This is a provocation.
You see a health inspection sign posted at a restaurant and what do you do? What does it mean? Maybe it has a QR code, but where does that go? - Town of Darien, CT - [2018 example](https://darienite.com/lowest-rating-c-for-one-darien-restaurant-in-most-recent-health-inspection-reports-32577): The Town Health Department ratings certificates have a QR code that links to [their general inspection reports search tool](https://ct.healthinspections.us/darien/). - Alameda County, CA - [2020 example](https://laothaikitchen.com/2020/10/11/food-facility-inspection-results-passed-with-flying-colors-in-spite-of-covid-19-pandemic/): Printed URL to the public health homepage: [acgov.org/aceh => Alameda County Department of Environmental Health](https://deh.acgov.org/index.page), scrolling down there is a link to [Food Facility Inspection Reports](https://ehgone.acgov.org/inspection/results/) and then a search bar.[^rating] - City of Pasadena, CA - [2014 example](https://www.cityofpasadena.net/city-manager/news/health-departments-issues-new-inspection-placards-for-restaurants/): Multiple URLs (to report or learn more) and a QR code that links to the general search interface: [Food Facility Inspection Search](http://www.decadeonline.com/main.phtml?agency=PAS) (HTTP only?) - City of Seattle and King County , WA - [2018 example](https://www.seattletimes.com/life/food-drink/what-do-seattles-restaurant-window-food-safety-emojis-really-mean/): Printed URL to a generic food safety page: [www.KingCounty.gov/FoodSafetyRating => Food safety rating system](https://kingcounty.gov/en/legacy/depts/health/environmental-health/food-safety/inspection-system/food-safety-rating.aspx) and a note to text a number for more information (in return you get [a link to only an explainer page: Food safety rating system > TEXTING VERSION OF FOOD SAFETY RATING SYSTEM](https://kingcounty.gov/en/legacy/depts/health/environmental-health/food-safety/inspection-system/food-safety-rating/texting-option.aspx)). Neither link directly has [the search bar: Search restaurant safety ratings](https://kingcounty.gov/en/dept/dph/health-safety/food-safety/search-restaurant-safety-ratings#/). {% assign canonicalSearchTerm = '"search seeds"' %} {% assign querySnippetContent = site.data.query_snippets[canonicalSearchTerm] %} {% if querySnippetContent %}

{{ querySnippetContent }}

{% endif %}
Speculative design?

This ppost was inspired by thinking about search seeds and seeking a 'material sign' that might be made searchable—and building on some other food & pathogen related musings on search.

If not a QR code, perhaps you could take a photo and be led directly to the report through something like [Google Lens](https://lens.google/) or [Apple's Visual Look Up](https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213088). What processes do these companies currently go through as they consider which features to support? Does "societal relevance" [@sundin2021relevance] play a role? Or some recognition of "the corporate responsibility to respect human rights" [@unhrc2011guiding]?

Such an aggregated search is somewhat complicated in the United States by such inspections being managed at the local level (though an app, HDScores, claims to have "built a database that covers 73% of the entire United States"[^what?]).[^askew]

See [ tags:speculative ]
See @dunne2013speculative, @wong2017real, @fox2019vivewell, & @mulligan2019technology.
[^what?]: What does 73% of the entire United States mean in this context? 73% of restaurants, jurisdictions, patrons, land-area?
Asides
I imagine this is relatively well-trod ground? @park2022certification: > Restaurant hygiene quality grades influence customers' decisions and improve restaurateurs' efforts to maintain hygiene quality (Bhuvanesh, 2021; Filion & Powell, 2009; Fleetwood, 2019; Grunert, 2005; Henson et al., 2006; Shahid and Whisson, 2012; Silver et al., 2021). The Korean government, of course, gives a “hygiene grade certificate,” which is a valuable indicator of restaurant sanitation for customers. Customers consider the hygiene certificate when deciding where to visit since it is highly linked to food-borne illness. As a consequence, the significance of the hygiene certificate is clear. @awasthi2021food: > Food inspector rankings are hailed as an outstanding example of combining mandated disclosure with consumer decision making (Fung, Graham, & Weil, 2007). Ben-Shahar and Schneider (2011) also opine that inspector hygiene rankings stand apart as a noteworthy public safety alternative. It is important to note that such rankings have significant ‘last mile’ touchpoints, wherein the end-user, i.e., consumer perception and subsequent behaviour is critical in the success of such policy intervention.
I have done minimal searching on this ppost, ex.: g[health inspection signs restaurant posted].images
g[[restaurant safety ("health inspection" OR "public health") (sign OR grade OR rating OR certificate) site:wikipedia.org]](https://www.google.com/search?q=restaurant+safety+%28%22health+inspection%22+OR+%22public+health%22%29+%28sign+OR+grade+OR+rating+OR+certificate%29+site%3Awikipedia.org) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_safety > Regulations by jurisdiction and agency > United States > State and local regulation > Restaurants and other retail food establishments fall under state law and are regulated by state or local health departments. Typically these regulations require official inspections of specific design features, best food-handling practices, and certification of food handlers.[66][67] In some places a letter grade or numerical score must be prominently posted following each inspection.[68] In some localities, inspection deficiencies and remedial action are posted on the Internet.[69] In addition, states may maintain and enforce their own model of the FDA Food Code. For example, California maintains the California Retail Food Code (CalCode), which is part of the Health and Safety Code and is based on most current and safe food handling practices in the retail industry.[70] It has been argued that restaurant hygiene ratings, though useful at times, are not informative enough for consumers.[71]
[Shad Snell's local news report from Utah: "Why aren’t health inspection scores displayed in Utah restaurants? Here’s why"](https://www.abc4.com/news/local-news/why-arent-health-inspection-scores-displayed-in-utah-restaurants-heres-why/) > According to the Salt Lake County Health Department, the only official source for Salt Lake County Health Department inspection information is the ”Inspection Reports” button on the website. Perhaps this search seed question is relevant here? Though I imagine penalties for fraudulent certificates would generally be deterrent enough?
How do the scores play out on search tools like Google Maps and Yelp? [Jessica Yadegaran's report in The Mercury News: "Yelp’s new health scores don’t mean what you think they do"](https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/08/09/yelps-new-health-scores-dont-mean-what-you-think-they-do/) > ...HDScores, the tech company working with Yelp, uses a proprietary algorithm to create a score. > > Glynne Thompson, chief marketing officer of HDScores, would not disclose the methodology used, calling it “proprietary and quite complex,” but explained that each restaurant inspection is assigned a score based on the number of demerits. The lower the number of demerits, the cleaner the restaurant. > > [ . . . ] > > Yelp considers the program, dubbed LIVES [or Local Inspector Value-Entry Specification], a boon for public health and a nudge for jurisdictions to update their public records in a timely fashion. “The target of Yelp’s sunlight is not only restaurants, but also city governments,” says Luther Lowe, Yelp’s head of public policy. “Why is the county of San Mateo taking nearly a year to re-inspect a restaurant?” > > The county’s response? When a private technology company mines raw inspection data and converts it to a numerical score, it often leads to misinterpretation, said Diana Rohini LaVigne, chief communications officer for San Mateo County Health System. [yelp.com/healthscores](https://www.yelp.com/healthscores), or LIVES provides this: > In 2012, Yelp partnered with the City of San Francisco and City of New York to develop the Local Inspector Value-Entry Specification (LIVES). LIVES is an open data standard which allows municipalities to publish restaurant inspection information to Yelp. I don't know whether other folks are allowed to access LIVES data and move it or analysis on it off of Yelp. As of today, [yelp.com/healthscores/feeds](https://www.yelp.com/healthscores/feeds) states that Yelp partners with [Hazel Analytics](https://hazelanalytics.com/): [hazelanalytics.com/research](hazelanalytics.com/research) > Hazel Analytics has its roots in academic research. For more than a decade, our co-founders have investigated food safety through the lens of consumer health, regulatory patterns, and retail merchant behavior. Today, we carry on that legacy of thought leadership in the form of industry whitepapers. The publications below offer a glimpse into the research that both draws upon Hazel's expertise in health inspection data and informs the ongoing development of our platform and products. In April 2023, it became a part of [ECOLAB](https://www.ecolab.com/pages/hazel-analytics-acquired): > ...Ecolab acquired Hazel Analytics, a technology-driven public health company. Hazel Analytics now operates within the EcoSure division, further strengthening EcoSure’s capabilities help clients mitigate brand risk, and optimize guest experience and food safety.
I didn't find an example from my county, but there is a search tool: [ Snohomish County Health Department > Food](https://snohomishonline.envisionconnect.com/#/pa1/search).[^prosp]
[^prosp]: As I look at the inspection reports for my favorite restaurants I wonder also about [prospective search](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prospective_search), being able to sign up for an alert for new ratings from restaurants I may frequent. It doesn't look like I can do that in this interface. On this, [per HDScores](https://hdscores.com/) > The HDScores App will allow you to “favorite” establishments and receive notifications on the their newest health inspection ratings. You will be able to search by your current location as well as nationwide. While perhaps useful, given the opacity reported above I'm not sure this approach as a whole achieves the utility I'm contemplated. I don't want another app (thought perhaps this app can serve useful forcing functions on restaurants and health departments). I want to navigate my lived environment in ways that let me use material signs to link to reputable resources. Now, maybe I also don't really want to sign up for notifications from my local health department. [^askew]: \@searchbound [recently posted on Twitter](https://twitter.com/searchbound/status/1696118058039885983): > one time, I tried to build a service that aggregated restaurant health inspection scores into a central database... > > that project was a [total disaster] Whereas in the replies \@sacha_vyzz linked to ["a live map of every filthy food outlet in the UK"](https://twitter.com/sacha_vyzz/status/1694294981677375777) (scrapped from Google Business Profiles). Such maps, [here is a static one for New York City, recently shared on reddit.com/r/MapPorn/](https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/1558du5/health_inspection_ratings_for_nyc_restaurants_os/), serve a different purpose than what I'm speculating about. [^rating]: Speaking of ratings systems, is there a rating system for how searcher friendly a search user interface is? Not something like TREC evaluations, though see [Ch. 2: THE EVALUATION OF SEARCH USER INTERFACES](https://searchuserinterfaces.com/book/sui_ch2_evaluation) in @hearst2009search. @shah2022situating present an "desiderata for building an ideal search system" (p. 230): > - The system must support all 16 information seeking strategies (ISS) [4] as well as transitions between them. > - There must be a clear way for the user to carry interactions with the system with iterations of request-response that carry the knowledge from previous interactions to the next. > - These interactions must be supported through various modalities and modes of communication, including different types of devices, interfaces, languages, and expression of information need (keywords-based queries, questions, gestures, etc.) > - The system must support all of the 20 search intentions[51]. > - The system should provide sufficient transparency about the sources where the information objects are coming from, as well as the process through which they are either ranked or consolidated and presented. > - The system should support users in increasing their information literacy [64]. > - The system should be free of economic structures that support and even incentivize the monetization of concepts (such as identity terms) and allow commercial interests to masquerade as ‘objective’ information [54]. > > ___ > > 4. Nicholas J Belkin, Colleen Cool, Adelheit Stein, and Ulrich Thiel. 1995. Cases, Scripts, and Information-Seeking Strategies: On the Design of Interactive Information Rretrieval Systems. Expert systems with applications 9, 3 (1995), 379–395. >
51. Matthew Mitsui, Jiqun Liu, Nicholas J Belkin, and Chirag Shah. 2017. Predicting Information Seeking Intentions from Search Behaviors. In Proceedings of the 40th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval. 1121–1124. >
54. Safiya Umoja Noble. 2018. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. NYU Press. >
64. Catherine L. Smith and Soo Young Rieh. 2019. Knowledge-Context in Search Systems: Toward Information-Literate Actions. In Proceedings of the 2019 Con- ference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (Glasgow, Scotland UK) (CHIIR ’19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 55–62. https://doi.org/10.1145/3295750.3298940 They also acknowledge that "One size does not fit all for search."