Month: March 2004

I won’t get into the whole song and dance behind Dipsie. I posted on the company back in early November, and for a while it was one of the most searched terms on the site, as it seemed to promise That Which We All Long For, which is to say, The Next Google.

I spent some time over the past few months talking to folks about Dipsie, and have in fact been quite close to posting Real News about the company at one point or another. But as with many startups working through the inevitable kinks, the Real News never quite materialized. Now, Gary posts that Dipsie has told the Chicago Sun Times that it will launch its public beta on May 10. There’s no other news in this piece, but it does reflect the bravado of founder Jason Weiner. As Gary says, let’s see what happens in May. We can all hope, of course. But me, I’m a skeptic. Prove me wrong, Jason; I’d love to be wrong….

Gary has his patent roundup posted, and it has more interesting stuff.

There’s a patent application for serving ads in email – from employees of Google. Overture gets a patent for search sets. Other search related patents go to Seibel, AT&T, Yahoo, IBM, et al.

My favorite: “Method of doing business by identifying customers of competitors through world wide web searches of job listing databases” – from IBM.

Another tool for you zeitgeist freaks, Wordtracker will tell you the top 500 search keywords updated daily (it comes as a ticker up top). It’s an interesting reminder of the real world – “prom hairstyles” makes the top 15….

I better watch out, or I’ll draw fire from Clay Shirky soon. But much of the debate over the semantic web clears my head by quite a distance – I’m more interested in what works and why. I just got off the phone with the GlobalSpec team -Jeffrey Killeen, Chairman & CEO, and John Schneiter, President. It seems to me that GlobalSpec is one of those innovations in search that works – at least for its intended audience – by adding context, organization, and tagging to a limited dataset. Sounds semantic to me.

GlobalSpec is a domain specific (or vertical) search engine. It got its start eight years ago as a classic IT play – take all the catalog-based information about engineering parts – sensors, transducers, etc. – and roll it into a huge, cross-referenced database, which you then distribute over the web. Make money by connecting customers to parts suppliers. Simple.

Over the years GlobalSpec has evolved into a robust community of a million or so engineering types who use it to find and spec parts. That alone is pretty cool (I mean, a million engineers!). But the coolest stuff was just launched: They call it “The Engineering Web” and it’s a domain-specific crawl of the web for engineering information. And not only have they crawled the web (about 100K engineering related sites, so far), they’ve also surfaced invisible web databases not found in mainstream search engines – patent and standards sites, for example, which are walled off by registration and business considerations. Anyone can use the service – it’s not limited to registered users. In essence, GlobalSpec has built a portal that drives traffic and intent through their original database business, in the process building an intelligent island of engineering information that lives in the public sphere. Of course this means they can add AdWord-like functionality, which of course they are working on.

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