Search

Couple of search related stories here, following my recent posting on whether or not search is broken.

Mike Arrington announces that Euekster have managed to grab $5.5 million in funding.

One of their products is a system for creating site specific search engines called Swickis, which also allows some user contributions in the form of voting for links.

Noel Hatch has set up a local government flavoured Swicki here.

Arrington also notes the launch of Wikiseek, which searches Wikipedia in a community-edited kind of way. It sounds pretty interesting, and I will be having a play. Their homepage looks familiar though…

Still, it’s interesting that these new approaches to search are starting to appear, and are working albeit on a fairly limited scale.

Tom Foremski over at Silicon Vallery Watcher points out the things that annoy him about search:

– There are many publishers that try to make sure their headlines catch the attention of the search engines rather than catch the attention of readers. The same is true for content, editors increasingly optimize it for the search engines rather than the readers.

– Why should I have to tag my content, and tag it according to the specific formats that Technorati, and other search engines recommend?  Aren’t they supposed to do that?

– Google relies on a tremendous amount of user-helped search. Websites are encouraged to create site maps and leave the XML file on their server so that the GOOGbot can find its way around.

– The search engines ask web site owners to mask-off parts of their sites that are not relevant, such as the comment sections,  with no-follow and no-index tags.

– Web sites are encouraged to upload their content into the Googlebase database. Nice–it doesn’t even need to send out a robot to index the site.

– Every time I publish something, I send out notification “pings” to dozens of search engines and aggregators. Again, they don’t have to send out their robots to check if there is new content.

– Google asks users to create collections of sites within specific topics so that other users can use them to find specific types of information.

– The popularity of blogs is partly based on the fact that they find lots of relevant links around a particular subject. Blogs are clear examples of people-powered search services.

It’s my view that web search has come as far as it can based on algorithms and sheer grunt alone. There needs to be a human element in terms of whether or not a result is actually a) relevant and b) useful to the searcher.

This is the thinking behind the Search Wikia project which Wikipedia and Wikia’s Jimmy Wales is running. I wrote a little about this on my personal blog here and here.

It’s also why I am working on a human generated ‘search engine’. The aim will be for people to submit links they have found useful, tag and categorise them, and allow others to vote them as useful. This database of links will then be searchable, producing fewer results, but ones which have been recommended by others. I think it is going to be really useful, but it will need the committment of other people to make it work.

Watch this space.

Google have removed their controversial ‘tips’ feature, according to FireFox dude Blake Ross:

Google has removed the tips feature. Perhaps it was always intended as a test; I don’t know the official reason for its removal. In any case, thanks to Matt Cutts and other Googlers who listened and responded to feedback with an open mind, and over the holidays no less.

Nice to know they’re listening.

Technorati Tags: google, tips, blake ross

One of the earliest posts on hyprtext was about the proposed new community search engine proposed by Jimmy Wales. There was quite a lot of kerfuffle about it, largely due to confusion over Amazon’s involvement, and quite a lot of debate concerning the name of the project, which everyone assumed was wikiasari. Most people agreed that this was a terrible name for a search engine.

Since then, I have had a chance to have a good poke about the site where the engine will be designed, search.wikia.com. The first thing the site does is put right a few misunderstandings:

Amazon has nothing to do with this project. They are a valued investor in Wikia, Inc., but people are really speculating beyond the facts. This search engine project has nothing to do with Amazon’s A9, etc…

This project has also nothing to do with the screenshot TechCrunch are running (which belongs to Wikisearch), and this search project has nothing to do with Wikipedia…

Wikiasari is not and will not be the name for the free search engine we’re developing. It was the name of a former project.

So, search.wikia is the name of the wiki where the project is discussed. Wikiasari is the name of a previous attempt to get a wiki based search engine going, and WikiSearch is a search engine that searches Wikipedia and all sites that are linked from it.

The new engine as yet has no name. But it’s being talked about.

I have to admit, I’m interested in this project, and I’d like to see it work. So, I have done as Jimbo implores us to do, and joined the mailing list. The first thing to pop into my mailbox was a missive from Jimbo, entitled First steps to getting it right…

…For now I just want to point out that the largest amount of skepticism about what we are going to try to accomplish here is driven by the inherent issue of spammers. There are huge incentives for people to try to abuse our good will and we have to anticipate and expect that. But, unlike many of the skeptics who think that this is impossible, I am very confident that if we can build a genuine community and give ourselves as a community the tools we need, then we can deal with this issue without a lot of trouble.

Tomorrow I will write more about how I see the core design working.

I’m looking forward to it.

For some reason, whenever I have visited Google today, it has bounced me straight to http://google.co.uk/ig – in other words, the Personalised Google page. This happens whether or not I am logged into my Google account.

Is Google starting to abandon it’s ‘classic’ homepage? Clicking the ‘Classic Home’ link now takes me to this URL.

Update: this explains it.

[tags]google, google personalised[/tags]