Nexplore: Another Google Challenger
January 14, 2009
Nexplore Search here is a Web search system with some interesting functions. A reader alerted me to the firm’s sharp increase in Web traffic. I had looked at the system last year, and I wanted to revisit the Web search company’s service.
The company said:
It starts with Nexplore Search Redefined a visually engaging user friendly, interactive multi-media interface makes navigation effortless and drill down obsolete.
The company indexes 50 billion Web pages. According to the company here, its system:
redefines the search experience. A visually engaging, user-friendly, multi-media interface makes navigation effortless and drill down obsolete. Computer intelligence combined with human community fosters greater relevancy — in both search results and ad displays. Intuitive refinement tools and advanced personalization features make search faster, easier and more enjoyable for everyone — from Web newbies to average users to accomplished surfers.
My test queries returned useful results. For example, for “enterprise search” returned links to Vivisimo, Coveo, and Endeca as “sponsored results”, which is okay. The first hit–somewhat surprisingly was to Microsoft.com enterprise search page here, not to the Fast Search page here. The Fast Search page seems a bit spare these days, so Nexplore seems to have indexed the Microsoft page as the number one enterprise search hit. I find this surprising, but I don’t have a good enough feel for what Nexplore is doing to determine relevancy.
Nexplore results for the query “enterprise search”.
The interface provides hot links to suggested or related queries, a feature Nexplore calls “Pop Search”. The system includes a link to a “Wiki Search”, which is okay, but the number two result in the hit list is a Wikipedia link. The sponsored results contained a surprise. There was a direct link to Ontolica, a unit of Surf Ray. Surf Ray has been the subject of considerable speculation. In fact, if you run a query for “Surf Ray” from this page on the Beyond Search Web log, you can follow the conversation about the company’s various managerial and financial ills. Obviously someone paid to put the Ontolica ad on the Nexplore results page, so this cannot be an error. So0me of the firms in the Sponsor Results were equally interesting; for example, I don’t think too much about Abbrevity, Accenture, or EMC as big players in the enterprise search sector. But someone is paying to reach eyeballs for the query “enterprise search”. Two results struck me as peculiar in the main results list. First, the inclusion of the Enterprise Search Summit 2009. I heard the show attracted 60 paying customers, so the owner of the show must be working overtime to pump up the search engine optimization to get the program to appear among vendors of search systems. The second anomaly is the exclusion of Google and its Google Search Appliance. Odd. Google has more than 16,000 licensees of its enterprise search appliance, which puts it on an equal footing or slightly ahead of Autonomy, another company not in the results list.
One useful touch is that the results for a news search are run against the query in the query box. No annoying retyping required. The video link did not return a direct link to any videos on the Google Channel. Majority of the videos came from Blinkx, a company touting itself as the largest index of video content. The exclusion of Google may be due to Google, not Nexplore, however.
The image search in response to the query “enterprise search” was not useful. The illustrations did not include the images that I know are available on the Web sites of the leading vendors. For example, the Google search appliance pages include screen shots. Similar images may be found on the Web sites of Autonomy, Coveo, and Endeca, to name just three companies who make visual content available for potential buyers. The inclusion of the defunct Enterprise Search Report was an anomaly. More recent reports such as the Gilbane Beyond Search study and the Galatea Successful Enterprise Search Management were not included on the first page of the results. The image search for this test query was not useful to me. The blog search was not useful either. The majority of the links were not directly about enterprise search. Presumably, the Nexplore indexing system does not handle synonyms for “enterprise search” at this stage of the content processing subsystem’s development. I will monitor this function going forward. A similar statement may be made about enterprise search podcasts. The inclusion of enterprise networking in the results set requires me to listen to a podcast to determine if the information would be of interest to me. My hunch is that “enterprise search” as a podcast subject is too narrow to be of much indexing traction.
The company offers several search related services:
- MyCircle–an application agnostic social computing platform
- AdCircle–Ad creation and management tool
- HitLabel–contents, prizes, and tools for aspiring music stars
The company’s president and founder is Edward Mandel and Dion Hinchcliffe the chief technical officer. Mr. Mandel was in 2004 a distinguished as a finalist for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award. Prior to Positive Software Systems, Mandel ran a successful technology consulting firm, IIT Consulting. Mr. Hinchcliffe served as president and chief technology officer of Alexandria, Virginia-based Hinchcliffe & Company, a premier Enterprise Web 2.0 consulting and advisory Firm.
has added a former Microsoft vice president (Rowland Hanson) to the firm’s advisory board.
Nexplore has stated that the company is attracting more than five million unique monthly visitors and that the search system ranks in the top 5,000 internationally ranked Web sites, based on Alexa data. You can read the news story here. The company is publicly traded under the symbol NXPC. Ask your broker to pull the data from the “Pink Sheet” listings. You can read the company’s 2008 financial news release here. I scanned the information on the three page document. Several points jumped out at me:
- The company describes itself as “a development stage company”. I interpreted this phrase that the firm will be seeking additional funding.
- The company’s net loses through June 2008 were about $17 million. Most of this money is probably due to the investment in the system and software
- Through June 30, 2008, the company generated almost $700,000 in revenues. The next financial statement will make it easier to determine how the present economic environment is affecting this company
The $64 question is, “Is Nexplore the next Google?” If you want to bet on Nexplore, contact the company here. I will add this search system to my watch list.
Stephen Arnold, January 13, 2009
YouTube.com: Big Cleats
November 24, 2008
YouTube.com seems to have new winter tires with big cleats. First, YouTube.com staged a live event. You can read about it here. I was less impressed with the content and more impressed with the fact that Google, like Microsoft, had to resort to third parties to handle the load. Video is expensive, and the GOOG will have to crack the code for revenue in order to keep the bills from exceeding the revenue. Next, SeekingAlpha reported that YouTube.com was the “third largest search engine.” SeekingAlpha said here:
YouTube has long been acknowledged as the far-and-away frontrunner in online video, with close to 63 million US-based visitors in October 2008, according to Compete. Less well-known has been YouTube’s status as a top-ranking search engine. Last month, YouTube served nearly 770 million search queries, making it the third largest search engine, according to Compete’s October Search Market Share.
Google has some patent documents that provides insight into the monetizing options available. The financial winter that is settling upon online means that Google will need some snow tires with big cleats. These are the big, chunky tires with savage rows of grippers.
At the same time, Hulu.com continues to be praised for its professional programming. In addition, Blinkx, another video search engine, is trying to buy Miva (the old FindWhat.com) to get some ad traction itself. My take on all this is that TV is coming to the Internet.
Wonderful.
I don’t watch TV. Another vast wasteland is being created I fear.
Stephen Arnold, November 24, 2008
Nutter on the Future of Search
October 22, 2008
Blaise Nutter’s “Three Companies That Will Change How We Search” here offers an interesting view of three vendors who are competing with Google. The premise of the article is that there is room for search innovation. The five page write up profiles and analyzes Blinkx (video search spin out from some folks at Autonomy), Mahalo (journalist turned search entrepreneur Jason Calcanis), and Cuil (Anna Patterson and assorted wizards from Google, IBM, and elsewhere). As I understand the analysis, the hook is different for each company; for example:
- Blinkx. Indexes the content in the video, not just be metadata, for 26 million videos
- Mahalo. Community search engine with humans not software doing the picking of results
- Cuil. A big index with a magazine style layout.
The conclusion of the article is that innovation is possible and that each of these sites does a better job of addressing user privacy.
For me, the most interesting comment in the write up was this comment:
David and Goliath fought on a level battlefield, but Google doesn’t.
My view on each of these search systems is a bit different from Mr. Nutter’s. I do agree that Google presents a large challenge to search start ups. In fact, until a competitor can leap frog Google, I doubt that users will change their surfing behavior regardless of Google’s policy regarding privacy. Google monitors to make money. Money is needed to scale and provide “free” search.
This brings me to the difference between Mr. Nutter’s analysis and mine. First, for any of these services to challenge Google in a meaningful way, the companies are going to need cash, lots of cash. In today’s economic climate, I think that these firms can get some money, but the question is, “Will it be enough if Google introduces substantially similar features?” Second, each of these services, according to Mr. Nutter, offers features Google doesn’t provide. I don’t agree. Google is indexing content of videos and audios. In fact I wrote about a patent application that suggests Google is gearing up for more services in this area here. Google is essentially social, which is a big chunk of the notion of user clicks. The “ig” or individualized Google offers a magazine style layout if you configure the new “ig” interface to do it. It’s not Cuil, but it’s in the ballpark.
For me, the question is, “What services are implementing technology that has the potential to leap frog Google as Google jumped ahead of AltaVista.com, MSN.com, and Yahoo.com in 1998? In my opinion it’s none of these three services profiled by Mr. Nutter. “Let many flowers bloom”. But these have to be of hearty stock, have the proper climate, and plenty of nurturing. None of these three services is out of the greenhouse and into the real world, and I think their survival has to be proven, not assumed. Search innovations are often in the eye of the beholder, not in the code of the vendor.
Stephen Arnold, October 20, 2008
VideoSurf Looking for Wave of New Users
October 18, 2008
VideoSurf, a new online video search engine, is inviting people to try out its beta engine. No username or password is required.
The engine is built on “computer vision” – VideoSurf has designed it to search and “see” inside videos to index content rather than depending upon tags and descriptions that can produce spam. The goal is to return more relevant results on keyword searches.
VideoSurf’s competition is Google Video Search and blinkx. We wrote about blinkx back in May here.
VideoSurf boasts more than 10 billion videos indexed. Visit their site for more information.
As for this beta user? A test search on VS of “Simon Pegg Star Trek” listed the top result as the “Star Trek” teaser trailer, followed by an interview on “Friday Night with Jonathan Ross”, then several more trailers before other Pegg errata. Google’s top results returned only movie trailers, while blinkx listed a couple trailers followed by several interviews and media event clips.
Jessica Bratcher, October 18, 2008
VideoSurf: Video Metasearch
September 23, 2008
I received an invitation to preview VideoSurf, a video metasearch provider, based in San Mateo, California. I tested the system whilst recovering from my wonderful Northwest Airlines flight from Europe to the US of A. When I fired up my laptop with the high speed Verizon service, I couldn’t get the video to run. When I switched to a high speed connection in my office, the search results were snappy and the videos I viewed ran without a hitch. Nice high speed network, Verizon.
The system offers a number of useful features:
- When I misspelled Google, the system offered a “did you mean” to fix up my lousy typing
- A handy checkbox in the left hand column allowed me to exclude certain video sites from the query. I noticed that the “world’s largest video search engine” Blinkx was not included.
- There’s a porn and no porn filter, which you can use to turn on porn. However, when I ran my test query “teen dancing” on the non-porn setting, I got some pretty exciting videos in my result set. I was too tired to watch more than a few seconds of gyrations to conclude that the non porn filter needs some fine tuning.
VideoSurf analyzes the contents of video. Most video search engines work with metadata and close caption information. Googzilla, not surprisingly, has introduced its own technology to index the audio content of files. For now, I thought VideoSurf was useful for general purpose queries. I did not find it as helpful for locating Google lectures at universities or for pinpointing presentations given at various Microsoft events. But it’s early days for the service.
This is what I saw when I ran my test query “Bill Gates”.
The company says here:
VideoSurf has created a better way for users to search, discover and watch online videos. Using a unique combination of new computer vision and fast computation methods, VideoSurf has taught computers to “see” inside videos to find content in a fast, efficient, and scalable way. Basing its search on visual identification, rather than text only, VideoSurf’s computer vision video search engine provides more relevant results and a better experience to let users find and discover the videos they really want to watch. With over 10 billion (and rapidly growing!) visual moments indexed from videos found across the web, VideoSurf allows consumers to visually navigate through their results to easily find the specific scenes, people or moments they most want to see. Users can now spend less time searching and more time being entertained! VideoSurf was founded in 2006 by leading experts in search, computer vision and fast computation technology and aims to become the destination for users looking to find, discover and watch online videos. The company is based in San Mateo, California.
The company was founded by Lior Delgo of FareChase.com fame. The technical honcho is Achi Brandt, who is a certified math whiz. The rest of the company’s management team is here.
The service merits a closer look.
Stephen Arnold, September 23, 2008
Search: The Problem with Words and Their Misuse
January 30, 2008
I rely on several different types of alerts, including Yahoo’s service, to keep pace with developments in what I call “behind the firewall search”.
Today was particularly frustrating because the number of matches for the word “search” has been increasing, particularly since the Microsoft – Fast Search & Transfer acquisition and the Endeca cash injection from Intel and SAP. My alerts contain a large number of hits, and I realized that most of these are not about “behind the firewall” search, nor chock full of substantive information. Alerts are a necessary evil, but over the years, the primitive key word indexing offered by free services don’t help me.
The problem is the word search and its use or misuse. If you know of better examples to illustrate these types of search, please, post them. I’m interested in learning about sites and their search technology.
I have a so-so understanding of language drift, ambiguity, and POM (plain old marketing) work. For someone looking for information about search, the job is not getting easier. In fact, search has become such a devalued term that locating information about a particular type of search requires some effort. I’ve just finished compiling the Glossary for “Beyond Search”, due out in April 2008 from the Gilbane Group, a high-caliber outfit in the Boston, Massachusetts area. So, terminology is at the top of my mind this morning.
Let’s look at a few terms. These are not in alphabetical order. The order is by their annoyance factor. The head of the list contains the most annoying terms to me. The foot of the list are terms that are less offensive to me. You may not agree. That’s okay.
Vertical search. Number one for 2008. Last year it was in second place. This term means that a particular topic or corpus has been indexed. The user of a vertical search engine like Sidestep.com sees only hits in the travel area. As Web search engines have done a better and better job of indexing horizontal content — that is, on almost every topic — vertical search engines narrow their focus. Think deep and narrow, not wide and shallow. As I have said elsewhere, vertical search is today’s 20-somethings rediscovering how commercial databases handled information in the late 1970s with success then but considerably less success today.
Search engine marketing. This is last year’s number one. Google and other Web engines are taking steps to make it harder to get junk sites to the top of a laundry list of results. This phrase search engine marketing is the buzzword for the entire industry of getting a site on the first page of Google results. The need to “rank high” and has made some people “search gurus”. I must admit I don’t think too much of SEM, as it is called. I do a reasonable job of explaining SEM in terms of Google’s Webmaster guidelines. I believe that solid content is enough. If you match that with clean code, Web indexing bots will index the information. Today’s Web search systems do a good job of indexing, and there are value-added services such as Clusty.com that add metadata, whether the metadata exists on the indexed sites or not. When I see the term search used to mean SEM, I’m annoyed. Figuring out how to fool Google, Microsoft Live.com, or Yahoo’s indexing systems is not something that is of much interest to me. Much of the SEM experts’ guidance amounts to repeating Google’s Web master guidelines and fiddling with page elements until a site moves up in the rankings. Most sites lack substantive content and deserve to be at the bottom of the results list. Why do I want to have in my first page of results a bunch of links to sites without heft? I want links to pages significant enough to get to the top of results list because of solid information, not SEM voodoo. For basics, check out “How Stuff Works.”
Guided, faceted, assisted, and discovery search. The idea that is difficult to express in words and phrases is a system that provides point-and-click access to related information. I’ve heard a variation on these concepts expressed as drill-down search or exploratory search. These are 21st-century buzzwords for “Use For” and “See Also” references. But by the time a vendor gets done explaining taxonomies, ontologies, and controlled term lists, the notion of search is mired in confusion. Don’t get me wrong. Rich metadata and exposed links to meaningful “See Also” and “Use For” information is important. I’m just burned out with companies using these terms when their technology can’t deliver.
Enterprise search. I do not know what “enterprise search” is. I do know that there are organizations of all types. Some are government agencies. Some are non-profit organizations. Some are publicly-traded companies. Some are privately held companies. Some are professional services corporations. Some are limited liability corporations. Each has a need to locate electronic information. There is no one-size-fits-all content processing and retrieval system. I prefer the phrase “behind the firewall search.” It may not be perfect, but it makes clear that the system must function in a specific type of setting. Enterprise search has been overused, and it is now too fuzzy to be useful from my point of view. A related annoyance is the word “all”. Some vendors say they can index “all the organization’s information.” Baloney. Effective “behind the firewall” systems deliver information needed to answer questions, not run afoul of federal regulations regarding health care information, incite dissatisfaction by exposing employee salaries, or let out vital company secrets that should be kept under wraps.
Natural language search. This term means that the user can type a question into a system. A favorite query is, “What are the car dealerships in Palo Alto?” You can run this query on Google or Ask.com. The system takes this “natural language question”, coverts it to Boolean, and displays the results. Some systems don’t do anything more than display a cached answer to a frequently asked question. The fact is that most users–exceptions include lawyers and expert intelligence operatives–don’t do “natural lanaguage queries”. Most users type some words like weather 40202 and hit the Enter key. NLP sounds great and is often used in the same sentence with latent semantic indexing, semantic search, and linguistic technology. These are useful technologies, but most users type their 2.3 words and take the first hit on the results list.
Semantic search. See natural language search. Semantic technologies are important and finally practical in every day business operations. Used inside search systems, today’s fast processors and cheap storage make it possible to figure out some nuances in content and convert those nuances to metatags. It’s easy for vendors to bandy about the term semantic and Semantic Web than explain what it delivers in terms of precision and recall. There are serious semantic-centric vendors, and there are a great many who use the phrase because it helps make sales. An important vendor of semantic technology is Siderean Software. I profile others in “Beyond Search”.
Value-added search. This is a coinage that means roughly, “When our search system processes content, we find and index more stuff.” “Stuff”, obviously, is a technical word that can mean the file type or concepts and entities. A value-added search system tries to tag concepts and entities automatically. Humans used to do indexing but there is too much data and not enough skilled indexers. So, value-added search means “indexing like a human used to do.” Once a result set has been generated, value-added search systems will display related information; that is, “See Also” references. An example is Internet the Best. Judge for yourself if the technique is useful.
Side search. I like this phrase. It sounds nifty and means nothing to most people in a vendor’s marketing presentation. What I think the vendors who use this term mean is additional processes that run to generate “Use For” and “See Also” references. The implication is that the user gets a search bonus or extra sugar in their coffee. Some vendors have described a “more like this” function as a side search. The idea is that a user sees a relevant hit. By clicking the “more like this” hot link, the system uses the relevant hit as the basis of a new, presumably more precise, query. A side search to me means any automatic query launched without the user having to type in a search box. The user may have to click the mouse button, but the heavy lifting is machine-assisted. Delicious offers a side search labeled as related terms. Just choose a tag from the list of the right side of the Web page, and you see more hits like these. The idea is that you get related information without reentering a query.
Sentiment search. I have just looked at a new search system called Circos. This system lets me search in “color”. The idea is that emotions or feeling can be located. People want systems that provide a way to work emotion, judgment, and nuance into their results. Lexalytics, for examples, offers a useful, commercial system that can provide brand managers with data about whether customers are positive or negative toward the brand. Google, based on their engineering papers, appears to be nosing around in this sentiment search as well. Worth monitoring because using algorithms to figure out if users like or dislike a person, place, or thing can be quite significant to analysts.
Visual search. I don’t know what this means. I have seen the term used to describe systems that allow the user to click on pictures in order to see other pictures that share some colors or shapes of the source picture. If you haven’t seen Kartoo, it’s worth a look. Inxight Software offers a “search wall”. This is a graphic representation of the information in a results list or a collection as a three-dimensional brick wall. Each brick is a content object. I liked the idea when I first saw in five or six years ago, but I find visual search functionality clunky. Flying hyperbolic maps and other graphic renderings have sizzle, but instead of steak I get boiled tofu.
Parametric search. Structured search or SQL queries with training wheels are loose synonyms for parametric search and close enough for horse shoes. The term parametric search has value, but it is losing ground to structured search. Today, structured data are fuzzed with unstructured data by vendors who say, “Our system supports unstructured information and structured data.” Structured and unstructured data treated as twins, thus making it hard for a prospect to understand what processes are needed to achieve this delightful state. These data can then be queried by assisted, guided, or faceted search. Some of the newer search systems are, at their core, parametric systems. These systems are not positioned in this way. Marketers find that customers don’t want to be troubled by “what’s under the hood.” So, “fields” become metatags, and other smoothing takes place. It is no surprise to me that content processing procurement teams struggle to figure out what a vendor’s system actually does. Check out Thunderstone‘s offering and look for my Web log post about parametric (structured search) in a day or two. In Beyond Search, I profile two vendors’ systems each with different but interesting parametric search functionality. Either of these two vendors’ solutions can help you deal with the structured – unstructured dichotomy. You will have to wait until April 2008 when my new study comes out. I’m not letting these two rabbits out of my hat yet.
Unstructured search. This usually implies running a query against text that has been indexed for its key words because the source lacks “tags” or “field names”. Email, PDFs, and some Word documents are unstructured. A number of content processing systems can also index bound phrases like “stock market” and “white house”. Others include some obvious access points such as file types. Today, unstructured search blends into other categories. But unstructured search has less perceived value than flashier types of search or a back office ERP (enterprise resource planning) application. Navigate to ArnoldIT.com and run a query in my site’s search box. That’s an unstructured search, provided by Blossom Software, which is quite interesting to me.
Hyperbolic search. There are many variations of this approach which is called “buzzword fog”. Hyperbolic geometry and modular forms play an important role is some vendors’ systems. But these functions are locked away out of sight and fiddling by licensees. When you hear terms other than plain English, you are in the presence of “fog rolling in on little cat’s feet.” The difference is that this fog doesn’t move on. You are stuck in an almost-impenetrable mist. When you see the collision coming, it is almost always too late to avoid. I think the phrase means, “Our engineers use stuff I don’t understand, but it sure sounds good.”
Intuitive search. This is a term used to suggest that the interface is easy enough for the marketer’s mother to use without someone telling her what to do. The interface is one visible piece of the search system itself. Humans like to look at interfaces and debate which color or icon is better for their users. Don’t guess on interfaces. Test different ones and use what gets the most clicks. Interfaces that generate more usage are generally better than interfaces designed by the senior vice president’s daughter who just graduated with an MFA from the University of Iowa. Design opinion is not search; it’s technology decoration. For an example, look at this interface from Yahoo. Is it intuitive to you?
Real-time search. This term means that the content is updated frequently enough to be perceived as real time. It’s not. There is latency in search systems. The word “search,” therefore, doesn’t mean real-time by definition. Feed means “near real time”. There are a lot of tricks to create the impression of real time. These include multiple indexes, caching, content boosting, and time stamp fiddling. Check out ZapTXT. Next compare Yahoo News, AllTheWeb.com news, and Google News. Okay, which is “real time”? Answer: none.
Audio, video, image search. The idea is that a vendor indexes a particular type of non-text content. The techniques range from indexing only metadata and not the information in the binary file to converting speech to ASCII, then indexing the ASCII. In Japan, I saw a demonstration of a system that allowed a user to identify a particular image — for example, a cow. The system then showed pictures the system thought contained cows. These type of search systems address a real need today. The majority of digital content is in the form of digitized audio, video, and image files. Text is small potatoes. We don’t do a great job on text. We don’t do very well at all on content objects such as audio, video, and images. I think Blinkx does a reasonably good job, not great, reasonable.
Local search. This is a variation on vertical search. Information about a city or particular geographic area is indexed and made available. This is Yellow Pages territory. It is the domain of local newspaper advertising. A number of vendors want to dominate this sector; for example, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. Incumbents like telcos and commercial directory firms aren’t sure what actions to take as online sites nibble away at what was a $32 billion dollar paper directory business. Look at Ask City. Will this make sense to your children?
Intelligent search. This is the old “FOAI” or familiar old artificial intelligence. Most vendors uses artificial intelligence but call it machine learning or computational intelligence. Every major search engine uses computational intelligence. Try Microsoft’s Live.com. Now try Google’s “ig” or Individualized Google service. Which is relying more on machine learning?
Key word search. This is the ubiquitous, “naked” search box. You can use Boolean operators, or you can enter free text and perform a free text search. Free text search means no explicit Boolean operators are required of a user. Enlightened search system vendors add an AND to narrow the result set. Other system vendors, rather unhelpfully, add an OR, which increases the number of results. Take a look at the key word search from Ixquick, a New York City investment banker developed engine now owned by a European company. What’s it doing to your free text query?
Search without search. Believe me, this is where the action is. The idea is that a vendor — for example, Google — will use information about information, user behavior, system processes, and other bits and pieces of data — to run automatically and in the background, queries for a user. Then when the user glances at his / her mobile device, the system is already displaying the information most likely to be wanted at that point of time by that user. An easy way to think of this is to imagine yourself rushing to the airport. The Google approach would look at your geo spatial coordinates, check your search history, and display flight departure delays or parking lot status. I want this service because anyone who has ridden with me knows that I can’t drive, think about parking, and locate my airline reliably. I can’t read the keyboard on my mobile phone, so I want Google to convert the search result to text, call me, and speak the information as I try to make my flight. Google has a patent application with the phrase “I’m feeling doubly lucky.” Stay tuned to Google and its competitors for more information on this type of search.
This short list of different types of search helps explain why there is confusion about which systems do what. Search is no longer something performed by a person training in computer science, information science, or a similar discipline. Search is something everyone knows, right? Wrong. Search is a service that’s readily available and used by millions of people each day. Don’t confuse using an automatic teller machine with understanding finance. The same applies to search. Just because a person can locate information about a subject does not mean that person understands search.
Search is among the most complex problems in computer science, cognitive psychology, information retrieval, and many other disciplines. Search is many things, but it definitely is not easy, well understood, or widely recognized as the next application platform.
Stephen Arnold, January 30, 2008
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