That was the name of the odds & ends (and corrections) column we had at Wired in the early days. It was too clever for its own good. Here’s some odds & ends in the search world:
Via its desktop search, Google does deal with Lotus to search Notes. In fact, Google has launched Google Desktop Search for Enterprise, with various enterprise friendly features (ie, the damn thing was not going to fly as is in companies concerned about security). Take note, enterprise, Google has not forsaken you.
Danny finds evidence of Google doing….old fashioned marketing. In Kansas City, no less. What’s wrong with Peoria?
Ebay tests new forms of internal search. One such test supports multi-faceted browsing (s you can search across categories, instead of being driven by a DOS like hierarchy.) Other bells and whistles also included. Amazing it took them this long given how search drives their business.
Matt Wells at Gigablast tells me he’s at over two billion pages indexed, and his directory, based on DMOZ, rocks. It can search entire sites in a topic, includes links to the Wayback Machine, is sorted by link popularity, and much more.
GoFish announces Playlist uploading. From an email announcing this: “We created the first technology that allows virtually anybody to submit their personal playlists to our search platform, personalize the playlist with images of the contributor, descriptions, special characteristics etc.
Our system automatically appends these playlists with the accurate Album Art, 30 second sample clips, and other relevant catalog meta-data, and allows anybody searching at GoFish to find these user-playlists the same way in which they would find any major, mainstream artist’s album.”
Newsgator swallowed FeedDemon. Fred has a nice analysis here.
Neat police blotter/Google Maps mashup: ChicagoCrime.org. (via ISEDB) Also, a cheap gas mashup.
Google has hired Dan Senor as VP of Communications.
Regarding the eBay internal search improvements, folks should take notice of another important feature beyond multi-faceted browsing: seller language is being interpreted into buyer language.
For example, A seller may list a “CK Jeans Sz7” for sale eBay. A buyer that browses to the Jeans category would now be presented with a list of brands (e.g. Calvin Klein, Levi’s), sizes (1, 3, 5, 7), and other qualities of jeans. The power in this new search is that if the buyer selects “Calvin Klein” they get ALL the jeans including the ones listed with the abbreviation “CK”. Needless to say this scenario also now works in reverse.
When we discuss Web 2.0 and semantic web, this kind of functionality will be an important enabling force.