In a recent thread at Cre8asite forums, we discussed an article on 10 things the Chinese do far better than we do.

One of the innovations mentioned was “informative stop lights” that “display red or green signals in a rectangle that rhythmically shrinks down as the time remaining evaporates.” Seems like a good idea. You know as you are approaching the light , or waiting for it, how long you have until the light changes.

That roadway enhancement came to mind when I was reading about a new way of communicating information about search results described in a recently released patent from IBM. Patent 6,810,402, Method and Computer Program Product for Color Coding Search Results, provides a quick way of allowing a searcher to use colors to distinquish the value of search results.

The user of the program could set certain colors to correspond to different search terms, and when the returns of the query display, a color map would be created based upon those settings, and the results would be mapped using the different colors. In a search for more than one term, different colors could be used to show which terms were on which pages. Pages with more than one of the terms could show more than one color.

A slight variation could be added:

In other embodiments of the invention, the correlation indicator may show the frequency of occurrence or the relative frequency of occurrence of each keyword in the web page identified by the URL, rather than show just the presence or absence of the keyword as described above. For example, if a web page contained the keyword “cricket” eight times and the keyword “bat” two times, eighty percent of the visual area of the correlation indicator could be blue and twenty percent green.

That might not work well for color-blind searchers, but chances are good that an additional visual element would be added to help those users of the program.

Search could be a lot more colorful in the future, and that could be a good thing.