Locator: NIE Home / Publications / Enterprise Search Newsletter / Volume 3 Number 5 / What's New
What's New
Volume 3 Number 5 - Fall 2006
A new web search site is on-line now at http://www.searchmash.com. The site says it is run by Google, and links to the Google privacy policy, but the site seems to exist to show better consolidated search results than conventional Google. Searchmash also experiments with the user interface a bit - note there is no search button, and entering a null search produces a tip under the search box rather than a blank search page.
It's not "Search 2.0", but it does illustrate many of the best practices that companies can begin implementing today.
Search for "mike lynch of autonomy", for example, and you'll see conventional textual results. But to the right of the window, you'll see pop-open navigators for 'Images', 'Blogs', 'Videos' and 'Wikipedia'. These call-outs are the kinds of things that can help a company show related sites and content for intranet searches such as phone directory entries, internal blogs, and polices. Note that once you 'open' a navigator - says 'Images' - searchmash tells you how many there are, and maintains this 'parametric' count even when you close the navigator again. Searchmash does a decent job linking to images, blogs and Wikipedia entries for Dr. Lynch.
Also, notice that when you first navigate a result page, the cursor is nowhere to be found; but if you type, your text populates the search box.
Our overall take? Cool, some near ideas, but not 'Search 2.0'. Still, it's got some good ideas for companies looking to improve search quality.
The young community support site for search developers, http://www.searchdev.org now has over 100 members supporting each other across most major search vendor technologies. The group also features members who work for some of the companies that make the leading search technologies, so there is a good chance that you will get an answer.
New Idea Engineering helps moderate the group, but it is not a service of our company.
If you have a question about implementing some capability, chances are good someone on the group will already know how to do it. And unlike vendor sites, you can ask about features across multiple search technologies.
Feel free to post any useful tools you have developed: we are hoping to have more and more tools in the coming months.
At its recent user group meeting, Oracle announced its new commitment to Enterprise Search in the form of Oracle Secure Search. And a few days later, Oracle announced it was acquiring Stellent, a leading supplier to make enterprise search vendors. They seem to be on a roll: let's see what they can do.