9
May
If you follow this blog you know that I rarely write about metasearch engines. It’s not that I dislike them, there’s just too many of them out there, it would be hard to keep track of them all, and few capture my attention. Plus, even though metasearch engines are federated search applications in their own right — they aggregate search results in real time from a number of sources (which may consist of live or crawled and indexed content) — I mentally place them in a category of their own.
Last December I wrote about Rollyo, a personal search engine that you can customize with a list of URLs to search. While one could argue that Rollyo is not a federated search application (it’s got to be searching crawled and indexed content rather than live sources if it searches arbitrary web-sites) I found it to be innovative enough to warrant a post. Addict-o-matic (hat tip to Web Worker Daily) is another metasearch engine that intrigued me.
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7
May
Search industry pundit, Stephen Arnold, writes about enterprise search train wrecks in his Beyond Search blog. Arnold sees many enterprise search installations, not as train wrecks that are waiting to happen, but as those that have already happened. Federated search vendors and customers should read Arnold’s article carefully. The article leads with this bold statement:
Enterprise search may be a train wreck for more than half of the people who use today’s most popular systems. The Big Name vendors can grouse, stomp, and sneer at this assertion. Reality: Most of these systems disappoint their licensees. When a search system “goes off the rails”, the consequences can be unexpected.
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6
May
The slides are up from the Infonortics Search Engine Meeting that was just held in Boston (4/28-4/29). Here are a number of presentations that caught my eye. Not all are related to federated search but breakthroughs in search should be of interest to all of us.
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2
May
Have you ever been bored to tears during a vendor demo? Apparently Marcus recently was and he was proud enough of the fact to blog about what he was doing while the demo was happening. No, he wasn’t paying attention.
Marcus’ post got me to thinking - but not too hard, it being Friday - what makes a demo awful enough that I too would rather read “an article about dental caries published in Scientific Monthly in 1931.” So, here’s my list of top 10 demo killers:
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