Search Inside Obama’s Inaugural Speech

Delve Networks has applied its audio search technology to Obama's inagural speech. When you enter keywords into the search field below the video, those words are highlighted on the timeline, guiding you to the most relevant parts of the video. Audio search is difficult to execute properly, since human speech is imprecise and varies wildly from person to person. Delve Networks have done a good job, however. I'll take a close look at various audio search engines in a future blog post.

Visual Search The Future? Spare Me The Eye Candy

Visual search engines like Searchme, Viewzi and Cooliris are still far away from replacing general-purpose search engines like Google. Coverflows, thumbnail galleries and timelines are pretty to look at, and they often work well for image and video searches. But so far nothing beats the old list of 10 blue links when it comes to efficient web search. Page titles and text summaries with highlighted keywords are far better (general) indicators of relevance than small thumbnails. A combination of text and thumbnails works quite well, though. I'm very pleased with the GooglePreview addon for Firefox, and I encourage everyone to try it.

Carrot2 – Open Source Search Results Clustering Engine

The Carrot2 clustering engine caught my interest today. It's an "open source framework for building search clustering engines". Carrot2 will basically take search results, analyze these on the fly, and group them according to most common concepts and keywords. Clusters can then be used for navigation and visualization (see the demo at http://search.carrot2.org/stable/search). Grokker (http://www.grokker.com) is using parts of this framework, apparently. Carrot2 can be integrated as a Java API, or you can interface with the standalone clustering server via XML or JSON. I hope I get to play with this technology sometime soon.

The Future Of Social Search (Or Why Google Should Buy Facebook)

While we're working on the big haul, have a look at Sidestripe. It's a Firefox plugins that brings together Google and Facebook in something of a social search experience. Sidestripe indexes your friends on Facebook and parts of their profile. When you later search on Google, friend search results appear after the third natural result. It may be rewarding to discover friends who share one of your particular interests. Search on Facebook is not a very satisfying experience in itself. Social networking is on the other side not one of Google's strengts. Perhaps a joint effort may breathe some life into social search?

We're Moving

We’re Moving

It’s a new year, and we’re using the opportunity to reinvent Searchnuggets. This blog will soon reappear under a new name – bigger, faster, and more productive. It’s a change we have to make, in order to bring you even more engaging and though-provoking (or so we like to think) news and stories from... Read More »