search me? who knows.

I’ve been very busy lately dealing with Twitter, but I’ve made some time to stop by SFBeta and earlier this evening, the OpenDNS party at fluid. Both were decent; OpenDNS was more of a mixer, and SFBeta, chock full o’ demos.

SFBeta was what you’d expect - Lots of industry folk, barely any food left if you showed up past 5:50pm or so (they opened at 5pm!), lots of people pushing random product at you, and not a hell of a lot of good technology. Most of it? Pointless, but every time I go, though, there’s at least one company showing a worthy technology.

i give you, search me:

A few months ago, it was PicLens, and this time, in the “we use and love coverflow” technology vein that PicLens is part of, it’s SearchMe.

They’re combining cover flow, Internet search, and a topic specific, topic sensitive system that displays categorical icons at the top of the page. The stacks feature allows you to drag and drop pages into a cohesive stack, share them with people on Digg, Twitter, and nearly every social networking site out there.

Give it a try - their developer tells me they are using their own crawler, which I think is a bad idea. I worked at Inktomi for a few years and I know how difficult it is to scale search. Their plight, in the face of Google and Microsoft, will not be any easier.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008 at 11:39 pm and is filed under stuff, web2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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giovanni gallucci 5 months ago 1 point
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John,

You make some interesting points in your piece here. In fact, the reason why we *don't* have our own crawler is because we think Google is doing a pretty good job at that :-)

We focus on the UX and use public API's to drive the data tier of our engine. Seems to be working out for us pretty well at this point (less than two months after launch).

Anyhoo - like the blog.

giovanni gallucci, viewzi.com evangelist

facebook: giovanni@gallucci.net | friendfeed.com/giovanni | linkedin.com/in/ggallucci | twitter.com/giovanni

Viewzi makes search fun.

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http://viewzi.com

John Adams 5 months ago 1 point
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Very, very, nice!

I like viewzi. My only complaint is that the selection of display format should occur before or on the same page as keyword search and not after I've typed in my keywords.

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http://www.retina.net/tech