Jun 09 2009
Safari 4 good:
bad:
The latter is really annoying me. Since I am working in Microsoft Live Search, my opinion is not completely unbiased, but I would really like to be able to change my default search engine from google.com to bing.com. Every other search engine allows this, so why not Safari? To compound matters, Safari does not have a very widely used plugin system, and I have not found an authoritative plugin which allows me to change my search engine.
Jul 10 2008
Well, John Battelle’s blog post about open search a week ago possibly had this announcement in mind, and I am glad to see that my comments there on allowing developers to access and modify an open search index hit the nail on the head.
Techcrunch reports that Yahoo has radically opened its search framework with BOSS, which provides an API for retrieving Yahoo results, and for mixing those results with results from other sources. There are apparently no restrictions on how the results get presented, except that at some point it will become necessary to display Yahoo’s ads in or around the results.
BOSS Custom, the next step, which is currently available by invitation only, allows companies to add data to Yahoo’s index.
This is a huge step, and very exciting. It could generate a win for Yahoo by growing the size of the whole search market. For example, say some company, X Co, has an engine which tags telephone numbers in web pages, and provides a link for each allowing the user to call the numbers using Skype (or similar). Previously, such a service would be limited to X Co’s website or portal, and perhaps a few affiliated sites. Now, the service can be linked in to Yahoo Search directly and present those links with some or all search results. Both Yahoo and X Co get a bigger slice of the (bigger) market.
Jul 06 2008
There has been a lot of speculation surrounding the value of Powerset’s technology, and the Microsoft acquisition of the company.
Last week’s Techcrunch interview with Barney Pell and Ramez Naam contains a lot of insight about the technology and the acquisition.
It is true that building a search index by parsing and understanding web pages is more expensive than building a keyword index. Scaling up from wikipedia to the whole web is something which will require a lot of resources, which the Microsoft acquisition provides.
I was compelled to reply to a recent blog post on ZDnet speculating that Microsoft acquired Powerset solely to enhance its advertising offerings, not search. This is pure speculation. As far as I know, and as far as the Techcrunch article indicates, Powerset under Microsoft will still be doing search.
May 22 2008
I have noticed a lot of wikipedia reading and searching applications cropping up on the web recently.
ReadWriteWeb recently published a list of top 10 ways to search Wikipedia, but some things are missing, so here is my list:
