Weblog search For a while, I've been interested in weblog search. It seems to combine personal publishing and information retrieval, and those are the two activities that the web has changed beyond recognition. Forget about e-commerce. Forget even about supply-chain management. Forget about the current orthodoxy among the venture capitalists. Weblogs and search: there is still so much to be done. For a while, Blogger ran a search directly off its database of posts and sites. Unsurprisingly, this worked until people started using the feature, when the requests killed the database. I'm collecting other examples of weblog search. Blogdex has attracted attention, although at present the service just presents lists of the most linked-to pages, and the weblogs that linked to them. Interesting. One could imagine browsing through a weblog, finding an interesting post, finding posts from other authors on the same subject, browsing through their posts. An even more effective way to lose oneself in an infinite loop of weblogs. My list: Linkwatcher NewsIsFree Daypop Blogdex weblogs.com Bloggle Google directory search Blogger search Am I missing anyone? Email me. [Thanks already to Alexander Fritz and others.]#
Salon.com Cheats Death With New Funding John Warnock, the retired CEO and cofounder of Adobe Systems, and William Hambrecht, the CEO and chairman of investment bank WR Hambrecht & Co., are among the existing backers who have reupped to save Salon Magazine. [Inside.com]#
Was Gates fired? Dave Bank of the Wall Street Journal digs through Microsoft emails to uncover an internal feud between Windows loyalists and internet fans at the company. That isn't new, but Bank also apparently concludes that Bill Gates was eased out of the CEO slot. I always thought as much. Despite all of the Microsoft rhetoric of Bill wanting to spend more time with his software.#
wednesday, august 8
PCWorld on specialty search engines Apart from a reference to Moreover, saying the service indexes stories a day or two old, which just ain't so, a good tour of specialty search.#
Startup bets against P2P [News.com] This just has to be the way to go. I've always thought P2P was a phenomenon driven by legal arbitrage. Piracy by individuals is harder to attack by copyright holders than is piracy by corporations. The downsides - interrupted downloads, inconsistent metadata etc - are evident to anyone who has struggled with a large download on Gnutella or one of its clones. What is so wrong with downloading from a central location?#
Finally, I'm one of the popular kids Blogorama makes it to number seven in NewsIsFree's chart of the most popular news channels. I have no idea how this ranking is calculated, and don't believe the number, but I'm strangely flattered.#
Realtime Google [Eric Schmidt in News.com] Q. "How much better can search technology become?" A. "There are lots of ways. Let me give you an example: If you write a story and it goes up on the Web and gets onto Google in the next couple of days. Wouldn't you like it to be accessible right now? We'd like Google to be real time. You make a change (to the Web) and it goes up immediately." email to a friend#
Search by Date at AltaVista and Google - Web Search Tip of the Day "Recency" - as Eric Schmidt of Google rather clumsily calls it - is attracting the attention of the search companies. Unfortunately, timely search results are not just a matter of speeding up the crawling of specific sites. With rapidly changing content, it is hard for a standard crawler to recognize what is new against what has previously been extracted. Even if the frequency is increased.#
tuesday, august 7
Metadata makers, a list Lee Greenhouse on the rise of metadata. "That's why technology, operating alone or in concert with human labor, is gaining popularity with publishers and aggregators. New software from companies such as ClearForest, InXight, Whizbang, and Autonomy can scan large volumes of text, extract important terms, and build files of meta data."#
Thomson Corporation to Acquire NewsEdge Thomson, since the acquisition of Dialog, is strong in archival information. With NewsEdge, it adds current awareness to its portfolio. The question now: what will Reed Elsevier do? With Lexis-Nexis, the company has a powerful archival database, but a more spotty range of information services than competitors such as Thomson and Reuters. The next phase of consolidation: information services companies adding web search to their portfolios. Watch out for who buys Northern Light.#
Google's new boss puts priority on recency "Q: Should users expect to see anything different on Google? A: I hope everything just gets better. The next interesting thing going on in the company is recency. If you are going to write a story, it will be some number of days before the index is updated to include your story. We would like that to be done in a few hours and properly ranked. That will be technically hard."#
monday, august 6
Ixiasoft XML database company mentioned in Catch of the Day. I'm trying to get my head around this area: specifically, how do companies such as Ixiasoft relate to parametric search and XML database technologies such as xyzfind, Mercado's IntuiFind and Ripfire? Rafe Needleman evaluates Ixiasoft in Catch of the Day. I also just came across this article on xyzfind and candidates for XML databases.#
