Search as You Type: Been There, Done That
November 25, 2008
A happy quack to the reader who alerted me to this article about Keyboardr here. The idea is that you can get search results without having to launch a browser, navigate to the search engine of your choice, type a query, and review results. The service “executes and displays searches as you type.” I think this type of service may have some utility. My addled goose recollection is that Autonomy introduced a similar service in 2000, maybe earlier. You can read this interesting article about Autonomy’s system here. If the link is dead, you can locate 1,000 other stories about Autonomy’s innovation with this Google query “Autonomy kenjin”. I really am an old goose. I keep seeing more and more innovations that are not new. Young folks just rediscover something that has already been done. A me too product is fine. Product extensions are fine. What’s not so fine is the positioning of a product as a new new thing. Take this shortcut in the pharmaceutical industry, and the innovator could be giving a deposition. You can get more information about Keyboardr here.
Stephen Arnold, November 25, 2008
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One Response to “Search as You Type: Been There, Done That”
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As I recall one of the problems with Kenjin is it gave corporate users the worry that somehow they were being watched, as the tool monitored what they were typing and showed suggested results. The program also had to be downloaded and installed, rather than ran in a browser, which can also be a barrier to use. We found some of the same issues with Webcheck, a search gizmo I designed a few years before. Of course, Keyboardr doesn’t suffer from this problem.