Better search options (finally) form Google and RDFa

Google introduced new refinement options today that will improve how user gets additional insights from the search results and moving away presenting "dumb" search results. If they move these refinement to Google Scholar it would be great for research community. Also their adoption of microformats and RDFa is an excellent move to provide rich snippets , btw Yahoo has similar options too where we tested this with Ben Adida and Zepheira team last year. Let's see which STM publishing company will leverage the value of this (RDFa) first.

Olé for NovoSeek

Spanish biomedical search engine NovoSeek has the right concept in providing insightful information within the context of the users. Currently their content include MedLine and US Grants.






I like the team picture too

Findability dilemma and providing answers and solutions

Jean Bedord's summary of KM World & Intranets 2007 Conference hits few important points. She highlights the value that semantic web and faceted search bring to improving user experience and findability.

"Increasingly, behavioral and linguistic aspects are being recognized as essential factors in the process of adding value to the organization. Search is not easy, and delivering answers to people is not straightforward." [bolding is mine]

When we search, we are all looking for answers and solutions, and we are not there yet....

As Bill Gates said in 2005 ""People are very impressed at what search is today but it's really quite poor compared to what it should be"

Hakia: The new Turkish delight in search?

There were few postings here, here last week about Hakia. I am all for a new search engine (especially started and funded by Turks ) that will provide us better answers to our questions.

Riza Berkan who is the CEO of Hakia invites public to send good questions. I don't if the following is a good one by his criteria but here we go:

What is technology intelligence?


The results that I am getting now from Hakia are not giving me the answer. The first result is related to the Privacy issues after 9/11. The same question in Google brings more relevant results including Alan Porter's article on QTIP

That's a challenging and intriguing road ahead in getting the meaning of the questions and providing the right answers...

Btw my search "Who is Elsevier's competitor" resulted in the following result:
You are very curious today Although Reed Elsevier is a competitor, it can not be included at a threat to Thomson. See this page. which created a nice smile in my face.

I hope in the future, Hakia using their semantic web technologies, would be able to provide a full list of our competitors and not just the search results similar to Google where I can't get any insights..

Will VuFind bring a new life to library OPACs?

VuFind looks refreshing with their sleek UI , faceted searching and other collaboration tools. The best of all it's Open Source. via Meredith Farkas

Will it replace the traditional OPACs? Time will tell...

Roy Tennant has more on VuFind.

"VuFind is a library resource portal designed and developed for libraries by libraries. The goal of VuFind is to enable your users to search and browse through all of your library's resources by replacing the traditional OPAC to include:

• Catalog Records
• Digital Library Items
• Institutional Repository
• Institutional Bibliography
• Other Library Collections and Resources

VuFind is completely modular so you can implement just the basic system, or all of components.
"

Google sees the future in universal search and translation

Marissa Mayer who is Google's VP for search products and user experience said that "Google had invested in automatic translation as a way to improve search results across various languages" and Google was moving " towards integrating all of its different search engines, including its Google Book Search and Google Patent Search, to produce comprehensive results for the same search".

She also says that "We're just getting started with universal search, there are a lot of issues to overcome here." via InfoWorld

One key thing would be the user interface to present these results in a way that it's going to make sense to the user and bring the "real meaning out of the content".

OctoPart: A new search engine for electronic parts

Octopart which was started by two physics grad students has a clean interface to find electronic parts you need. One interesting feature that they have is users can create project and save the parts in the project folder.

Google Killer or not? Is better search (or finding) around the corner?

I do want to kill Google but improve the results that we get there. Do we really want to search? No, we want to find answers to our questions and get out or do some discovery "berry picking" while finding the answers. There has been a lot coverage lately about Powerset
and their PowerLab and how they may change the information retrieval.

Pinhead's Progress: Powerset and Powerlabs, roundup
Kevin Burton's NEW FeedBlog: Powerset - Out of Stealth
Matt Labbe's whirn: Powerset Opens Up
Ashkan Karbasfrooshan on HipMojo: Right Now, PoweRset Stands For PR

via Nitin Karandikar



From the coverage one can see that Powerset was able to attract great talents, and from a recent post in their blog, it seems that they are also working with Marti Hearst's group at UC Berkeley which created Flamenco Search Interface and BioText among other projects.

A new blog search engine using faceted search from NTT

I wish I had known Japanese to play with this new blog search engine Blogranger from NTT that supports "three types of blog search: topic, blogger and reputation search". A research paper describing the system is available here.

Jakob Nielsen on breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs is good for online navigation. Implement it and you'll delight the users...

• Breadcrumbs show people their current location relative to higher-level concepts, helping them understand where they are in relation to the rest of the site.
• Breadcrumbs afford one-click access to higher site levels and thus rescue users who parachute into very specific but inappropriate destinations through search or deep links.
• Breadcrumbs never cause problems in user testing: people might overlook this small design element, but they never misinterpret breadcrumb trails or have trouble operating them.
• Breadcrumbs take up very little space on the page. (via AlertBox)
  

Eploratory Search and Faceted Search

Some great examples from mspace team which is based in the School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton.

Oracle goes Semantic with Siderean

Oracle released their Oracle Technology Network in a new skin using semantic web technology and some cool AJAX UIs. The system is powered by Siderean. This is a well deserved accomplishment for Brad Allen, Michael Schmitt & company from the early days of BPAllen Technologies to powering Oracle's system.