Specialized search
Analysis of efforts in “vertical” search and single-site search, and other forms of specialized search engine. Related subjects include:
Lukewarm review of Yahoo mobile search
Stephen Shankland reviewed Yahoo’s mobile voice search, which works by taking voice input and returning results onscreen (in his case on his Blackberry Pearl). He found:
- There are plenty of times when voice is a more convenient form of input than typing.
- Voice recognition was good but far from perfect.
- Editing search strings was annoyingly difficult.
- Search results themselves aren’t 100% perfect.
No big surprises there. 
| Categories: Language recognition, Search engines, Specialized search, Speech recognition, Yahoo | Leave a Comment |
Google and the Author’s Guild establish an ASCAP for books
Most of the coverage of the Google/Authors Guild settlement today seems to focus on Google’s side of things. But I think the authors’ side is much more important. This deal paves the way for traditional publishers to become quaint and useless — and not a moment too soon.
Below are some quotes — fair use!! 
— from the Authors Guild official statement on the deal (emphasis mine): Read more
| Categories: Google, Search engines, Social software and online media, Specialized search | Leave a Comment |
Google Health spoof
FutureFeedForward is on a roll:
MOUNTAIN VIEW–Information search giant Google, Inc. announced Thursday the release of Google Body, a search service aiming to index the internal and external anatomy of every living creature on the planet. …
Early testers have remarked upon a fuzzy-logic “match my organ” feature, which helps users get in touch with the nearest, most suitable donor for multiple organ systems. …
Responding to criticism from privacy groups, Google’s Hind pointed to the program’s opt-out policy. “We are very concerned about user privacy, and that’s why we will not make publicly available any information about anybody who let’s us know they do not want to participate by wearing an Opt-Out headband when in public. Google archives information about those individuals, but does not make it searchable.” The yellow and black vinyl headbands can be requested free of charge by writing to the company at its Mountain View headquarters.
| Categories: Fun stuff, Google, Humor, Search engines, Specialized search | Leave a Comment |
Google could dominate single-site search
Google has begun to introduce a feature whereby, if your search obviously leads you to a single site (e.g., you searched on a company name), you get a second search box to search only within that site. More details at Google and Search Engine Land. Basically, this is Google Site Search made a lot easier to use.
I think this could be a really big deal. Read more
| Categories: Enterprise search, Google, Search engines, Specialized search | 4 Comments |
Code search options
Questions come up here from time to time about code search engines, a subject I have not researched. Well, here’s a quick link listing some leading code search engines, both Web (guess who?) and internal. Most interesting may be that the list is so short.
| Categories: Search engines, Specialized search | Leave a Comment |
Danny Sullivan thinks blended vertical search is a game-changer
Danny Sullivan thinks blended vertical search — which he’s calling Search 3.0 — is a game changer. (In this context, “vertical” search denotes alternate result types such as video, image, map coordinates, or product listings.) In saying that, he’s focused on search marketers, who now have a lot more ways to try to get their messages onto Google searchers’ top result pages. But I presume what he’s really saying is that there will be a feedback effect — if Google tells all web searchers about videos and product listings, then internet marketers will be more motivated to post videos and product listings, and hence there will be more interesting choices of videos and product listings — which Google will naturally wind up featuring more prominently in its search results. And so on.
Given the Youtube explosion, I find it hard to argue with his claim.
| Categories: Google, Search engine optimization (SEO), Search engines, Specialized search, Structured search | Leave a Comment |
Wise Crowds of Long-Tailed Ants, or something like that
Baynote sells a recommendation engine whose motto appears to be “popularity implies accuracy.” While that leads to some interesting technological ideas (below), Baynote carries that principle to an unfortunate extreme in its marketing, which is jam-packed with inaccurate buzzspeak. While most of that is focused on a few trendy meme-oriented books, the low point of my briefing today was the probably the insistence against pushback that “95%” of Google’s results depend on “PageRank.” (I think what Baynote really meant is “all off-page factors combined,” but anyhow I sure didn’t get the sense that accuracy was an important metric for them in setting their briefing strategy. And by the way, one reason I repeat the company’s name rather than referring to Baynote by a pronoun is that on-page factors DO matter in search engine rankings.)
That said, here’s the essence of Baynote’s story, as best I could figure it out.
| Categories: Baynote, Google, Ontologies, Search engine optimization (SEO), Search engines, Social software and online media, Software as a Service (SaaS), Specialized search | 4 Comments |
Does anybody actually use Technorati?
I just did some Technorati searches, and my blog posts come up near the top of the search results for a bunch of small companies’ names and similar words — Attensity, ClearForest, Netezza, DATAllegro, Crossbeam, DMOZ, ODP, and surely many others.
But judging by my referrer logs, nobody cares. I get lots of visitors via classic search engines — largely Google, but also the others — but bubkus from Technorati.
Technorati Tags: Technorati
| Categories: Search engines, Specialized search | 4 Comments |
Government-specific search fails to impress
According to Steven Arnold, FirstGov – which has been renamed USASearch.gov — is by far the most effective US government-specific search engine. But there’s something odd about it; whatever the query, it’s determined to give no more than a little over 100 results. Queries for which I’ve noted results in this quantity range include Bush (and this covers all family members), Cheney (ditto), Kennedy (ditto), Condaleeza, Scalia, Coolidge, Red Sox, big dig, Burlingame, Redmond, Pluto, ethanol, spotted owl, and topology. The only ones I’ve found so far coming out above that results range – perhaps inevitably 
— are death (137) and taxes (177).
| Categories: Convera, Search engines, Specialized search | Leave a Comment |
But Google trumps most site search
Popular on Digg, for obvious reasons, is a post showing that Google is better for searching Digg than Digg’s own search engine. No shock there. If I want to search Wikipedia for information on astrowidgets, I’ll just google on the phrase wikipedia astrowidgets. That works much better than Wikipedia’s own search.
Speaking of which — if you want to search for my writing, I’m using Google web search technology too. It works like a charm.
| Categories: Google, Search engines, Specialized search | 2 Comments |
