Searching notes
From PLN
Searching notes
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Notes about searching in general.
Search smarter; find a person
- by Leslie Dillon from Leader's Digest April 2008
Among the nine business trends featured in the April 2008 issue of Wired magazine is "The human touch: Algorithms are terrific, but to search smarter, find a person." Suffering from a bad case of information overload, Jeremy Brosowsky created Brijit, which uses people to produce 125 daily summaries and ratings of online and offline content--articles, audio and video programs . "Brijit is your well-read friend," says Brosowsky. He's not alone in turning to human sources; there's also Mahalo, ChaCha (from Amazon) and Squidoo. And don't forget Google's knol. "These ventures have a common goal: to enhance the Web with the kind of critical thinking that's alien to software but that comes naturally to humans."
OCLC's George Needham asks (in a recent post on It's all good) where libraries are in all this. "Is there a way we can begin to capitalize on the fact that the web magnifies the importance of personalization? Why do we keep the vast majority of our services on such an impersonal level? The old verities simply don't hold water any more."
(Brendan I. Koerner, "Algorithms are terrific, but to search smarter, find a person," Wired, April 2008 via It's all good, Apr. 10, 2008.)
Searching as a team
- by Leslie Dillon from Leader's Digest March 2008
Today’s search tools are designed for people working alone, but that’s not always how people work. An innovative tool called SearchTogether aims to help groups work together from different computers.
Designed to solve the problems of redundant effort and inefficient communication, SearchTogether is a plug-in for Internet Explorer 7 and requires a Windows Live ID. One group member can invite other members to join in a search and assign tasks, while all the members can track progress. Simultaneous searchers can use the “peek and follow” feature to see web pages others are viewing.
The examples of the SearchTogether web site show how helpful this tool can be (e.g., How to travel on Italian trains). I wish we’d had it when my daughter and I were looking for a beach house to rent for our families!
(Erica Naone, "Searching as a team", Technology Review, Mar. 13, 2008.)
Illumin8: Semantic search from Elsevier
- by Leslie Dillon from Leader's Digest March 2008
By now, you’ve probably heard about Elsevier’s new Illumin8, but how is it different from traditional search services, and what do we need to know about it?
Barbara Quint, editor-in-chief of Searcher, explains that Illumin8 is focused around solutions needed by knowledge workers in R&D and marketing research departments.
Shore Communications’ John Blossom believes it “promises to be a real breakthrough in STM workflow solutions…”
Illumin8 adds “an important semantic twist to search processing.” Traditional search tools focus on nouns “to define how content relates to a topic.” Illumin8 “clusters results based on how they fall into verb categories…”
Drawing from five billion websites, three million full-text articles from 1,800 Elsevier journals, 33 million abstracts for 15,000 other journals, and 22 million patents, Illumin8 “categorizes the abbreviated results into products, organizations, approaches, and experts. Searchers can reach content by Topic or broad solution areas, Problem, and Benefit…”
Illumin8 is powered by NetBase’s semantic indexing technology, which was developed at MIT’s Media Lab. It’s expensive, with a base price of $100,000 for a Fortune 1000 company and additions based on the number of FTEs.
Internal enterprise collaboration features are planned for later this year, and visualization possibilities are envisioned.
(John Blossom, "Elsevier’s Illumin8 unleashes semantic search on intelligence for R&D", ContentBlogger, Feb. 25, 2008; Barbara Quint, "Elsevier and NetBase launch illumin8", Information Today NewsBreaks, Feb.28, 2008.)
Related articles
- Google Book Search, Open Content Alliance and Live Search Books notes - Extended notes and links to more notes on these projects, all of which should vastly increase findability of books.
