Comments on: The Changing Face Of Search Engines

By: ChaCha - Search With A Twist on iface thoughts

ChaCha - Search With A Twist on iface thoughts — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 14:30:03 +0000

[...] If you thought automation is the solution for everything, ChaCha will be a surprise for you. The twist is provides is if you are not happy with the search results, you can chat with a Search Guide. The Search Guide is a human who, as expected, guides you to find what you are looking for. Alex Iskold has a detailed review. Humans takeover where machines fail! It is quite established that the right balance between automation and manual intervention provides the maximum benefits. I think ChaCha will provide a gentle blow. Whether it can turn into a wind that will lead changes in the search space will depend on performance of the search guides. For ChaCha they have the additional responsibility of managing and supervising the 10,000 or so humans. Checkout the ChaCha Communities and their blog for more updates. [...]

By: Riya Opens With Visual Search on iface thoughts

Riya Opens With Visual Search on iface thoughts — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 16:22:46 +0000

[...] Riya is the first big player in the field of visual search. It seems to be trying to find its holding in the changing face of search engines. It converts a text query into a visual signature that is used to find results. Though face mapping has not got a favorble response, visual search has found a business model in fashion. We have seen Fast Multiresolution Image Querying being used with retrievr. Lets see if this can push ahead interests in video searches. [...]

By: Lorelle on WordPress » The Changing Face of Search Engines: Try Not Searching Google for a Change

Thu, 01 Jun 2006 17:35:01 +0000

[...] Abhijit Nadgouda has written another awesome article, “The Changing Face Of Search Engines”, explaining why you should consider trying a non-Google search engine for a change. Still, lot of quests end in frustration and dissatisfaction, sometimes because of the userâ€™s mistakes or sometimes because the expected information is either never thrown up or are buried in the eternal search result pages or sometimes it is simply inconvenience. There are some new entrants in the search engine domain with their own ideas to solve these problems. They claim they are better, some are, and some are still proving. [...]

By: Abhijit Nadgouda

Abhijit Nadgouda — Sat, 27 May 2006 04:57:56 +0000

Hi Lorelle,

Thanks for the comment.

Yes, it will be interesting to see if too many out-going tag links divert the webcrawler.

However, I would really like if we didn’t have to mark the tags . The author should be able to provide something to reflect the whole scheme/context/subject of the article rather than keywords/tags.

By: Lorelle VanFossen

Lorelle VanFossen — Wed, 24 May 2006 13:51:18 +0000

Excellent, as usual.

The only point I’d like to make is that you say Sphere does not use tags. Well, it doesn’t recognize tags as “tags” but does recognize the words in the links as words. Because they are usually (but not always) reflective of the keyword content and categories of the post, they are put into the keyword pool. They aren’t ignored, or used as tags but are used as keywords.

Tags that link, as you are using, to Technorati or other offsite content rather than onsite content, help search engines follow those leads those sites, which helps them gather more information into their database, which speeds up collection of material. I would be interested to know if such offsite links could convince a webcrawler to leave your site faster if they meet enough offsite links before they get to your intrasite links found in the sidebar and elsewhere.

You’ve listed several search engines I love working with, and a few new ones I’m eager to try. Thanks for the great work!