The Search Lounge

How many homepages does Yahoo build every single day?

Chris — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 18:56:59 +0000

Really cool way to visualize the scale happening on the Yahoo front page:

http://www.visualize.yahoo.com/core/

Web search engine query language – what’s it called?

Chris — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 23:37:42 +0000

I have a question:

Natural language search is: what is the population of Portland?
Boolean search is: salt AND pepper

So what do we call the sort of “regular” syntax that web search engines have made so popular and common as a way to query for information?

Watson is just a super search engine

Chris — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 18:19:03 +0000

Not like I’m so smart or anything since I’m sure lots of people thought the same thing, but the first thing that went through my mind when I heard about Watson was that it was a search engine disguised as a Jeopardy contestant.

Watson is just a super search engine.

If you’ve ever wondered what search quality/editorial/analysis people like me do at search engines, a big part of our jobs is training and evaluating machine-learning systems like Watson.

Bloglines is closing

Chris — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 20:11:17 +0000

I just saw that Ask.com is officially closing Bloglines. Read more here: Bloglines Update. I’m sorry to hear it. I’ve been using Bloglines for 5 or 6 years. The first couple years I checked it obsessively for new articles about search and other interests. Now I check in much less frequently, maybe a couple times a month. But it’s still a good place to catch up on articles that where timeliness is not so important. I’ll have to decide whether to find a new RSS reader. Or not.

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