New Search Engine Technology

Just when it looked like Google had attained an unchallanged monopoly on web searching ideas, a raft of new concepts are garnering press coverage. I like google, I really do. I used it almost exclusively even before it was cool, and when the geeks choice of search engine was still AltaVista (Alta who? I still remember having to go to altavisita.digital.com, but then I'm getting on in my years ;).

My theory is that it is the rise of blogging, rather than spam-like pornographic sites, that are ruining the results from conventional search sites. For example, my referrer logs show that some time this month, a poor hapless internet searcher was searching for "(law and rss )and( not commercial)" which hits my blog entry SCO vs. the World. So this web surfer has gone to roughly 300% more effort than the average person while constructing his or her search string and still they get a less than useful result. I hope they enjoyed my site though!

Not that long ago, you wouldn't have called Google a "conventional search engine" with it's innovative page rank technology, but times move fast, and I guess eventually the pigeons just can't keep up.

I have been playing with vivisimo.com a bit which, basically, automatically categorizes the search results into browseable groups of results. Not so exciting, except that the categories themselves are generated from the content of the search results themselves. I am a bit ambivilent about the results so far, I suspect their results would be better if they used google as the underlying index instead of Yahoo, MSN and others.

A different approach is to improve the way you interact with the search results. This is the approach taken by Grokker. Grokker clusters the results, possibly in a similar way to vivisimo but I'm not entirely sure, and then lets you kindof "fly through" the results. It appears to borrow a lot of ideas from Apple's Project X (using their experimental Meta Content Format known as Hot Sauce), which was a new idea in, oh, 1996. Like Project X, it's a nice idea, but I don't see it being a big hit.

A similar concept is behind www.kartoo.com, but instead of downloading an application, it runs in your browser which is more convenient, and instantly gives it 100 times more chance of surviving. It took me a little while to get used to it, but I quite like it.

Stay tuned for more reports.