Month: August 2004

PC World: National Archives Will Go Digital.

Update: Gary points out this project has been in the works for some time and is really focused on electronic records…

Remember when I predicted that there would be a company claiming to be the new Google every month or so this year? I was wrong. It’s more like every two weeks, and it’s either the new Google, or the “Google of” (insert vertical here – travel, shopping, etc.).

Latest to get the spin is Kozuru, which just got three million dollars and is based in Kansas. They plan to take the natural language approach to search and are basing their stuff on structured taxonomies in the English language – in other words, the dictionary and the encyclopedia. I dunno…

When I saw Jeff Weiner yesterday, he mentioned that he thought we’d see a lot more small companies getting snatched up by larger ones, once the small ones proved their merit (as Fare Chase has, by the way). I’m not going to get the quotes right, but he said something to the effect that “If you’re a great chef, you need a great kitchen to cook in.” Three million dollars ain’t gonna buy a lot of Viking stoves, but it’s a start.

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I’ve always thought it’d be great, and ultimately very important, to have some kind of time axis in search – to be able to search not only the web as it is now, but as it was at some point in the past. The Internet Archive is a start toward that goal. Today I learned about “G-Metrics” – a Google hack which allows you to track the results for queries over time. Another small step…

(thanks, ResearchBuzz)

Today I took a break from writing and drove down US 101 60 or so miles to Yahoo, a trip I’ve made at least a dozen times in the past few years. The ostensible reason for the visit was a casual, no agenda lunch with Yahoo communications chief Chris Castro and Yahoo search chief Jeff Weiner. But it quickly turned into that wonderful digressive riffing which continues to make braving Bay area freeways a worthy endeavor.

I’ve found the folks at Yahoo to have an increasing appetite for new ideas, quite a switch from a few years ago when the company was hunkered down in protect mode, like much of the Valley. They want to grok RSS, blogs, mobile, desktop search – and beyond. Jeff is on fire about where his unit is going, and I have to admit the things he spoke of and showed me, much of which unfortunately I can’t report on yet, were pretty damn cool. Suffice to say Yahoo is continuing and strengthening its approach of driving search results based on intent of the user, and in particular discerning what the “task” is the user is attempting to do, then helping complete that task. Such a focused goal has pretty significant implications for where the company is going next, and how it will handle platforms in general (beyond the web) and commerce in particular. Its integrated approach requires a lot of threading of disparate data feeds into one grand unified experience, and I think after so many years of banging on this problem, Yahoo’s experience is starting to bear some fruit. One example is their recently debuted local search – which incorporates a platform approach that allows users to create reviews and such, another is their product search (which has cool narrowing features – doing that is not as easy as it looks), not to mention their shortcuts.

More to come when I can say more…