The Search Lounge

Bing’s Visual Search

Chris — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 03:31:42 +0000

Bing is playing around with some new visual search functionality. Check it out here: Bing Visual Search.

Have a look here at US Presidents. I like the layout – it’s clean and easy to see a lot of images at once. It’s cool how you can mouse over each thumb and the search box automatically populates; and under the search box there is a bit of structured data about each President. However, it’s not so easy to navigate through all the images if you’re looking for something in particular, especially if you look at something with a whole bunch of things like dog breeds.

Searchme R.I.P.

Chris — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 16:53:35 +0000

As has been well publicized, Searchme shut off the lights last week. It’s sad for all of us who worked so hard over the past few years to build the engine. We came from nothing and made tremendous progress for such a small team. I’m really proud of everyone who built not only a functioning search engine, but a quality one that was constantly getting better. Our relevance was on the rise, we were increasing our coverage, we were adding new sources of multimedia content, we continued to refine and improve our classifiers, our advertising programs were growing, we’d made improvements to the UI, etc.

I’d like to give a special thanks to my team – The Search Quality Department – who did so many amazing and groundbreaking things, ranging from working day in and day out to look for ways to improve our search engine, to building the ontology and classifiers to classify billions of documents, to generating a ton of training and evaluation judgments for the ranking functions, to identifying spam and keeping one of the cleanest search engine indexes, to reviewing ads, and so many other things.

And thank you to all of you users who used Searchme and provided us with positive feedback and suggestions.

supercuil

Chris — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 21:13:06 +0000

An interesting new search engine. Supercruil.

Searchme Mini Search

Chris — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 16:05:09 +0000

Hey look, an embedded version of Searchme. Try a search…

LibraryThing

Chris — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 21:18:22 +0000

I’m one of those (OK, maybe I’m THE only one) internet librarian types who is coming late to the Library Thing party. Please help me use it. I like it but I’m not really sure why and not sure how exactly I should be using it to take full advantage of it.

So if you’re on there drop me a comment so I can add you as a contact and further explore the site.

thanks!

Hi Cuil

Chris — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 14:28:51 +0000

When I joined Searchme in 2006 a couple other startup search engines were making headlines. Powerset, which recently got bought by Microsoft, and Cuil, which launched today.

Cuil has been known as the startup building the huge index. I ran some pet queries and it seems like they’re pretty comprehensive, though other people have emailed me about missing results for their queries. So try it yourself. The UI is mostly text, with a couple visual elements thrown in like thumbnails next to results. For the life of me though, I can’t figure out where they got the thumbnails used for a query for Searchlounge. The text is in columns like a newspaper. They’ve implemented a query suggest tabbed feature along the top of the SERP, and an Explore by Category feature on the right (strangely several times when I clicked this I got a no result page, so must be something buggy).

I’m not going to delve into a relevance analysis, so give it a whirl yourself and see what you think. There are tons of posts already about it, but here’s Techcrunch’s: Cuil Exits Stealth Mode With A Massive Search Engine

Consider What’s Missing

Chris — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 16:33:48 +0000

What if search engines did the following?

Imagine all the spam.

Redirects

Chris — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 16:29:32 +0000

Imagine this scenario: you get a letter at your home saying come to an address because your favorite shoes are on sale, and you go there and instead they pack you into a bus and drive you across town to another store. And at that second store they force you to show them your driver’s license and they write down where you live, how old you are, and what kind of car you drive. Then they blindfold you and pack you back into the bus and drive you to a shoe store where you find the shoes you want. If you called the police they’d investigate. It’s suspicious.

Now take that scenario and apply it to the web: no physical transportation, but you go to a web site (via a spam email, a web search, browsing, whatever) and you get redirected to a retailer’s site and they capture your IP address and some info about your computer, browser, and operating system. If you called the authorities they wouldn’t know what to do. They rely on search engines to police the net, yet search engines can only remove sites from their results, not from the web.

Triumph Bonneville Stack

Chris — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 03:00:49 +0000

A stack I created when I was shopping for a new model Bonnie motorcycle.

Searchme

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Searchme Stacks

Chris — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 20:05:08 +0000

Today we at Searchme launched a new tool called Stacks. Here’s an example of a stack I made of photos of some of the best goalies. (I’m still looking for a cool, large image of Brad Friedel in action).

Searchme

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