SubscribeDecember 13, 2006 / 45 comments
Search 2.0 - What's Next?
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 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 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, 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
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.
Permalink / 
Audio / Comments (45) / Trackbacks (5) / 
digg this / 
add to del.icio.us / 
stumble it
TrackBack
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/movabletype/mt-tb.cgi/767
» Fried SPAM Cooks Up on Google, Yahoo, Ask and MSN from eoecho | Greg Magnus
Tracked on December 13, 2006 03:12 AM
» What's new in search technology? Is Google it? from Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing
Tracked on December 13, 2006 07:51 AM
» Social Search Engine from Confluence: Social Software Research Space
Tracked on December 13, 2006 08:08 AM
» Next generation search from Soaring on Ridgelift
Tracked on December 13, 2006 09:52 AM
» ChaCha: A Human-Powered Search Engine from Read/WriteWeb
Tracked on December 14, 2006 02:11 AM
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all Read/WriteWeb posts
# 1
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
Posted by: Aidan Henry | December 13, 2006 01:26 AM
# 2
What about exalead?
Posted by: Pierre | December 13, 2006 03:21 AM
# 3
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....
Posted by: Abhishek Sharma | December 13, 2006 03:51 AM
# 4
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
Posted by: Bob Caswell | December 13, 2006 04:20 AM
# 5
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.
Posted by: Scott | December 13, 2006 05:11 AM
# 6
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.
Posted by: Scott | December 13, 2006 05:12 AM
# 7
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.
Posted by: ADM | December 13, 2006 05:47 AM
# 8
Intent driven search is for me the most useful development.
Posted by: Bob | December 13, 2006 06:07 AM
# 9
What about mobile search？
Posted by: Jim | December 13, 2006 06:51 AM
# 10
Hi Emre,
Two comments from hakia:
1) we raised $16MM
2) we will debut full operations in mid-late 2007.
Cheers,
Melek
Posted by: Melek Pulatkonak | December 13, 2006 07:01 AM
# 11
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.
Posted by: Adam Jusko | December 13, 2006 07:15 AM
# 12
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
Posted by: Nicolas Steegmann | December 13, 2006 07:40 AM
# 13
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
Posted by: Don Dodge | December 13, 2006 07:50 AM
# 14
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
Posted by: Michael Dillon | December 13, 2006 08:32 AM
# 15
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:
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
Posted by: Derek | December 13, 2006 09:31 AM
# 16
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?
Posted by: Hashim | December 13, 2006 10:41 AM
# 17
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
Posted by: Alex Iskold | December 13, 2006 12:00 PM
# 18
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.
Posted by: Raju | December 13, 2006 12:41 PM
# 19
What? No Ms. Dewey?
Posted by: John Koetsier | December 13, 2006 12:45 PM
# 20
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
Posted by: Denis | December 13, 2006 01:08 PM
# 21
Anyone know of tools for comparing search results or clustering results from different engines? Thanks in advance....
Posted by: Brian | December 13, 2006 01:21 PM
# 22
I would include Quintura (http://www.quintura.com) for both visual UI and technology advancements.
Posted by: Serge | December 13, 2006 02:14 PM
# 23
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 ..
Posted by: sekhar | December 13, 2006 03:23 PM
# 24
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".
Posted by: Franck Poisson | December 13, 2006 03:55 PM
# 25
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.
Posted by: Ranjit Padmanabhan | December 13, 2006 04:27 PM
# 26
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
Posted by: Mark | December 13, 2006 07:31 PM
# 27
Apologies for not previously including the link to the site I was referring to. It is here: http://inods.com/
Mark
Posted by: Mark | December 13, 2006 07:34 PM
# 28
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.
Posted by: Anthony | December 13, 2006 07:45 PM
# 29
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.
Posted by: Tony M. | December 13, 2006 07:50 PM
# 30
Social Search : Blogbar
Tag Search : Keotag
Posted by: E. Tazar | December 13, 2006 10:04 PM
# 31
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.
Posted by: Ajay | December 13, 2006 10:43 PM
# 32
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
Posted by: jack | December 13, 2006 11:11 PM
# 33
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.
Posted by: Gary | December 13, 2006 11:43 PM
# 34
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.
Posted by: Emil | December 14, 2006 12:09 AM
# 35
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.
Posted by: irfan | December 14, 2006 12:28 AM
# 36
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'.
Posted by: spal | December 14, 2006 01:08 AM
# 37
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.
Posted by: Ash Rust | December 14, 2006 02:50 AM
# 38
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.
Posted by: Secret Search | December 14, 2006 04:46 AM
# 39
and what about a flash search? www.msdewey.com
Posted by: Nextmedia Lab | December 14, 2006 06:07 AM
# 40
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.
Posted by: Logan | December 14, 2006 11:06 AM
# 41
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.
Posted by: spal | December 14, 2006 01:44 PM
# 42
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.
Posted by: Kevin | December 14, 2006 01:59 PM
# 43
Nice article. Let me propose another category for vertical search - Events - which we at BusyTonight are working on.
Joshua
Posted by: Joshua C. Lerner | December 14, 2006 02:43 PM
# 44
Well, if you're going to do Events as a search category, you should certainly include Eventful.
Posted by: Brian Dear | December 14, 2006 05:49 PM
# 45
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
Posted by: Colin Donald | December 15, 2006 05:12 AM
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/search_20_what_is_next.php