Comments for Search 2.0 - What's Next?

Search 2.0 - What's Next?

2006-12-13T08:39:48Z

Written by Emre Sokullu and edited by Richard MacManus

You may feel relatively satisfied with the current search offerings of Google, Yahoo, Ask and MSN. Search today is undoubtedly much better than what it was in the second half of the 1990's. But Internet search is still in its infancy and there's much room for improvement. Moreover, the super high valuation of Google on NASDAQ pushes investors and researchers to find better search solutions - to be The Next Big Thing. And these wannabes are not only working on discovering better indexing techniques, they're exploring new horizons like vertical engines, meaning-based search, intent-driven search, new clustering methods, and much more. In this post, we look into latest trends in the search industry.

We have positioned the latest search trends into 3 main categories:

UI Enhancements
Technology Enhancements
Approach Enhancements (Vertical Engines)

UI Enhancements

Snap

Snap promises a better interface for search, using the latest advancements in browsers and AJAX technology. Although there were earlier, similar implementations, preview powered search is perhaps the biggest innovation of Snap. With Snap's preview powered search, you don't necessarily need to visit the site to see if it satisfies your needs - you can see a dynamically loaded screenshot in the right side of your window.

According to a Microsoft study, users spend 11 minutes on a typical search - so potentially Snap can radically shorten this time. Another benefit is that it allows you browse the search results with a few key strokes, which is another big usability enhancement. However it's worth noting that Snap is slow to process searches as a result, because there's too much Javascript and it's too heavy for most modern browsers and hardware. Also, from a technology point of view, Snap doesn't have much to offer - it uses Ask's existing technology. However they have introduced a power of masses approach with options for "This page is Junk" and "This page is Perfect".

]]> Snap's real time query recommendation is also a little similar to an idea once tested at Google Labs. All in all, Snap doesn't bring anything new to the table, but it's a good mashup of some of the innovative ideas in search that we've seen in the last few months.

SearchMash

SearchMash is actually a Google site, to test their latest search innovations. SearchMash follows the basic Google principle - it's cutting-edge, but still plain and simple. When you do a typical web search, you also see image, blog, video and Wikipedia results in the right side of the screen. And there's absolutely no noticeable speed loss, thanks to AJAX. Basically it is a shortcut to reach all the information you need.

The best innovation of SearchMash is perhaps the "More web results" bar. I strongly recommend Google find a way to implement it into their default engine immediately. It makes it much easier to browse the search results. When you need more information, simply click on "More web results" and new results appear at the bottom - enabling you to continue scrolling down on the same page, instead of opening a new page. SearchMash also allows you to give feedback about the results; this may be a sign of the introduction of power of masses into Google Search.

All in all, SearchMash shows that while Google continues to keep itself simple, it also has absolutely no intention of giving way on the innovation front to upcomers. All of the new features in SearchMash are discussed on their About page.

Live.com

Live.com, the new internet initiative of Microsoft, had many innovative ideas at the beginning. However as Vista's official release date gets closer, it has become a much more traditional search engine. Besides the technology advances in their algorithms, which Microsoft hopes will enable it to compete with Google, there are/were many UI enhancements as well. There used to be, for example, an infinite scrollbar in Live.com - but this seems to have been removed for the final public release.

Most innovations in the image search interface have been kept though - the tiered zooming feature is the most blatant one. Live's Image Search offers seamless user experience enhancements. The infinite scrollbar functionality fits very well and saves you from the hassle of clicking and waiting. And Scratchpad functionality allows you to pick your favourites and compare them smoothly.

Overall we can conclude that Live's interface, when compared to old MSN and Microsoft sites, got more simple and Google-like.

Technology Advancements

Search for Meaning by Hakia

Hakia's motto is "Search for Meaning". Founded by seasoned nuclear scientist Riza Berkan, Hakia has raised more than $30M so far, mostly from European private investors. With Hakia you don't search keywords, instead you directly ask questions to the search engine. Hakia makes deep semantic analysis on the pages they crawl. It introduces a new mosaic-like indexing method called QDEX (Query Detection and Extraction). Despite all these nice promises, currently Hakia does not always return the correct results. However they're still in public alpha release and the company is set to debut its full operations in Jan, 2007. After this date, we will have a better chance to judge Hakia's capabilities. Note that Hakia works on top of Microsoft technologies.

Also see Read/WriteWeb's recent post reviewing Hakia.

Clustered Search of Vivisimo and Ask

Neither Vivisimo nor Ask are new companies. Both offer clustered search, which means fragmenting the results of your query so that users can see related terms and go deeper or broader in their data mining. Vivisimo was the first to offer it and it's very useful in cases where you are researching a topic that you're completely new to. Ask's approach is less dense than Vivisimo's and is somehow similar to Live's related results feature. But as stated above, clustered search is probably not something you'll need all the time - it's more a side feature that may be helpful in some cases.

Read/WriteWeb profiled Ask last month.

Intent-Driven Search by Yahoo!

This is a brilliant idea. Yahoo's research project Mindset brings you results according to your search purposes. For instance, when you enter "Rolex Watches" in the search box, you may be willing to buy a Rolex Watch or make an encyclopedic research about the company. Yahoo's intent-driven search allows you to specify your intent and get the most relevant results.

Note that intent-driven search is still in a very early phase, but it's very promising for mainstream users.

Google's Ori Alon

In April this year, Google bought a patented technology that allows them to show related terms after your query. For example, if you search information on the War of Independence, this technology gives you a list of related words - like Etzel, Palmach, Ben-Gurion. The patent was taken by an Israeli phD studying in Australia. Google has not released this feature yet on Google or SearchMash, but it is expected to be shown soon. Also, it is rumored that Microsoft and Yahoo were also after this patent, but Google won the race.

Del.icio.us and Power of Masses

You may ask, what is del.icio.us doing in between all these search sites - isn't it just a bookmarking system? Well, the answer is both yes and no. While it's true that it's a bookmarking site, Yahoo probably didn't buy them just for bookmarking. Actually del.icio.us is also a great tool that empowers the search results of any search engine. Because when you bookmark a site, this indicates the site is a useful resource - so its "pagerank" should be increased. In other words, del.icio.us can actually be used as a search engine, fueled by the power of masses principle. And del.icio.us is not alone in this - Wink and Snap are also trying to use the power of masses in their search offerings.

Supposedly, Google also uses some sort of power of masses with their Personalized Search and Google Toolbar offerings.

NLP (Natural Language Processing) powered Powerset

While still in stealth mode, Powerset has already raised $12.5M in pre-money valuation from several venture capital companies and angel investors like Reid Hoffman, Luke Nosek and early Googlers Aydin Senkut and Zain Khan. The difference between Powerset and the traditional search engines is that while typical search engines like Google and Yahoo don't take into account stopwords (by, after, the, etc), stopwords are a very important part of the engine for Powerset. Why? Because Powerset relies on a semantic capability that can be triggered by using these stopwords. So while the "book by children" and "book for children" queries return exactly the same results in Google, Powerset evaluates them separately and somehow cares about your stopwords as well.

Personalized Search

Palo Alto based Collarity is a very new company entering into the personalized search area. The question that pushed them into this challenge is: "Why are your search results exactly the same as the next person's search results?" This is not a very new idea - Google (with its Kaltix acquisition in 2003) and others already offer this feature, albeit weakly. However Collarity seems very strong with their innovative interface (Collarity Slider), outsourced approach (Collarity Compass) and promising technology.

Social Search

Read/WriteWeb has covered the area of social search very thoroughly already in two articles in July by Ebrahim Ezzy. Two good examples are Eurekster's Swicki and Rollyo. Swicki is a community-driven search engine that allows users to create deep, focused searches on a specific niche - and 'learns' from its community. Rollyo allows users to create and publish their own personal search engines, based on websites they decide to include in their "SearchRoll".

Image Search

Image Search has been around for a very long time, but to be frank it's still very primitive. What most image search engines do is just look for text around images and examine the image tags.

Riya was the first to introduce advanced face recognition technologies in image search. This obviously requires a lot of computing power and just because of this, Riya's weekly burnrate is supposedly over $100K. Co-founded by web 1.0 veteran Munjal Shah and face recognition gurus Burak Gokturk and Azhar Khan, Riya is now entering a whole new space - "search by likeness" with like.com. This may come in very handy, for example when you try to find a watch that is similar to the one you have a digital photo of. That's why Riya is expected to make partnership deals with, or get acquired by, e-commerce companies like Amazon and eBay. It's worth noting that Riya was once in acquisition negotiations with Google, but this never happened - and Google ended up acquiring another face recognition company, Neven Vision. So we can conclude that Google is pursuing this technology very closely!

Approach Enhancements (Vertical Search)

Vertical search is a relatively new discipline in search. Basically, vertical engines look up a very limited subset of the internet - so they are more efficient than generic search engines. Because their search area is not so broad, they can adapt themselves for the specific needs and common points of their area of focus. We won't go in too much detail about vertical search engines, as it has already been covered in a recent article in Read/WriteWeb. But we can categorize the major vertical engines this way:

Jobs: SimplyHired.com Indeed.com, Bixee.com (India), Eluta.ca (Canada), Recruit.net (Hong Kong)
Travel: Sidestep.com, Kayak.com, Mobissimo.com
Health: Amniota.com, CloserLookSearch.com, GenieKnows.com, Healia.com, Healthline.com, Kosmix.com, MammaHealth.com, Google Health
Classifieds: Edgeio.com, Oodle.com
Blogs: Technorati, Bloglines, Blogger Search, Sphere, Feedster
Source Code: Koders.com, Krugle, Google Code

Conclusion

The innovation in search does not stop and there's much to look forward to in the search space. What's more, Google and Yahoo search APIs and the open source Nutch and DMOZ projects allow anyone to try out new ideas. Nutch, supported by Yahoo and shielded under Apache Software Foundation, is providing a free global search engine. DMOZ gives you a very large open source web directory edited by volunteers.

Google will have a hard time competing not only its big adversaries like Microsoft, Yahoo and Ask - but also the ambitious startups that are opening new dimensions and bringing forth new approaches. We will probably hear of acquisitions in this space as well.

We may not have covered all the promising new search offerings here, so please let us know your feedback in the comments below. Also let us know which of the above approaches sounds the most promising to you - and why.

Comment from Aidan Henry on 2006-12-13

2006-12-13T09:26:26Z

I definitely think we will continue to see growth in the number and variety of vertical search engines. No-one can compete against Google on an aggregate level - at least in the short term.

Therefore, the smaller players must eat away at tiny bits of the pie. The quality and relevance of vertical searches (if properly executed) is incredible. I see this as an area with much room for growth.

Cheers,
Aidan

Comment from Pierre on 2006-12-13

2006-12-13T11:21:43Z

What about exalead?

Comment from Abhishek Sharma on 2006-12-13

2006-12-13T11:51:45Z

There is going to growth and adoption of vertical serach engines at the same the search engines will start using "collective intelligence" of users too to display search results.

At the end of it, its the user's who are going to benefit a great deal....

Comment from Bob Caswell on 2006-12-13

2006-12-13T12:20:01Z

What about A9? It's similar to Google's SearchMash only better (well, at least, in my opinion). I review / compare and contrast the two here:

http://www.computers.net/2006/11/search_20_custo.html

Comment from Scott on 2006-12-13

2006-12-13T13:11:33Z

I think the bottom line is that with so many search engines out there (vertical, horizontal, whatever), the big winners will be web 2.0 meta-search sites like Srchr (http://www.srchr.com)

As a user, I'm so used to going to google, I feel like I'm missing something unless I see their results. With a search aggregator, I can see anybody's results I choose. This has important implications for the "big guys" because now they've lost their sticky-ness...but it's awesome for the new guys who can now reach the end users who otherwise wouldn't take the time to get comfortable with a new search service.

Comment from Scott on 2006-12-13

2006-12-13T13:12:36Z

I think the bottom line is that with so many search engines out there (vertical, horizontal, whatever), the big winners will be web 2.0 meta-search sites like Srchr http://www.srchr.com

Comment from ADM on 2006-12-13

2006-12-13T13:47:34Z

There is no doubt that search has come a long way since the late 90s and is in its infancy. The next big winner will be the search company that can shift the model away from optimized SERPs and focus on actual content to extract relevant information and provide some level of analysis for the user.

Don't get me wrong, if you are looking for a list of links to interesting sites then Google, Yahoo and others will provide exactly what you need. That is because Google and others are nothing more than glorified directory assistance providers. If you are looking to go beyond search and actually research anything, Google and other sites provide nothing but frustration. The large search companies don't care about the user experience and put little resource into enhancing the experience. Look no further than Google, they only care about monetizing ads...their search interface has not changed in five years.

Clusty and other clustering technologies are a step in the right direction, however, they fall short in providing deep relevance. All of today's clustering engines still rely on some predetermined structure to serve up its clusters.

Based on media speculation, Google's Orion is suppose to automatically identify and serve up related info from source sites in an effort to provide more insight into search content. Currently, Q-Phrase's ConceptQ applications provide this exact functionality via a downloadable search agent. (As an aside, I believe that Q-Phrase's IP predates Google's Orion patent in the US, so it will be interesting to see what happens if and when Google decides to launch Orion.)

Semantic search is definitely the wave of the future and companies like Powerset and Quece seem to be headed in the right direction. Only time will tell, but investors sure are making some big bets.

Comment from Bob on 2006-12-13

2006-12-13T14:07:33Z

Intent driven search is for me the most useful development.

Comment from Jim on 2006-12-13

2006-12-13T14:51:28Z

What about mobile searchÔºü

Comment from Melek Pulatkonak on 2006-12-13

2006-12-13T15:01:14Z

Hi Emre,

Two comments from hakia:

1) we raised $16MM
2) we will debut full operations in mid-late 2007.

Cheers,

Melek

Comment from Adam Jusko on 2006-12-13

2006-12-13T15:15:52Z

Is there still a place for human-powered search? Our new search site Bessed at http://www.bessed.com thinks so. We're building what I call an "active directory", meaning that our editors create topics and actively go out and add sites to the directory while also welcoming visitor suggestions.

(I don't really like the term "directory" for our site because it connotes a hierarchical structure and very static content, neither of which we are offering.)

The site is built on WordPress, so each directory topic is actually a "post", allowing visitors to request addition of their sites or to offer other suggestions directly on the topic page. We also happily add new topics at Webmasters' request.

It's a way to combine search, social media and the interactivity of blogging software, and we believe over time it will become a trusted resource along the lines of Wikipedia. Not a competitor to the big search engines, but a resource they can trust as one of the best sites for info on any topic.

Comment from Nicolas Steegmann on 2006-12-13

2006-12-13T15:40:41Z

Hi,
I 'd like to develop Pierre's comment and invite you to check exalead.com, which provides users with refinements on the righthand side of each SERP. Included are usual refinements (except that you can choose or exclude them AFTER your query) , such as filetype, language, location, and more original ones : DMOZ categories and related keywords, which are statistically generated (so they appear for any query) using our own technology, and I guess Google's Orion product could look like that somehow.
Cheers,
Nicolas Steegmann
Exalead Web Product Manager

Comment from Don Dodge on 2006-12-13

2006-12-13T15:50:49Z

Great post! You missed a few companies like Jookster, Quintura, Findory, ZoomInfo, etc, but overall a very good view of what is happening in search.

I don't see any big "game changers" in the current lot of start-ups. I think there are three big areas of search that are untapped or under-served; Mobile search, Local search, and Classified search. These are HUGE markets with no clear leader. A new business model, a self service approach, and innovative business alliances will create a monster company in each of these categories. I wrote a blog on this subject today at http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2006/12/whats_new_in_se.html

Don Dodge

Comment from Michael Dillon on 2006-12-13

2006-12-13T16:32:31Z

What about shopping search, or more importantly, comparison shopping search? There is a search engine out there now that seems to have the forefront for this: http://www.jellyfish.com

Comment from Derek on 2006-12-13

2006-12-13T17:31:00Z

Great article!

I think that there will be more work done on the front-end of search, kind of like what we're doing here:

http://www.whonu.com

Instead of taking a query, and using the results page to throw everything at the user that they might want to view, and letting them choose, we're giving them all thier choices upfront, before they even submit their query.

We think it's a much better approach.

A Google-centric version of this approach is coming in 01/07

Derek

Comment from Hashim on 2006-12-13

2006-12-13T18:41:56Z

For me, Search 2.0 should be about Discovery.

I've spent years telling Google what I want to know about. By now they should understand I'm interested in the latest web technology, hip-hop music, local NYC news, and the NY Knicks.

Why isn't my search engine helping me to discover new / useful / entertaining information about these topics?

Comment from Alex Iskold on 2006-12-13

2006-12-13T20:00:59Z

Great article!

I had no idea about searchmash.com. It looks like a vertical search engine killer. And I love the collapsed mode, it looks so simple, clean and readable.

Alex

Comment from Raju on 2006-12-13

2006-12-13T20:41:45Z

There is another way to approach to search 2.0 presented
in http://www.commandengine.com/
It basically suggest to index the web interms of
service it provide. Search index shall be called Command.
Service providers can register their services in terms
of command with command engine. End web users shall start
to getting felling of commanding web. All it provides
some sort of Command Cloud and verb clould similar to Tag clould.

Comment from John Koetsier on 2006-12-13

2006-12-13T20:45:50Z

What? No Ms. Dewey?

;-)

Comment from Denis on 2006-12-13

2006-12-13T21:08:29Z

Hi,

Great post for the trens, but I would suggest http://www.exalead.com for clustering, they have billions of pages indexed, much more than Vivissimo (and their UI rocks).

Denis

Comment from Brian on 2006-12-13

2006-12-13T21:21:05Z

Anyone know of tools for comparing search results or clustering results from different engines? Thanks in advance....

Comment from Serge on 2006-12-13

2006-12-13T22:14:53Z

I would include Quintura (http://www.quintura.com) for both visual UI and technology advancements.

Comment from sekhar on 2006-12-13

2006-12-13T23:23:34Z

Hi ,
Very nice article ..but u missed to list ANSWERS.COM.....
search engine enhanced using google technology ....
it gives accurate answers for search queries .

i prefer it more for its good filtering of unwanted results ..

Comment from Franck Poisson on 2006-12-13

2006-12-13T23:55:47Z

Very good quality article and good coverage of this industry. As you say "Innovation never stops in search". I personaly do not believe in the UI, social, or any human-action improvements in search. All that matters is relevancy and the comprehension of the user's mind and center of interest while he's typing a query.

At Webwag, we are modest, we return the results from the RSS feeds installed by the user on his page. A new search experience to search in your "personal wide web".

Comment from Ranjit Padmanabhan on 2006-12-13

2006-12-14T00:27:27Z

As others have remarked, the holy grail of search is to serve up results based on the presumed Intent of the searcher. In hot pursuit, there are numerous innovative tools that use NLP, rules, closest-question matching, and such techniques to essentially convert a phrase into a structured query.

To make the problem more tractable, these tools are vertically focused and with a nose for monetization, the companies have turned to product search/e-commerce, of which one key facet is shopping comparison. This is where, in my opinion, most of the innovation is taking place and one presumes that the techniques born here will flow to other disciplines.

While it is hard enough to divine the Intent of a query by "structurizing" it, there are a handful of product search services that are tackling the devilish problem of inferring structure and normalizing product data from the web at large. This issue is magnified by issues of crawling and scale, keeping data fresh, identifying product pages and images, extracting the relevant attributes, clustering like products, etc. This complexity is further compounded by the need for slick and responsive visualization and the integration of user opinions, real-time click-through feedback, and personalization.

I would keep an eye on the Goliaths - Microsoft, Froogle and the Davids - TheFind, ShopWiki, and Pronto to be the vanguard of the wave of Intent-based Matching.

Comment from Mark on 2006-12-13

2006-12-14T03:31:20Z

Great article.
In terms of the local search scene, I think that 2007 is going to be the year of the aggregators.
Sites like that aggregate user reviews will take off.

Mark
www.raveaboutit.com.au

Comment from Mark on 2006-12-13

2006-12-14T03:34:04Z

Apologies for not previously including the link to the site I was referring to. It is here: http://inods.com/

Mark

Comment from Anthony on 2006-12-13

2006-12-14T03:45:19Z

Sure you can do all these wonderful things with the frontend of search but if they don't find websites as well as Google does then they are useless.

Comment from Tony M. on 2006-12-13

2006-12-14T03:50:34Z

Wonderful article today, and we very much appreciate the mention. Vertical search has a wonderful future, especially in highly structured fields (ours is jobs). For our part, we're working on new mathematical techniques to deliver search results that more closely match the user's interests. There's excellent work going on in vertical search, especially in Bayesian analysis and probability theory. We're grateful for your survey of the industry.

Comment from E. Tazar on 2006-12-13

2006-12-14T06:04:35Z

Social Search : Blogbar
Tag Search : Keotag

Comment from Ajay on 2006-12-13

2006-12-14T06:43:09Z

I didn't even know various search engines existed. While Google serves as my primary search engine, I do use Yahoo! sometimes and Live at others.

Yet have to get on to testing the others.

Comment from jack on 2006-12-13

2006-12-14T07:11:56Z

I came across a tag search engine that would basically scour all the folksonomy web2.0 sites for tags that match the search query. i forgot to save the name of the site though, anyone know what i'm talking about, if so please post the name. i want to say it was searchtags or tagsearch or something but i really can't remember.
thx in advance

Comment from Gary on 2006-12-13

2006-12-14T07:43:35Z

From my point of view, there are 2 things that search doesn't solve very well currently.

1st is Fairer search results
2nd is spam

Check out our social recommendation engine at Tallstreet.com which solves both.

Comment from Emil on 2006-12-14

2006-12-14T08:09:41Z

in response to Hashim & Frank comments;
both your theme are a main focus of collarity. relevancy is of course the goal, and relevancy must include a profound analysis and understanding of users dynamic interest without asking the user to supply it explicitly. as Hashim said; he worked with Google for 2 years so he expect them to KNOW. I advice you to try www.collarity.com and to see for yourself the fast adaptive learning of the engine.

thanks.

Comment from irfan on 2006-12-14

2006-12-14T08:28:01Z

This is an exhaustive list. I was just going through this and clicking on each of the search sites. Though some of them are nice with nice UI... I still feel like I have to search through google. It has become synonymous with searching the web.

First time visitor to your site, will be coming here often.

Irfan

Comment from spal on 2006-12-14

2006-12-14T09:08:12Z

I think that 'NLP' (Natural Language Processing) type search plus 'Question & Answering Deductive Systems' search will improve the experience of the user in the future compared to today. These 2 areas will bring different technology together into one box. Google & Yahoo search are based on 'link analysis' , that is what page is linked to what other pages & vice versa and I suspect that the 2 vendors would include 'Latent Semantic Analysis' (LSA) capability to their softwares in the near future. LSA can go beyond the meaning of link analysis by describing the concept behind the search 'term'.

Comment from Ash Rust on 2006-12-14

2006-12-14T10:50:26Z

The problem of meaning in web pages is, and will probably continue to be, the main problem facing search precision. Problems such as the difference in meaning between "the blue gun" and "the hired gun", are likely to linger for some time; particularly as linguists are taking a largely manual approach to solving these issues.

Comment from Secret Search on 2006-12-14

2006-12-14T12:46:05Z

AWESOME:

Nice post Emre, but I think you have overlooked a couple areas.

I agree with an earlier commenter that Answers.com is awesome and I hate to say it but ASK.com is good too.

The feed wars have created a whole new era of multi search engines coming out like crazy, however, I think the new warriors like NetVibes.com will be interesting to see. There new search feature is very cool.

Comment from Nextmedia Lab on 2006-12-14

2006-12-14T14:07:49Z

and what about a flash search? www.msdewey.com

Comment from Logan on 2006-12-14

2006-12-14T19:06:28Z

To add to the list of vertical search sites, take a look at www.ArtSugar.com - ArtSugar is a vertical search site for art that just launched.

Comment from spal on 2006-12-14

2006-12-14T21:44:48Z

Ash Rust said...
[Problems such as the difference in meaning between "the blue gun" and "the hired gun", are likely to linger for some time; particularly as linguists are taking a largely manual approach to solving these issues.]

This is exactly what 'Question & Answering Deductive Systems' search is all about. The algorithm can deduce from a knowledge-based that "the blue gun" and "the hired gun" have different linguistic meanings. The research in this area is still in its infancy, however I read it somewhere that Google is putting huge resources into 'Question & Answering Deductive Systems' research.

Comment from Kevin on 2006-12-14

2006-12-14T21:59:08Z

Hi there, very interesting article, I would suggest our web search tool at http://www.mrsapo.com from where you can access some of the tools listed here plus dozens others.

Comment from Joshua C. Lerner on 2006-12-14

2006-12-14T22:43:59Z

Nice article. Let me propose another category for vertical search - Events - which we at BusyTonight are working on.

Joshua

Comment from Brian Dear on 2006-12-14

2006-12-15T01:49:55Z

Well, if you're going to do Events as a search category, you should certainly include Eventful.

Comment from Colin Donald on 2006-12-15

2006-12-15T13:12:55Z

I wouldn't underestimate the usefulness to Google of the custom search engine programme for both the main SE and vertical search. We've created three CSEs in the past month and I'm sure that our work and those of other CSE developers will add a human-powered dimension to the Google algo.

www.madfortoys.com

www.livenetmusic.com

www.mynameisvideo.com

Comment from Ethan Stock on 2006-12-15

2006-12-15T23:38:16Z

I encourage interested readers of this article to check out my April 06 blog post on search innovations and trends. The un-named "serious search startup" is PowerSet. In the post, my breakdown of the innovations in search was a) verticalize b)personalize c)get more user intent (e.g. by accepting large natural language queries, a la PowerSet).

Comment from Russell Miller on 2006-12-15

2006-12-16T00:17:05Z

If you like Ask clustered search, check out my site, Zeedex, which uses wiki-powered suggestions.

Do a search for "renal" on Ask, and you get suggestions for search terms generated by a computer.

Do a search for "renal" on Zeedex, and you get categorized lists of suggestions: kidney symptoms, diseases, drugs, etc., with descriptions and pictures. The suggestions are generated by users.

Comment from Emre Sokullu on 2006-12-15

2006-12-16T02:04:05Z

Thanks everyone for your comments and SE additions.. This thread became a list of latest innovations in the search space :) That's great!

And thanks Melek for the corrections, I based this number on my conversation with Riza Berkan but seems like I misunderstood him. Excuse me for that..

Franck, I think that's a great idea.. This is something we need, I can get lost in my startpage very quickly!

Comment from Emre Sokullu on 2006-12-15

2006-12-16T02:05:01Z

By the way sorry for the late reply. I was very busy the day this article was posted!

Comment from David Mackey on 2006-12-15

2006-12-16T05:07:59Z

I am a particularly big fan of the masses approach. I think that people are the best way to discover the best search results. I also think that learning about the user can help. If I reference SOAP as a programmer I am probably talking about the protocol, whereas a mom is probably referencing the stuff she uses to wash her kids.

Comment from Emre Sokullu on 2006-12-15

2006-12-16T05:14:40Z

That's what Collarity is doing David,
AFAIK, Google also uses your personal info at Gmail and Google Toolbar to fine-tune your searches for you

Comment from Kevin Burton on 2006-12-17

2006-12-17T08:32:13Z

Great post....... lots of awesome research here.

Comment from Mike on 2006-12-17

2006-12-17T11:44:47Z

I think there will be a lot of innovation around social search and social discovery. You mentioned del.icio.us but I would argue that currently we are innovating much faster than they are along social search and discovery.

Here is a post that highlights some of our most recent innovations in social search:

http://blog.mindvalley.com/2006/12/17/blinklist-advances-social-search-and-discovery/

Comment from Emre Sokullu on 2006-12-17

2006-12-17T13:14:13Z

Great to hear from you Mike. Let me clarify this, with del.icio.us, I actually pointed out all social bookmarking sites including blinklist of course. Here the important point is critical mass - that I believe Blinklist has reached. More users you have, more powerful your search system is.

Comment from dumbfounder on 2006-12-17

2006-12-17T19:38:49Z

No mention of Searchles? Searchles is like social bookmarking squared, it is a mixture of social networking and bookmarking, advanced search algorithms, and the ability to search dynamic networks of information. del.icio.us is very limited in its search (and they don't index the web pages), Searchles allows you to search through your posts, or all of your friends posts, or all of your friends' friends posts. But you can also search through anyone else's perspective as well, effectively allowing you to borrow the expertise and connections of anyone on Searchles.

Searchles grew from the search engine Dumbfind. Search is what we do, and now we are applying it to a new medium.

http://www.searchles.com

Comment from Monty on 2006-12-20

2006-12-20T15:20:08Z

DoHowTo.com - a startup how-to video only search. Every result is a free how-to video.

Comment from Gsurface on 2007-01-02

2007-01-03T00:53:18Z

Here is a search engine we have been working on for a bit now. It displays tags when searching. http://www.yufind.com

Comment from Lorett loves pictures on 2007-01-08

2007-01-08T15:59:49Z

Visimo looks very promissing to me.
I like it's aproach to vertical search. I think google is going to offer a simmilar feature in the near time.

Thank you for sharing this story with me !

Comment from FeaturePics Images on 2007-01-10

2007-01-10T21:39:35Z

While always looking to improve FeaturePics.com, we are always on the lookout for the queries and responses which people look for in order to visit our web site.

http://www.featurepics.com/editorial/ask.aspx -
Sometimes the Authors are very serious and other times very much not.
Whatever it is people are looking for, some results are erroneous - and quite often plainly funny.

Ask.com works good for us.