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• Intelways.com is not the Google killer but it's certainly much MORE than Google. SEE what I mean!

  Juan Sosa
  CEO & Founder
  Intelways

  Posted by: Juan | July 26, 2007 4:11 PM




• First off - welcome!!!

  I think that the key is in a tool that is iterative. We do not find answers right away. The tool you are looking for needs understand the process of research and guide you.

  Alex

  Posted by: Alex Iskold | July 26, 2007 6:27 PM




• the future of the net is going to be social movement of groups that harness the power and channel for the betterment of society. they wont use a search engine that is not contributing to there causes.

  Posted by: daniel rueda | July 26, 2007 8:16 PM




• Speaking of Google, perhaps it's time to admit that the emperor is buck naked? Google is no longer an asset to small business. It's digressed into a black box designed to extract as much money as possible from small business while giving back as little value as possible. This piece explains why Adwords is something to be skeptical about: "Why Google Adwords is Not Helpful to Small Business" http://smartstartup.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/07/a-fable-doing-b.html

  Posted by: Peter | July 26, 2007 9:24 PM




• You guys should do a piece about true Cross-Language-Search:

  The term ‚Äúcross-language search‚Ä? is used in many different senses:

  1. Some search engine providers claim to support multilingual or cross-language search if they can handle and index documents written in different languages. They search for the exact appearance of the entered search terms, e.g. ‚Äúwar‚Ä? finds English documents referring to military actions and it finds German documents containing ‚Äúwar‚Ä? in the sense of ‚Äúwas‚Ä? (i.e. a meaningless glue word).

  2. Other search engines (see, e.g., www.google.com/intl/en/press/annc/translate_20070523.html) provide a tool for the translation of a query into a selectable other language, and then, the query is submitted with the translated query text. This is certainly a progress and can be useful in some specific situations, e.g. if one is looking for a hairdresser in Paris.

  Shortcomings:
  - If one is looking for ‚Äúmember of the board‚Ä? and ‚ÄúSAir Group‚Ä? (Swissair) and searches for German documents, the translated query ‚ÄúMitglied des Brettes‚Ä? und ‚ÄúSAir Gruppe‚Ä? won‚Äôt provide any results. If ‚Äúmember of the board‚Ä? is replaced by ‚ÄúAufsichtsrat‚Ä? some documents are found but they do not correspond to the commonly used terms ‚ÄúVerwaltungsrat‚Ä? or ‚ÄúVerwaltungsr√§te‚Ä? in conjunction with the Sair case.
  - For information research and intelligence services the above-mentioned method does not help because it is not able to compare and rank documents written in different languages.

  3. A true cross-language search is possible only if the search engine is able to recognize the thematic content, i.e., if the system realizes that the English translation of a French (or a German etc.) document is equivalent to the original document. This advanced technique is implemented in InfoCodex (see www.infocodex.com). It simultaneously finds documents in all supported languages, without the need for a cumbersome (and arbitrary) translation into each other language. Because of the cross-language content recognition and a well-founded similarity measure, the documents can be ordered by their relevance with respect to the query.

  Posted by: Zeno Davatz | July 26, 2007 11:52 PM




• Bernard, you are laying out a good roadmap for how value can be added to what the major search engines offer and you emphasize "the place to look is what we do AFTER a Google Search." This suggests to me that the searcher is in a process where s/he is gathering information and not just looking for a single answer to his/her question. Especially in such a (re)search process, it might be useful to have a sense of the "quality" and "authority" of the information being collected. Further, as you point out, we work in teams, sometimes small or part of a larger enterprise, and it is critical that we can share what we have found to see what we agree on and what has been uniquely deemed valuable by only a few. It would useful to see degree of agreement in the team about what is valuable information, without losing the unique perspectives.
  For these reasons, we have developed searchCrystal, which lets you visualize, compare, filter, annotate and share search results or lists of valuable information with your friends and co-workers. searchCrystal guides you toward relevant information: the more engines that suggest a specific result and the more highly they rank it, the better this result. Also, the more agreement between the engines, the greater the quality of the search results.
  There is a free Full">Full">http://www.searchcrystal.com/analytics.html‚Ä?>Full Version (with advanced functionality) and the searchCrystal">searchCrystal">http://www.searchcrystal.com/pCreateEmbeddedObjectGenericSearch.php‚Ä?>searchCrystal Widget lets you share visualizations of your search results on your blog or within the enterprise. searchCrystal can compare and visualize any ordered list of data and that's why we support the comparison of RSS">RSS">http://www.searchcrystal.com/pCreateEmbeddedObjectRSS.php‚Ä?>RSS feeds.
  You write ‚Äúdo something useful for me right now and don‚Äôt mess with my head while I figure out how to use it‚Ä? ... searchCrystal is a new service, "still rough at the edges" ... may be a way to start is to do a search for you (Bernard Lunn): MSN and Ask find your contact info (Google does not as easily). You can view the results in different ways (icons in top right corner of the widget), where the standard list display is one option.

  Posted by: Anselm | July 27, 2007 1:23 AM




• I would have to agree with Peter's comments above. Adwords is a killer on small business, and until someone comes up with an alternative that actually benefits small business, then we will continue to see me potential web businesses come and go.

  The only way to kill off Google is creating a new technology that leaves search engine companies at a loss.

  Posted by: Finance Team | July 27, 2007 3:35 AM




• First, thanks to everybody who responded.
  Double-thanks to Alex who encouraged my late entry as a Blogger. You are right, a tool that can adapt to an guide the research process is key. I intend to do a follow-up process on the different types of research process.
  I looked at the two engines and - this was a very quick glance - saw search aggregators. The ability to use multiple engine APIs is part of the initial serach process but not that difficult I believe. Visualization is an important feature, it must adapt to my/my team's tags and relationships ie our view of the world.
  Anselm I am intrigued by "it might be useful to have a sense of the "quality" and "authority" of the information being collected". How do you do that? PageRanks was one answer, but clearly not enough.
  Yes, cross language important at some stage as the nuances of language are tricky and I saw an interesting post on r/ww about Korean engine beating Google. But my immediate focus is English-speeaking world.

  Posted by: bernard lunn | July 27, 2007 6:01 AM




• "Speaking of Google, perhaps it's time to admit that the emperor is buck naked? Google is no longer an asset to small business. It's digressed into a black box designed to extract as much money as possible from small business while giving back as little value as possible".

  Hey Peter...I agree with you 100%. Just recently, hoping against hope of course, wrote to Google pointing the ills of the program as I saw them.

  As I expected, no response to date.

  Posted by: Adrian keys | July 27, 2007 7:02 AM




• Google killer - I would say that social sites could probably take over google. If they could incorporate more respectable search functions into thier site without the help of google. I think thats why Google will probably buy Facebook. They are geared towards a more functional site than just for fun.

  Posted by: Omadsense | July 27, 2007 7:08 AM




• Bernard, I understand your scepticism about NLP, but I believe it will be gradually taking a bigger role in post-search. It just won't become one ultimate solution for all search questions, but rather achieve successes in some niches, one by one (some vertical searches perhaps). Innovation in this area will keep coming from Google and other big players, as well as from new startups.
  As for the (re)search needs, consider the approach we take in SenseBot.net: we use NLP to create a summary on the topic of the user's query. The summary crosses the boundaries of individual results, and is intended to give the user a quick digest on the topic. This may be considered as the first step in (re)search: you get a scoop on the topic, and after that decide whether you want to drill down into the individual pages or not.

  Posted by: Dmitri | July 27, 2007 8:03 AM




• It is true that Google is still the undisputed champ, but in the past couple months, faltering has occurred and I think that we are all ignoring the nature of the Internet, which has shown itself time and time again - no one has dominance forever and as soon as you slip, there is someone/something ready to take your spot.

  Google, in my opinion, will fall the same as any other site that has had overwhelming dominance. MySpace is currently experiencing it, and Facebook will go through it's spell next. Google may take more time given it's market control, but as I've been saying, it will slip.

  Posted by: 10668844 | July 27, 2007 9:44 AM




• "Anselm I am intrigued by "it might be useful to have a sense of the "quality" and "authority" of the information being collected". How do you do that? PageRanks was one answer, but clearly not enough."

  PageRank generalized the concept of "citation analysis" that is used to analyze academic research and developed algorithms to be able to analyze very large "hyperlink networks" to identify "authoritative" sites ... surely, in Google current algorithm, this is only one of the many parameters they use.
  Now, in the context of "meta search", multiple search engines are consulted and we can think of them as "experts.‚Ä? The idea is "common sense": the more the experts agree, the better the quality of the recommendations ... of course, there are always counter examples, but in general, it is a "reasonable" working assumption that if you hear the same advice to come to the conclusion that the answers you are getting are good (unless the experts all have the same bias and blindspot) - this is why searchCrystal visualizes the agreement between search engines as well as the results only found by one engine in the same display ... this way you are less likely to miss an important "outlier. "
  I have done research in a controlled setting using large data sets and shown that there is a correlation between the quality of a search engine and how many of its results are also recommended by other search engines.
  In terms of the relevance of a result, I have also shown that the probability of a result being relevant is correlated with the number of engines that find it and how highly they rank it. This is why searchCrystal uses a bulls-eye display to guide users toward relevant results: a) results found by the same number of engines are mapped into the same ring; b) the more engines that find a result, the closer toward the display center it is placed; c) the more highly ranked a result is by the engines that find it, the larger the size of the result icon and closer toward the display center it is placed. Hope, this helps to explain how a sense of ‚Äúauthority: and ‚Äúquality‚Ä? can be determined and visualized.
  BTW, Bernard, did you find the searchCrystal results for your name (Bernard Lunn) useful enough?
  

  Posted by: Anselm | July 27, 2007 1:30 PM




• This is an easy one to answer. Google exists because of unstructured data making web search hard. When web content becomes more structured, web search will be much easier and Google's competitive advantage (huge indexing farms etc.) will be relatively less valuable to users. Not sure if I'm being clear but basically I am saying that once TBL's semantic web dreams come to pass, querying a lot of data hosted on millions of webservers well will be much easier (and better). Google will probably still be #1 in search then, but its advantage will be lessened (unless it can own the data standards).

  Posted by: chad | July 27, 2007 2:18 PM




• I have quit YouTube and will be committing ritual suicide online.
  The Rock Star life is just too much for me.
  Here is my farewell video:

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mpkAdaG9yU

  Posted by: Raymond Stolp | July 27, 2007 2:42 PM




• Hello all, this is Pedro from Spain.

  I'm higly interested in what you say. Form me, natural search and semantic search is not the way. It means that instead of searching 't-shirt shop' you should search: 'Where can i find a t-shirt shop' or instead of searching 't-shirt shop new york' you search 'where can i find a t-shirt shop in new york'?. For me, this is a step back. Now we've got into word searching, why do we have to write the full sentence? Its like SMS and IM language: its shorter, faster, and easier. Maybe google then says that whe have to search like this: 'excuse me, your Highness, Google, can you tell me where can i find t-shirts in new york, often called 'the big apple'?' Nonsense.

  Other thing. Maybe we are facing now the end of internet creativity. At least, i think the search market is closed now. No other company will implement anything will change our way of searching today. Maybe they invent anything else, but not this. And that's why google, MSFT, yahoo and co are trying to get the advertising market with them. When those companies are after the advertising market, it means that the internet is mature. They are no inventing anything, they are after money ad deals that make them get money.

  Que sera sera? Whatever will be will be...

  Posted by: Pedro | July 27, 2007 2:54 PM




• I'm inclined to agree with Pedro from Spain...shorter is probably better. People think in terms of text message sized information and the trend seems to be that shorter is better.

  I must disagree with the basic premise of this article...I don't think Google has search on lock. You have to look at the situation when Google arose...everyone thought Search = Portal and giants like Lycos and Excite still roamed the Earth. But Google came out of nowhere and changed the whole game (I remember feeling like an early adopter when I was using google before the story about it hit slashdot). I think the next big thing in search will be similar...something completely out of left field that just works better.

  Google certainly doesn't have a lock on relevance and algorithims. They just have what works best now. Something tells me that the company is sooo tied up in that particular algorithim that they're using the considerable brain trust they've created to improve it, not throw it out and look for something innovative and new (like they did so many years ago). I've also got a feeling that if one of their employees used their famous "personal project time" to create a competing search algo Sergi & Co would not be happy about it.

  So is there still opportunity in the search market? Heck yeah. All it will take is a new algorithim that "just works". That's all Google did when they started and the opportunity is still there. We've all just accepted the fact that PageRank is the greatest web search strategy in existence. Well, that just isn't true. There is something better and more effective out there and it's just a matter of time before a motivated group of young people find it. But the first step in that is not believing the hype and not fearing the Google giant.

  Posted by: Joel | July 27, 2007 3:29 PM




• How about an engine that gives you an option to remove results where someone is trying to sell you something?

  Posted by: Dave | July 27, 2007 4:28 PM




• Check out the state of search for an admittedly rather cryptic response, I'm bound by my work contract to not go into too much detail :) Hopefully it gives some more food for thought.

  Posted by: David Novakovic | July 27, 2007 8:55 PM




• I was reading "What is Enterprise 2.0?" by Fred ( http://www.fredcavazza.net/2007/07/27/what-is-enterprise-20/ ) the other day, and he made a good point in it:

  "At least, search is an essential tool to access the famous business-critical information. This search engine can be semantic (based on a thesaurus), empiric (like Google’s index) or social (using tags, folksonomies and rating systems); and why not the three of them (like CoReap - www.coreap.com)."

  Posted by: Marthas | July 27, 2007 9:34 PM




• I've been mulling over the idea of "concept searching" in my mind as of late. The problem with today's search engines is that they're still related strictly to my search terms. The problem is exposed when I need to do a search for terms that may not appear exactly as I type them, but together form more of a characteristic or conceptual pattern of something else. For instance, if I search for red, orange, and yellow, I will get a wide diversity of sites which have these words prominently displayed in HTML content. But maybe what I'm really after is artistic impressions of warm color use. Or perhaps I'm looking for images of fire...

  The point is, the terms I specified are related in ways beyond just their placement on a web site. Flickr does a very nice job of demonstrating the power of tagging, categorizing, and respectively searching. By combining definitions of the words we're searching for, they're able to build what are called "clusters." Clusters are groups of tags that seem related and Flickr allows you to pick a cluster to further identify the concept you're searching on.

  This is the next revolution in search engines. It's a combination of Natural Language and research search types. By analyzing the words meanings and allowing the user to refine their particular definition, Conceptual Searching can be made possible.

  Posted by: Olaf Gradin | July 27, 2007 10:47 PM




• Olaf: That's almost exactly the right way to think about it. In fact searching for a concept is pretty much already possible, what the real challenge at the moment is how do we enable users to formulate a conceptual query.

  Posted by: David Novakovic | July 28, 2007 6:04 AM




• Anselm, I looked at the search on my name and this is my take:

  1. The visualization is intriguing and fun but unless I can set the tags and relationships in ways that make sense I think this would be fun but not essential/daily tool.

  2. The search had the same mix of relevant and irrelevant that I get from searching my name on Google or other engines.

  3. Having the comments in there was interesting and with some more organization in the way that presented a person's thought process it could have some value.

  4. People information is one area that is well covered by Vertical Search. I now use Zoom Info before I use Google for people search and that is a significant achievement for ZoomInfo if, as I suspect, I am not alone in that.

  This shows the difficulty of a search engine competitor to Google. Unless you focus on being best at one thing (eg People) you have to persuade users that your engine is always or at least usually the best in all or at least most of the search use cases. That is a huge hurdle to jump over. I am not saying it cannot be done. I hope it can and anything is possible, but it is a high hurdle.

  Posted by: bernard lunn | July 28, 2007 10:04 AM




• The seeds that grew to become Google's strengths are now its Achilles heel. From the "Do No Evil" brand-promise that is continually wheeled out to haunt them, to the linking/relevance algorithms to the hierarchical results display format and their dependence on privacy-invasive methodologies; they are today's dominant oligopolist, but yesterday's innovators.

  Unlike early-Google, the company now has so much momentum holding it on its current course that by definition they are ripe for disruption. Why? Because they have too much invested in their way of doing things to be able to adapt quickly enough to an inevitable systemic innovation. Even if they do see it coming, they won't be able to counter it.

  Clayten Christensen, in the Harvard Business Review says: "Most big companies have talented managers and specialists, strong product portfolios, first-rate technological know-how, and deep pockets. What managers lack is a habit of thinking about their organization’s capabilities as carefully as they think about individual people’s capabilities."

  ...and what's the incentive to worry about the Firm? They are top of the heap, they are making boat-loads of cash, what can go wrong?

  Posted by: Simon Edhouse | July 29, 2007 7:29 AM




• It seems to me that as technology is built one layer upon another, each layer dependent on the strengths and possibly the frailties of the layer before it, that any new form of search will have to be built upon combinations of the older forms. Social search, could not function in the way it does now, were it not for the other forms coming before it. This will take different routes as it goes. It almost seems that some type of emotive search is what a lot of people are seeking, but I am not sure how that can be accomplished without a shift in the tech itself. I would love to be able to think something into being on my screen, with all the relevant information brought up right in front of my eyes, but a lot of the true creativity in any project happens as a result of the search itself. Finding material that is not what you are looking for, helps to better determine what you are looking for.

  Posted by: James Burns | July 29, 2007 11:05 PM




• When it comes to search no one can beat Google. Human searches would be a great concept but it will work in a limited way. It seems as the technology matures we can expect improvement in search functions.

  Posted by: kalpesh | July 29, 2007 11:07 PM