Wednesday, January 07, 2004

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How Scott Adams Could Make (A Little) Money with A Search Feature on the Dilbert Website I was looking for a particular Dilbert I remembered, but couldn't find it, not on the www.Dilbert.com site, nor elsewhere on the web, although I remembered enough words from it that I could pretty reliably have searched out the right one, had the strips all been text-indexed. The best I could do was to find a random website that recounted, textually, the Dilbert I had in mind. This experience made me think of an idea for the Dilbert website. The text of each strip should be indexed and searchable. So, to the extent you accurately remembered the text of a Dilbert, you could be fairly confident you had found the right one, based on the text-only search results. Then, just like the archives for the New York Times and other on-line publications, you would have to pay to get the full content--in this case, the illustrated comic strip. Of course it would have to be cheap, $1 per strip at the most. (Ideally, the text might be augmented with keywords to aid in searching. For instance, perhaps there is a strip where Wally gets fired, but it doesn't actually contain the text "fired". If "fired" were added as a keyword, then a search for "Wally" + "fired" would stand a decent change of returning the strip in question.) 1:33:14 PM    comment []