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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 !
 
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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April 2004
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