By Vegard Sandvold on February 2, 2009
An interesting discussion is taking place in the Enterprise Search Engine Professionals group on LinkedIn. The question asked is this: Is on-demand cloud based enterprise search a good value proposition for the future (with the recession and companies aggressively cutting cost)?
I have played around in my head with the idea of cloud-based enterprise search... Read More »
By Vegard Sandvold on January 26, 2009
If your work involves user experience in any way, you should be familiar with design patterns. Bringing patterns into your design will help you define and solve common problems related to user interaction and information architecture. Sharing patterns with your team help you establish a common vocabulary, in turn making it easier to convert... Read More »
By Vegard Sandvold on January 22, 2009
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.
By Vegard Sandvold on January 20, 2009
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.
By Vegard Sandvold on January 19, 2009
Coverflow, like any other popular design pattern, is widely used and abused. It’s bling for your iPod and MP3 collection. It’s makes file browsing all fun and games. But please, keep it away from my search results. Just because it looks good doesn’t mean it works good. I seriously doubt that search result coverflows... Read More »
By Vegard Sandvold on January 13, 2009
Twitter holds a great opportunity for companies to engage in conversation with customers about their products and services. And search is a great technology for discovering people who are twittering about you.
Last week I made a commented to a friends about Protoshare, an application for online collaborating on web design. We were just exchanging... Read More »
By Vegard Sandvold on January 12, 2009
Looking for Searchnuggets? Please read on. As previously announced, Searchnuggets has reappeared under a new name – bigger, faster, and more productive. It’s a change we had to make, in order to bring you even more engaging and though-provoking (or so we like to think) news and topics from the search business. Welcome to... Read More »
By Vegard Sandvold on January 10, 2009
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.
By Vegard Sandvold on January 5, 2009
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?
By Vegard Sandvold on January 4, 2009
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 »
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