Monday, March 12, 2007

find

I can't seem to find anything around here these days!

Recently I spent a good twenty minutes trying to hunt down a post I had read about social networking sites not being good real estate for ads.

I know it was a post I had read in the last couple of weeks. I know at least one paragraph talked about monetizing social networking websites. I also know it was a post in the set of feeds I subscribe to which narrows down the number of pages considerably. But no matter what keywords I tried, the advanced search in Bloglines drew a blank each time.

Given all this information it's a shame I couldn't get what I was looking for. Search engines have solved (to some extent) the problem of scale. They can locate somewhat useful data from the trillions of pages using TF/IDF, Page Rank and other tricks. But they still need be able to find what the user is looking for. My search was probably looking at a few hundred articles at most but the machine just does not know how to figure what text is talking about social networking and monetization and internet ads.

We need a find engine.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

First, Would you like a personal tracker ? (Are you fine logging in while using Google for search, so that the personal search is enabled)
However, I meant a plugin that can keep track of all websites you would have browsed and then provide a search and suggestion service ? I am sure there is something out there, its all upto adoption.

Umang said...

Jyothi: I was using the Bloglines advanced search where I had specified to search in "my feeds" and for the "last 2 weeks". So tracking sites I visited etc isn't a problem.

Text search needs to go beyond keyword search.

Anonymous said...

that is the reason why I still bet on microsoft and its search.. the search in vista is supposed to be integrated into the core windows(dont know for sure) and when it gets the ability to read the browser cache, it shud be able to give more useful results.. (only problem will be if you had seen it on some other comp..)

as a competition, it could be google desktop search + mozilla + other google stuff like reader etc...

btw, were u looking for http://tech.nologi.ca/?p=59

Umang said...

Shrikanth: The article I was looking for was in one the feeds I've subscribed to. But thanks for this link anyway... it talks about the same thing. :-)