Livery for a Lackey

Livery for a Lackey of the Counts of Attems
Austria, c. 1820
Mont. Dep. Inv. No. N 63 1

As was done at court, the nobility dressed its servants in livery, usually in the colours of the coat of arms of the family concerned. Thus a keen observer could immediately recognise from the livery whose servant it was.

The livery depicted here, that of a lackey of the counts of Attems, is one of the few examples preserved from the early 19th century. It consists of a coat of yellow cloth, decorated with wide blue and white silk edging with a floral pattern, as well as a waistcoat of light-yellow cloth with silver edging and silver-plated buttons.

Googlelinking: Let's Feel Lucky

It's possible to compose a URL that mimics the effect of the Google "I'm feeling lucky" button. For example, the URL

http://www.google.com/search?q='Albert Einstein'&btnI=Google+Search

will immediately transfer you to the web page that Google currently considers best for the term Albert Einstein (to see that this works, copy the URL into the address bar of your browser).

I call it Googlelinking, and I think it's a useful possible solution to linkrot. The (current) top-ranked Google site for "linkrot" explains:

6% of the links on the Web are broken according to a recent survey by Terry Sullivan's All Things Web. Even worse, linkrot in May 1998 was double that found by a similar survey in August 1997.

Linkrot definitely reduces the usability of the Web, being cited as one of the biggest problems in using the Web by 60% of the users in the October 1997 GVU survey. This percentage was up from "only" 50% in the April 1997 survey. Users get irritated when they attempt to go somewhere, only to get their reward snatched away at the last moment by a 404 or other incomprehensible error message.

When you Googlelink, you push off the problem of keeping your links up to date onto Google itself, which is likely to do a much better job than you, anyway.

I first experimented with Googlelinking over two years ago in my random person generator, and it still works. So perhaps the risk that Google will change the input URL format is small.

Now what I need to do is write a web form that will spit out an appropriate HTML Googlelink for an input search term. Then I wouldn't have to keep refiguring out the appropriate syntax when I want to use this technique in my own web pages.

Maybe tomorrow.

Note added 26 June 2004: I started an experiment to googlelink the Mathematical Subject Areas used by the American Math Society and other organizations to classify mathematical literature. Unfortunately, it's looking like a huge task to complete it—I had no idea how many different subareas of mathematics there were—but I am pleased with how it is turning out, as far as I've gotten. I need to find a better way to automate the creation of the googlelinks).