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Better Search Results Than Google?
Mechanik writes "CNN has an AP article about the next generation of up and coming search tools, which try to cope with the glut of hits that result from 'conventional' search engines such as Google. One tool, Vivisimo, "is like a superfast librarian who can instantly arrange the titles on shelves in a way that makes sense. [...] But unlike libraries, Vivisimo doesn't use predefined categories. Its software determines them on the fly, depending on the search results. The filing is done through a combination of linguistic and statistical analysis." Grokker, another, downloadable program, "not only sorts search results into categories but also "maps" the results in a holistic way, showing each category as a colorful circle. Within each circle, subcategories appear as more circles that can be clicked on and zoomed in on." You have to love the author's use of trying to look for a hotel in France with the terms 'Paris Hilton' as an example of searching gone awry."
You have to love the author's use of trying to look for a hotel in France with the terms 'Paris Hilton' as an example of searching gone awry."
So what you're saying is the search went awry because the author decided that a hotel in Paris was more interesting than the other Paris Hilton entries?//
Despite the problems with Google, it's still the best place I've found to get good info. The trick is to be very careful about how you search for something by adding in search modifiers such as "-sale" or "-bargain" or "review" to weed out the overtly commercial results. But even then, things have changed and not for the better.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
"Vivisimo" can *somehow* come up with a better engine than google, will people use it? Google is getting bigger and bigger not necessarily by their search results (or lack thereof) but also because of how the phrase "google" has caught on in mainstream culture. Face it - when your competitor makes it into the dictionary, it's going to be EXTREMELY hard to get people to change the way they search. If you ask many non-techs how they find information on the web, they don't say "I search for it" they say "I google it".
Now, that being said, one thing the CNN article doesn't talk about in great detail is the technology behind this company - Google started out at a major university - what's the background of this company? While I agree something should be done with all the advertising that occurs with PageRank, I find it highly doubtful that it's going to be another company (rather than Google itself) that will fix it.
Pittsburgh-based Vivisimo sells its technology to companies and intelligence agencies, and offers free Web searches at Vivisimo.com.
Oh boy! Where do I sign up for my free registration! Here's my name, age, adress...
Sigh.
You can't take the sky from me...
Google is about having good quality results with a very simple interface, one that anyone can use. Go to an academic library and look at the various journal search engines like "America: History and Life" or PychINFO, or better yet just try out MedLine. See anything wrong? Busy page, weird syntax, a huge instruction page about "how to search".
Engines like Vivisimo may make it if they can keep Google's simplicity and ease of use and only add value with categorizations. And personally, I think they better get out of 1996 with the frames. Yech!
Man, I must have been sleeping...
When did google become a conventional search engine...?
--
bachiatari na torisetsu o yome!
I have yet to see a visualization tool that was truly useful. Do people really want to see their results laid out using Cartesian coordinates as result metadata? I don't think so. Its cute but the reality is that people will prefer a list, and more specifically, look at the first five entries. Getting the right links into that top five is all that matters.
From what I understand, the reason that google can do many many searches at once and still complete each in 0.5 seconds (besides having a huge linux farm) is that they make a lot of algorithmic shortcuts and precompute datastructures as much as possible. There really aren't any such precomputed algorithmic shortcuts to take with regular expressions, so searches would either be much much slower, or google would need to buy a vastly larger linux farm, for a feature that's used by less than 1% of the population.
Well, for an attempt at a better newsbot than Google news, you can check out newsbot here. It does a few things that GN leaves out (XML feeds, PDA version, peer recommendations, etc, etc) and I believe it has a better S/N ratio. End of shameless plug.
The bandwidth theft may be something to keep an eye on; something else to think about is the taxing Grokker's going to put on your box's resources:
t ml
"System Requirements
Windows 2000 or Windows XP
Pentium III at 400MHZ or higher
128MB RAM (we recommend 256MB or more, if you're going to use the file indexing service for the My Files keyword search)
100MB of free disk space (or 20MB only if Java 2 is already installed)"
Myself I kind of like the idea of the graphical results, but not if my box is doing the grunt work. I think Google has them beat on that point.
Not to mention that Grokker "Contains a fully functional Web browser based on Internet Explorer". How would one go about updating the various patches for this browser?
http://www.groxis.com/service/grok/g_products.h
I went to the city because I wished to live without deliberation.
His example of searching for Paris Hilton is nothing more then an glorified example to try to prove his point.
You do not need to completely redign a search engine to get your desired results. You need to refine your search. Search google for Paris Hilton Hotel and the first three results are directly related to a Hilton Hotel in Paris. I would not find this hotel any faster using his circle method with Grokker2. I use a search engine to find exactly what I am looking for. Displaying all the results on some chart, graph, or 3d display still requires me to browse around to narrow my search.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
for a feature that's used by less than 1% of the population.
Wouldn't that make it somewhat viable then? I mean, those of us who know regular expressions well enough to use them regularly are few and far between, so not every person using Google will search using a regexp. In fact, they could likely make it to where one can search using a regular expression by prefixing their search with 'regexp:' (similar to how you can search for definitions using 'define:').
Of course, the fact that regexps can be used with Google might spawn a whole array of books showing the average joe how to conduct more powerful searches using "Regular Expressions", meaning more people may end up using them anyway.
What you ask is more difficult than one may originally think. As soon as a novel approach to counter-acting one of these annoyances becomes popular, it lands itself in the cross-hairs of those who would exploit "the system" in the first place. Witness the current arms race that is SPAM. Witness Microsoft security. Hell, witness Slashdot moderation.
There are a number of bright people on both sides of the aisle. When one side discovers a new technique, the other will work hard to neutralize said technique. This continues until either: it is too expensive for one side to continue, or too complicated for the consumer to bother with anymore.
Anything 3d will immediately slow down your interaction to a snails pace as you manipulate your environment. Even if it was a virtual mind-meld into a matrix like environment... "walking" to your search result and activating would take longer than a quick scroll down a result list with text blurbs.
Intuitive does not mean good.
It should be efficient, and become good through acclimation. Just like riding a bicycle. It seems garish at first, but it makes perfect sense later on.
Just look at the interface from Minority Report. We should all be so lucky to have UIs like that. The answer is big screens, "front page snippets" representation of documents/results for at a glance viewing, and multidimensional arrangement where dimension (and tagging) is based on attributes (relevance, date, accuracy). Dimension could mean position in space or in a hierachy, etc.
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
In this case yes, but this is a very simple example. Sometimes, epsecially on topics that you are unfamiliar with, it can be difficult to figure out what additional words are going to help to refine your search.
And what, if not /.ing, did *you* try to do?
Yes, there is glut and yes there are blog-holes.
The thing I have noticed to be the greatest single limit on web searching is the operator. I can regularly find things on the net that my co-workers cannot. This is because I understand keyword boolean searching at a deeper level than most people.
I blame this on the level of education of the common population, as opposed to being evidence of my own superiority. 8-)
In a world where most people have never actually met or "dealt with" a librarian (archivist, whatever 8-) it should surprise nobody that these self-same people have no idea what it means to take personal responsibility for organizing their own approach to knowing things.
Having grown up near and actually talked to librarians all my life I actually understand how to group information. Applying that knowledge to a search for some words and against others isn't that far a stretch.
It is a personal pet peve of mine to have to listen to people bemoan Google (etc.) when these self-same people have never even *noticed* the advanced search link, nor even learned the power of the minus ("-") in the standard search bar.
There is no technology that can "fix" bad user inquiries that won't in turn "ruin" good ones.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
Heck, just searching for "paris hilton" brought up some information on the hotel in about the 6th link down. Given that the default is 10 on the front page, I don't see much of a problem even without the extra modifiers (aside from the lack of video previews in the other links returned)...
From my own experience with developing search technologies for an e-content site, these guys are on the right track. Compared to a lot of search technologies out there, Google is dumb. But it is blazing fast, general purpose, and smarter than most of its (former) compettitors. Part of why it is dumb is that it is so general purpose. To make a search engine smarter, you have to add context. Specialized search engines can do this by standardizing their inputs. Google could do this too, but it would require complex parsing of everything that it spiders.
Another thing that Google really lacks is detection of duplicates. Google tries to do this, but does it poorly. I remember recently doing a search on Google for an obscure DB2 error code, and getting the same page out of the IBM manual over and over again, all on different college websites.
This is another area where linguistic/statistical analysis could really help. Most knowledge-base products offer a "More Like This" feature that is an index of linguistic similarities between items. An easy way to detect duplicates with such a system is to have a fine scale and place an uppler limit on similarities, i.e. any two items with a similarity > N are likely to be duplicates.
All of this being said, I would be surprised if Google does not address these issues in the very near future. I do not think they have gone down the path that many large companies go down where they stop trying to innovate and instead just try to protect their turf.
Exactly! Sometimes you don't even know wtf is out there...using the 'word in/exclude' technique, you would miss out on much info you might actually be (more) interested in.
Using something like Grokker gives you some more insight into the whole available field.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
I can't believe how quickly these sites have almost ruined Google.
n d-strategy-walkthrough-cheat-whatever-else-might-b e-in-a-search-string.html sites.
I got a bunch of games for Xmas, and when I've gone looking for strategy sites or even walkthroughs (for Morrowind for example), its practically impossible to separate the real sites from those we-sell-u-stuff-cheap-online-from-hungary.morrowi
VERY AGGRAVATING.
Remember Altavista? It used to be "the" hot search engine. So did Lycos before that. The only reason Google seems bigger is that the audience is bigger. Search is such an integral part of peoples net experience that a new engine has the potential to rice to the top VERY quickly if the competitors don't manage to copy it and do what it does better almost instantly.
What I see in the replies is that the majority says that Google is good enough and that they do not need anything els/better/different. To me these are exactly the 'arguments' I hear when I tell people to switch over to Linux.
I do like that there are still different possabilaties. I would hate to see Google become the one and only searchengine, just as I hate Windows becoming the one and only OS or RedHat becoming the one and only Linux.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.