Posts Tagged ‘search’

New York Times Says it’s Time to Rethink Search

Friday, August 19th, 2011
In a recent article entitled, “A Call to Rethink Internet Search,” New York Times technology reporter, Steve Lohr, discusses the rising call for greater innovation and experimentation in web search. Lohr focuses on the criticisms voiced by University of Washington computer scientist, Oren Etzioni, in a recent essay published in Nature, concerning the need to move beyond keyword search to natural language search and question answering. Here’s an exciting prediction from the original Nature article:
“We could soon view today’s keyword searching with the same nostalgia and amusement reserved for bygone technologies such as electric typewriters and vinyl records.”Continue Reading...

On Google’s Spam Woes and the Need for More Players in Search

Wednesday, January 26th, 2011

Fresh on the heels of search newcomer Blekko’s launch in November, and the ensuing debate over whether it’s particularly wise for anyone to challenge Google, the last few weeks have seen a surprising, though gratifying, spate of criticisms of the declining quality of Google’s results for some searches. And, surprise surprise, by and large the critiques run parallel to issues raised by Blekko Founder, Rich Skrenta, in the months leading up to Blekko’s launch, as well as to arguments we’ve been making since Helioid’s first launch in 2008. Finally, it seems as though people are catching on to the fact that Google isn’t infallible, that it doesn’t handle every search perfectly, that the kinds of searches it struggles with are actually increasing in number, and therefore that there is indeed room in the field for fresh players.

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Blekko and Dexterous Search

Wednesday, January 12th, 2011

This past November, search newcomer Blekko opened its figurative doors to the public, and the appearance of a search engine that aims to intuitively boost user dexterity in refining results has been much welcomed. Blekko lets users narrow or reorganize search results by adding slashtags to the query.

Blekko Screen Shot

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