borax miners -- are all straight-up street legal. Click through on a few. They're ads. Who woulda guessed, huh?

As to the Cluelessness poster, well... me and despair go way  back.

Oh yeah, and next time I'll tell you why I was so excited about finding the review of that book by Marianne Faithful Williamson. Because sometimes, to find real treasure, you just have to dig deeper.

It's been a while, hasn't it? Too long, I know. But listen, it's because I been busy cooking up all sortsa new stuff -- what we useta call "content" -- for y'all. No, really. Busier'n a one-legged man in an ass-kickin contest. Would I lie to you? Yes, I would. But in this case, you should take what I'm sayin here as gospel. OK, then.

Now the first reason referred to in the subject slug above is this fairly mind-blowing statistic from the Amazon page for Hunter Thompson's book, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. You ready? Well, here she is then:

For those of you unfamiliar with Amazon's sales-ranking scheme, this means that Fear & Loathing has reentered (if it was ever there) the Top 20 books being sold today. I just popped over to Barnes & Noble to check it there. Hmmm, only a disappointing #38. But still...

So there's reason #1 to off yourself, though this one only works for published authors (I'm thinkin, I'm thinkin). Plus, it really only pays out for your heirs, if any. However, I imagine our Good Doctor looking down from some utterly stoned-out Heaven and laughing his ass off at his posthumous sales numbers. And that's all I'm going to say about HST here this week. Actually, forever. RIP, dude, and congrats on the fat royalty check!

Reason #2 is not quite so factoidinal. Not hardly. In fact, reason #2 is what I've been working on in the background since last Friday night, if you can believe it. But yes, it's true; being single and undesirable gives me a lot more time than most people would be able to devote to this sort of pursuit -- though I'm sure there are many of you out there on fast-failing weekend dates who envy my wide-open options. In this case, to stay home and curl up with a nice warm HighBeam interface and like, you know, do research! Yeah well, here's what I started writing nearly a week ago now...

She's a babe. No doubt about it. But in the tradition I've established here in the past few months (and elsewhere online in the past ten years), let me digress at the outset and get it over with. We'll come back to the lovely Marianne Williamson, for that's who she is, momentarily.

Momentarily, sure. I wrote another 800 words after that, and never did quite make it back to Marianne. I sorta drifted off in a lengthy meditation-cum-experiment having to do with the process of search itself. I'm sure you're all waiting with bated breath (and yes, it's bated, not "baited" -- ugh, what an image! -- though you see that written all the time on the good old internet). Anyway, it's still not finished, the whole gonzo suicide thing having intervened.

So what we have here is a failure to communicate.

Cool Hand Luke notwithstanding, this monster-in-the-background has now grown into not just one, but two unposted posts, which I hope to have up here soon (and with all this preamble, you damn well better like em). Meanwhile, the only hints I'll give you are...

1. Marianne Faithful Williamson is the author of A Return to Love -- one of my favorite books to hate. And,
2. the following, which is the next bit I wrote last Friday evening right after the babe-intro bit quoted above...

First, let's talk about two fundamental ways of measuring the usefulness of search results. One is technically termed precision, the other recall. In a search that could be characterized as having optimum precision, every document returned is a document you want. However, not all the documents you want are returned. It's so simple, it's a bit hard to grasp at first. Example: let's say you search for...

narcissism "new age" race

...as I just did (we'll get to why later), and you get six hits, every one of which is relevant. Wow! You're happy. I'm happy (we'll get to why later). But the thing is, there are actually 50 documents in the database that you would have liked to see, so you're missing 44 relevant documents that you may never find -- without a lot more effort.

OK, say you're willing to put in the extra effort. What you want is something like Total Recall...

So that's where the fateful diversion started to divert. And now I'm going to have to rewrite the lede when I finally post the damn thing. Or, I should say, things. The first will be about search, and the second about Marianne Faithful Williamson, who was, for some reason I no longer recall, the inspiration for that Who quote at the top of this. Hell, she doesn't even have blue eyes!

And now, if you'll forgive me, I have just enough time to take a bath before going to see my psychotherapist. Oh no, I'm late, I'm late...

I've been getting many letters of condolence -- emails of condolence, actually -- regarding the death of Hunter S. Thompson. Now, you may fairly ask: why's that? Good question. The answer, I guess, is that I once tried mightily to convey the crucial importance of Thompson's core "theory" of writing, which came to be called gonzo journalism. However, as I did this in a "marketing" book, I was concerned -- fearful, you could say -- as to what his reaction might be. Unless he told one of you, and you tell me, I'll never know. I never met the man, never even spoke with him.

The reason for the quotation marks, above, is that gonzo wasn't a theory  for the good Doctor. He lived it. And Gonzo Marketing wasn't so much about marketing  as about voice -- that indefinable quality of communication that unmistakably signals it's coming from a human being. But not just any old garden-variety human. This is where the indefinable part comes in. And the risk of a perversely inverted elitism. It's simply not possible to weigh or measure voice, but chances are good (if you're not dead from the neck up and the waist down) you'll know it when you hear it. Thompson had voice.

In December, 2001, USA Today wrote:

[Locke's] solution is Gonzo, borrowing a term associated with over-the-top journalist Hunter S. Thompson. (If your pop-culture references are hazy, think back to the early 1970s Rolling Stone and such books as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Putting Thompson's spirit behind Web marketing isn't that far-fetched, given that Thompson is now writing a weekly column, "Hey, Rube," for ESPN online.)

Gonzo involves passionate engagement, not detachment. It means getting to know the people to whom you are marketing -- literally talking to them (or at least exchanging e-mail).

from: Get personal to market on Web by Bruce Rosenstein
source: USA Today, 10 December 2001
via: HighBeam Research

His ESPN column wasn't the point. The second paragraph, however, was -- especially if you change "marketing" to writing, and "e-mail" to fax. I was never a big fan of Thompson's "mojo wire" (the fax machine he so loved) but neither have I been as big a fan of marketing as some seem to believe. Gonzo Marketing was in fact an anti-marketing book. Here's a clip from the inside front flap...

I was searching the web for a copy of the passage where Thompson comes down from Woody Creek, CO -- just a couple hours from where I live in Boulder -- and shoots me, kills me -- with a shotgun, of course -- for writing about him in a business book. I didn't find the exact bit I was looking for (though you can [barely] read it in this atrocious scan), but I did come across this review of Gonzo Marketing on Tom Matrullo's old  blog...

On one level, Gonzo is a mythic tale of the reallocation of voice. The power to speak that the giants of mass marketing and mass media tore from us -- the rape of voice -- is envisioned restored to the multifarious intelligences of the Net. In turn, the corporate Frankensteins are stripped of speech: Gonzo's autopsy fails to find any sign of the heart where voice resides.

It is a cautionary and arresting tale. At its edge, the author gets blown away for stealing voice -- the same crime corporations are charged with. Of course, the author is authoring the scene of his execution. As he lies mangled and bloody, his Sony XBR TV tries to mate with him. It's a hoot, right? The pulverizing violence is just pulp. Just fiction. Not to worry...

Mitch Ratcliffe writes earlier today of Thompson: "If you'd tried to claim him as your own in his lifetime without draining your life force into your writing first, well, Thompson would have done you violence."

I was actually quite concerned about that last bit, yes. But I guess there's no need, as Tom says, too worry now. Too late. Ah, too too late. And I think if there's a reason HST killed himself, I mean, if he really meant to do that, it was some manner of long-delayed reaction to what he describes in this -- to me, the most arresting -- passage of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

"The writer must be a participant in the scene, while he's writing it." Hunter S. Thompson 1939 - 2005 respect

Dr. Hunter S.Thompson -- pioneer of the techniques of gonzo journalism -- has his blood up. On sports writers: "A kind of rude and brainless sub-culture of fat, fascist drunks". On politics: "The whole Bush family, from, I believe, Texas, should be boiled in poisoned oil."

from: Dr. Hunter S.Thompson - pioneer of gonzo journalism
by Sam Leith
source: Daily Telegraph (London), 2 December 2000
via: HighBeam Research
Copyright © 2000 Daily Telegraph

---

Author Hunter S. Thompson is as famous for his antics as his works. He was one of the pioneers of New Journalism, and his work 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas' is being rereleased in 1996 for its 25th anniversary. Thompson has written most of his life and lives an isolated life.

Hunter S. Thompson joins the ranks of the classics

We're In Dr. Hunter S. Thompson's New York hotel suite when the coughing starts to take hold. A terrible pipe-induced death rattle. It turns his bald head blood-red and doesn't go away until the notoriously hard-living "doctor" of gonzo journalism swigs a mouthful of Chivas Regal, gargles with it, then lets out a earsplitting screech to clear his throat. "HAAIIIEEEE!!" Let the interview begin.

At 11:30 p.m., HST is just starting to recover from the previous night's festivities, a tony booze-up celebrating the 25th anniversary of his revolutionary book, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas." (Opening line: "We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.") Originally published in Rolling Stone, this hallucinogenic postcard from the edge has just been reissued in a Modern Library edition, alongside "Moby-Dick" and Proust. An audio adaptation is out this week. And next spring Villard will roll out volume one of Thompson's letters...

The imprimatur of literary eminence means Thompson, 59, is officially respected -- if not quite respectable. Upon arriving in New York last week, he unloaded a fire extinguisher on Rolling Stone Editor in Chief Jann Wenner. During the party, held at the stuffy Lotos Club, he kept attacking people with a noisemaking plastic hammer. He grabbed his old friend Tom Wolfe, still recovering from triple-bypass heart surgery, in a chokehold. "One of the few writers who comes as advertised," Wolfe said after the assault. Among the old lions of New Journalism (George Plimpton et al.), a couple of junior Hollywood hangers-on paid homage. Johnny Depp, with Kate Moss. Matt Dillon. Mick Jagger came late, after Thompson had already fled to his hotel. During the hard-core afterparty in his suite he passed out in the bathtub, bringing to mind the epigraph from Dr. Johnson with which "Fear and Loathing" begins: "He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man."

from: The doctor is still in: Hunter S. Thompson joins the ranks of the classics by Rick Marin
source: Newsweek, 25 November 1996
via: HighBeam Research
Copyright © 1996 Newsweek, Inc.