This is nifty:

Google News Map: “Why not parse Google News, find the first name match and draw a map with the latest headlines on the coordinates of the countries.”

Call it a prediction or stating the obvious, but I believe in the coming year corporate search solutions will be generating a steady buzz — driven primarily by innovative products that focus on unlocking the terabytes of knowledge squandered away in the reassess of the corporate network data stores. A position John Battelle seems to agree with in a recent post on the topic:

“…the overwhelming presumption of webwide search on your desktop is certainly rewiring how corporations think about their more private databanks. A robust market has grown up around “enterprise search,” (some companies, such as FAST, were spun off from consumer search companies, and Google maintains a unit focused on the market). There’s a crop of interesting startups to boot, including Tim Bray’s company, Antarctica. It’s entirely possible some of the next big ideas in search may well be developed in this more focused, less public field.”

You can create a social network search interface by using Micah Alpern’s ‘Blogs I Read’ Google Hack and/or Feedster. However it appears that Eurekster has taken it one step further:

“Eurekster uses the six-degrees of separation concept to learn from your extended network of contacts and deliver you prioritized results based on the success and proximity of the searches they have done.”

The public beta currently available seems to require a bit more effort than the average consumer “searcher” would be willing to afford. However, I would like to see how well this works within the corporate enterprise — assuming of course you can integrate much of the social network mechanics with existing enterprise directory services such as Active Directory or other LDAP-compliant systems.

Raul Valdes-Perez, president of Vivisimo is quoted in
an article at New Scientist about improvements to the user experience of search interfaces. In particular he is talking about Google News, MSN’s newly announced Newsbot and Vivisimo as yet to be released spontaneous clustering approach.

“[Raul Valdes-Perez] says that the engineering of search and rank algorithms “has gone about as far as it can go”. Now the way to improve the user experience is to work on the next layer of algorithms that determine the presentation of the “search and rank” results.”

“Vivisimo is working on a different approach to the presentation of news search results. Its test news site, which has not yet been revealed to the public, spontaneously clusters links to news articles according to subject.”

In reference to my post yesterday, I don’t completely agree with his statement about the extent of ranking algorithms. In that I believe there is unexploited popularity metadata that should be used as an additional input to existing ranking algorithms. To a small extent this is similar to Amazon’s recommendations, which seems to be one the directions MSN has chosen for its news site.

“This algorithm analyses the other choices of people who have already bought the first book. A news site would instead group articles according to the reading patterns of previous users.”

Although, Vivisimo is certainly on to something in regard to focusing more on the presentation layer of search. Yet, they are not alone in that regard either with existing products such as Antarctica’s Visual Net and new comers like BA-Insight forging through the muck.

In Tim Bray’s latest essay on search he points out what I feel is an often overlooked aspect of Google’s PageRank when it is applied to enterprise search:

“[PageRank] Won’t Work for You If you’re writing or deploying a search engine for your Intranet or product catalogue or portal, Google’s PageRank trick probably won’t work, because most Intranet and catalogue and portal pages don’t point at each other. The Web is unique in that it has millions of authors independently making decisions about what’s important; aggregating those decisions is what makes PageRank so powerful.”

“The Real Lesson of Google PageRank works on the basis of guessing that what’s popular is what’s important, which turns out to be a good guess. The technique relies on the Web’s linkage network, and while non-Web deployments can’t use that, we shouldn’t give up on the notion of using a popularity metric.”(via Ongoing)

Indeed, and lowering the barriers to collaboration via corporate blogs and wikis will provide a rich corpus of popularity metrics.

In addition, I believe there is untapped potential in mining the ongoing dialogs found in email, IM and messages boards for relevancy references. I’m not saying however, that you use the dialogs themselves in search results; I’m simply suggesting that digital conversational data can be used to determine the popularity and thus importance of an object within a corporation.

Although I’m sure privacy advocates will fault with this notion.

I usually don’t like to add too much extra paraphernalia to the default Windows desktop. However, after about an hour of sporadic usage, I think the Google Deskbar is on its way to becoming required gear for me.

“Google Deskbar enables you to search with Google from any application without lifting your fingers from the keyboard. Installs easily in your Windows taskbar.”

I just read this via /. about Microsoft’s interest in other search engines:

“Microsoft had also been linked with buys of any of the remaining search players, including Ask Jeeves and Looksmart, though the company has recently dumped Looksmart after deciding its results did not match up to those of its other search partners, notably Overture.”

Quotes from an article in The Economist about Google’s ability to sustain its market-share.

“For Google to stay permanently ahead of other search-engine technologies is almost impossible, since it takes so little—only a bright idea by another set of geeks—to lose the lead.”

“Yahoo!, in fact, will probably be the first to attack. It now … has under its own roof all the elements of the business model that made Google such a success.

“Even more frightening … Microsoft smells blood. It is currently working on its own search algorithm, which it hopes to make public early next year, around the probable time of Google’s share listing.”

I do feel that Google’s almost utilitarian design, core focus and loyal user-base certainly factor significantly in its market-share dominance, but as was mentioned in the article, Netscape had much of that as well. So at best, Google’s added advantages are short-term assets.

Cathleen Moore’s article in InfoWorld this week regarding the necessity of a Enterprise Search strategy should be considered “stating the obvious”.

Some excellent quotes from the article:

“The explosion of corporate content “both in the physical form of documents, records, and data, and in the human form of personal knowledge” has pressed companies into a crisis: Find a way to tap into and effectively leverage that knowledge, or watch your company’s most vital assets wither on the vine.”

“If you look inside a large corporation, anywhere you swing a stick you can find something that can be made better by search,” says Matthew Berk, research director at Jupiter Research.”

“Taking search to the next level is “when you don’t know the exact terms to query on, or you don’t know exactly what is on the network. We want to expose that information,” says Andy Feit, Verity’s senior vice president of marketing. “Taxonomies can uncover content you may not have known about before looking at it. It lets you expose content to more people.”

“Looking toward the future, enterprise search technology will continue to expand beyond its seek-and-find roots, blurring the lines between efforts such as business intelligence and knowledge management in an effort to present a full view of information assets within a company.”

Essentially an enterprise search tool is simply a facet of business intelligence reporting.

In light of Amazon’s recent book search service, this report on CNet about Google in talks with publishers to provide a similar service seems a little strange.

“Google is in talks with several publishers to build a service that would allow Web surfers to search the full text of books online” (via CNet)

IMHO, the service does make sense for Amazon as a way to drive more consumers to book purchases and I suppose it could also turn another revenue source for Google — certainly as a research tool for business and academia, but is the market big enough to support the effort?