A review from the Wall Street Journal:
online.wsj.com/article/SB120648944687663981.html
One of the company sites in the review:
http://www.searchme.com/wsj
Company news:
http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9890911-7.html?tag=nefd.top
My initial reaction to this article was that the author must have a lot of time on her hands - I mean, who cares about a better search engine any more? Google wins, end of story.
But, because I have spent so much time with Google in the past few months, I read on.
The article chronicles the experience the author had with the products of two new companies: SearchMe and SpaceTime. I was reworded with an interesting introduction to a new take on the Graphical User Interface.
SearchMe, is a startup that is trying to innovate in a space dominated by Google and coveted by Microsoft. What can a company with 35 employees do in the land of giants?
Well, as it turns out, a lot. It can change the way you view searches. We are all very used to the list view that pumps our of searches - "enhanced" by ads on the side and lots of related links, maps, and pictures, the result is still a list. SearchMe returns a collection of screen shots of related sites that float across the page. This is a lot like the album art that Apple uses with iTunes.
Search results as floating pages? I think this is one of those things that must be tried to be understood. So I did. And, I do. It is amazing to learn how much you can grasp from seeing a page, even in a small, distorted fashion. I found myself flipping though the results and clicking away - in a fashion that I never would in my old friend Google.
In truth, the search results are not very good (hopefully this is because of the early nature of the technology, but the presentation is very refreshing. And, the refreshment has been sufficient to raise $62m in venture funding over the last couple of years.
10 April 2008
Weekly Recommender Log
This science project is over - I can say with little fear of rebuttal that iGoogle's Recommender tab is severally broken. Somebody needs to turn out the lights.
After 200 reviews, and a month to think it over, any recommender that has a CPU should be able to do something.
Alas, iGoogle's Recommender tab does practically nothing. When I login this week, I was presented with the same sad list of items from last week, including my overwhelmingly negative ratings.
In disbelief, I restarted and with some relief, found that I once again had recommendations in only 1 of 6 categories. And, in that one category - "Pages", I had another set of 50 sad recommendations.
Once again, I paged though, hoping to find some merit in this service. Alas, there is none.
What I have learned is that given a random set of 50 url's I will probably like 1 or 2.
I will need a new plan for next week.
After 200 reviews, and a month to think it over, any recommender that has a CPU should be able to do something.
Alas, iGoogle's Recommender tab does practically nothing. When I login this week, I was presented with the same sad list of items from last week, including my overwhelmingly negative ratings.
In disbelief, I restarted and with some relief, found that I once again had recommendations in only 1 of 6 categories. And, in that one category - "Pages", I had another set of 50 sad recommendations.
Once again, I paged though, hoping to find some merit in this service. Alas, there is none.
What I have learned is that given a random set of 50 url's I will probably like 1 or 2.
I will need a new plan for next week.
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