Navgle: Nifty and Useful
March 21, 2009
I don’t like the word or phrase mash up, usually written mashup. I don’t like the phrase programmable Web. Heck, I don’t like much of the wordsmithing generated by the trophy kids who swarm over Web companies. I do like a service called Navgle. You must try it here. The name is a combo of Naver.com (South Korea) and Google.com (intergalactic). I looked at this service on the laptop of a Google partner not long ago. Naver.com dominates search in South Korea and has revenues of about US$1.0 billion. More information about the company is here.
I needed to locate information about Cleveland business failures, and I was not too happy with lots of Crain hits and the baloney about how wonderful the northern Ohio business climate was. I decided to give Navgle.com a try.
What happened? See for yourself. Go to Navgle.com. Plug the phrase “Cleveland business” in the search box, and you can see what I found useful. Here’s the result screen for my home run query a couple of days ago. Navgle.com updates frequently, so your screen will probably look different from this one.
The first result–note, the first hit!–reported that Crain’s Cleveland Business was chopping employees. When you run your query, you will see that Navgle.com returns results by type of content, delivering the top hits from each in a useful relevance ranked order.
On this one page, I could see that Cleveland is in a world of hurt. There were Tweets. I had Google search results. I had useful Web log entries. I had snippets from Google Groups. In short, I had a useful way to get an overview of the Cleveland business scene.
Is Navgle.com perfect? No, but it is a heck of a lot more useful than most of the search systems I use on a daily basis. I can think of a number of ways to use the Navgle.com system to make this Web log more useful to my five or six readers. In fact, I am going to write the Navgle.com “contact” and see what the company has to say. Maybe I can wrangle a way to put some search related info links on this site to provide more context for my opinion pieces.
I keep getting emails from readers who ask, “Who are you? Why do you act like a stupid goose?” Navgle.com might slap some bacon around my write ups and the grousers can live with my view of the world.
Bottomline: a nifty service. Not much latency. A very useful service. What’s with the tie up between Naver.com and Google.com? In my opinion, more than meets the eye.
Stephen Arnold, March 21, 2009
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4 Responses to “Navgle: Nifty and Useful”
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Thanks for the pingback
Navgle is really cool!
Thanks for the great blog posting about us. We really appreciate it!
If you have any suggestions on how you want to include Navgle in your blog, please let us know. We would love to hear your great ideas.
Navgle Support
Navgle,
Your online service is better than the forehand smash of Lee Dal Joon, your former national champion who beat me to death in a table tennis tournament in the 1970s. I have a number of ideas. Send me a human email and I will chop some ideas toward your team. Use seaky2000 at yahoo dot com.
Stephen Arnold, March 21, 2009