One drawback with the Google Search Appliance (GSA) has been that you cannot test it before you buy it. You could go to a Google Partner and ask them to index your content but that only works well with public content. If it’s content behind your firewall it gets worse and you most probably have to buy your own GSA just to try it out. (more…)
Sometimes the users know exactly what they are looking for, sometimes they are just looking to discover new areas. When it comes to information discovery, a plain, one dimensional result list is not the most suitable tool. (more…)
Web service award recently issued a press release stating that the web is being flooded in 2008. This flood of information is caused by the demands for availability as well as the users’ demands for finding all information possibly needed, online. So Swedish websites are being flooded with information and navigation and structure aren’t coping with the problem. And so the users can’t find the information…
I believe something has been missed here. There is a big difference between just publishing your content online to make it available to users and making it findable. Could you really say your content is available when it’s not findable? When talking about search, I always like to use the quote: “If the user can’t find the information, it’s not there.” You don’t make the information available to users just by publishing it; you also have to make the information findable.
Three weeks after making a $1.2 billion bid for FAST search & Transfer Microsoft announces that they make a $44.6 billion offer to buy Yahoo. So far it‘s only an offer which Yahoo’s board and stockholders are considering but, to conclude, Microsoft is serious about going into strategic search markets.
Even Gartner has talked about open source solutions as interesting search tools. For those of you who needs an introduction, a slideshow comparing Lucene, Solr and Nutch can be found here.
That was one of the questions the UIE research group asked themselves when conducting a study of on-site search. One of the things they discovered was that the choice of search engine was not as important as the implementation. Most of the big search vendors were found in both the top sites and the bottom sites.
So even though the choice of vendor influences what functionality you can achieve and the control you have over your content there are other things that matter, maybe even more. Because the best search engine in the world will not work for you unless you configure it properly.
You can, on a very high level, divide the users who visit corporate public websites into two categories. The first category would be The Pathfinders. Typical for this category is that they try to find a logic structure on the websites in order to find the information they are looking for. They never use the search field on the website.
The other category could be named The Search Generation. They are not so impressed by the website navigation and structure. They normally go direct to the search field and type their query, instead of trying to find it by using the website navigation. The challenges for the corporate websites are to satisfy both these categories.
Luckily, search is not all finding critical business information, it also is the ticket to finding new enjoyments. Recently Yahoo has launched a new audio search that lets you search multiple music libraries, including for example iTunes, containing millions of songs. In the search result you can see who provided the song and also listen to a free 30- second clip. (more…)
Today, Google is the main source for finding information on the web, regardless of the kind of information you’re looking for. Let it be company information, diseases, or people – Google is used for finding everything. While Google is doing a great job in finding relevant information, it can be good to explore alternatives that are concentrated upon a more specific target.
In the previous post, Karl blogged about alternatives to Google that provides a different user interface. Earlier, Caroline has enlightened us about search engines that leads to new ways on how to use search. Today I am going to continue on these tracks and tell you a bit about a new challenger, Spock, and my first impressions of using it.
Out on the web there are a large number of small search engines that try to stand out and maybe take some of the market shares from Google.
I would like to introduce some of them in order to help other realize that search can (and should) be a bit more then a search bar and a list of hits. A number of these alternative search engines have focused on the visual presentation of the search result in interesting ways. For example the search engine quintura uses tag clouds of related terms and concepts to the original query.
A slightly different approach has been taken by mnemomap and webbrain that presents related concepts in a graph instead. The other part is to visually show the divisions of the search results into different categories so they can easily be navigated through but also to give a quick overview of the subject, examples of that can be seen at e.g. mooter and kooltorch. Finally I would also like to mention kartOO that have, in my opinion, gone one step further and even presents the links to the search results with images and icons. (more…)
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