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obvious musings
Wednesday, September 22, 2004
  Next Phase of Search Engines
The next wave of search engine technology is here.

Amazon (a9), AskJeeves and My Yahoo Search have all introduced capabilities to store past searches and to retrieve them and search your past searches. This is an obvious next step to searching when it is increasingly becoming an extension of one's memory even. Just like we remember that something hapenned last week, there should be a way of remembering your searches automatically so that we can go back to it whenever we want to.

a9 especially has some extra cool features like storing bookmarks and a diary with any site (where one can store notes along with any site) . Also the nifty thing about a9 is that it uses the best content provider for different types of search, so it uses Google for web and image search, Gurunet for reference, imdb for movies and ofcourse amazon for books.

Yahoo search has also like Google has introduced lots of small bells and whistles like local search, maps, calculator ,weather, math/currency conversions, even gas prices and a whole lot of others in the search box itself. Here's the link to the Yahoo search options. Nice ! Heres the Google link.

Btw all Microsoft has to show for search still is poor little msn search. :)

I love it ! Email storage has been turned on its head just in 6 months time because of Google offering 1 GB, with many improved features too. Now the same thing is hapenning to web search, competetion is leading to innovation and almost everyday now we have interesting features being churned out by all the major players in search too.

The latest salvo fired by Google is the desktop search which indexes your entire hard drive, your IE search , all your word and excel documents and searches them in super fast typical Google style. It even integrates this with the Google home page so that you actually see "Desktop" as a tab in addition to Web, Image etc.. This was a much needed tool as frankly Windows search sucks so bad ! Here's the Google Desktop.Its pretty cool ! I tried it today..(Randpm funda .. the port number that it uses on your computer for this service is 4664 ..which is GOOG on the phone )

Speaking of Google it has also come out with Google print, which lets you browse inside books ( amazon already has this though called Look Inside a book ). Its also come out with Google SMS where you can send a SMS to receive back local search results.

I am rubbing my hands in anticipation to see what Google does for storing the search results feature.

Coming up next :Personalized Portals !
 
Comments:
Nice blog! Handy compilation of lots of new web-toys!

Google SMS is fast becoming a favorite of mine! I especially love the fact that the results are all text. No links and web pages, so you don't need a web-enabled phone/PDA to view them. And being a li'l compulsive about words and their meanings, the quick access to a dictionary via SMS is awesome!

With the web becoming more and more search-based and less index-based it was only a matter of time that search management started gaining the importance it deserves. Here's looking forward to greater personalization of searches!
 
Yes, Google Desktop is awesome. I installed it y'day, and its doing great. Didnt realize the '4664' funda. Infact, 'GOOG' is Google's ticker symbol on Nasdaq.
 
[megha] Thanks for your comments. Havent tried out the SMS feature yet. Should try it out. I am sure that as everything from the Google stable, it will be super intutive to use, very functional and immediatly useful.

[hifzur] yes, pretty neat ! also reminds me of the size of Google's IPO it was "e" billion dollars. Considering how the stock is doing these days, I should have invested some too :)
 
Yep! I agree.BTW Did you also check out the cool stuff at http://answers.google.com/answers/

Try it in your spare tme and you'll see a lot of stuff which doesnt show up specifically in your search would show up here.

Apologize for being a tubelight :=: if you already knew this.
 
[Paddy] Excellent link ! I had heard about Google Answers before, but I didnt know that they had opened up all the past questions. Lots of interesting questions and ofcourse answers. Thanks !
 
The thing I keep waiting for with all these super cool web apps some kind of corresponding desktop app. That is to say, with a9, I'd love it if there were a desktop app that I could use when I'm at my own computer that mimics the functionality but has more of a real applications look and feel and maybe some more customization. But in the end it doesn't subvert the real power that you can still get to it all from anywhere on the web.
On that note, I still think Gmail should buy Bloomba and make it the desktop version of Gmail. It doesn't have to dl it all to your computer like POP3, just give you an interface that's better integrated with your computer. At least for when you're at home.
 
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I post things which if someone else would start saying they would start by saying "obviously .. blah blah". Due to my limited and slow perception I usually realize things late, so it happens often that I suddenly realize something which the whole world already knows.. I post such late realizations here about society, culture, business, politics and economics..

Anirudh Garg, Boston, Software Engineer.

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