SurfWax Gets Busy With Real-Time Abstracts

After playing around with MetaEureka (mentioned earlier this week) over the weekend, I found myself quite liking the idea of using a search engine as a jump-off point, or even a "linger point," to obtain more information in real-time about the pages or subject one is researching. And not the static information of a moldy old indexed page, but the current version of the page itself.

Then this morning I read that SurfWax has started including Real-Time abstracts with its search service at http://www.surfwax.com/. These are not the same type of site information bits you get from MetaEureka; SurfWax doesn't pull server information or information just from the meta-tags. Instead, what you get is an almost compressed version of the page. You get the title, URL, "author's description" (which looks pulled from the meta-tags) an "abstract" of the page, "key points," and "focus words" which help in indexing the site. The abstract and key points could use some tweaking, but it's still possible to pull an interesting amount of information from a compacted page.

I'd change things around a little -- why search Webcrawler and not LookSmart? -- and it'd be nice to figure out some way to separate out page which have enough context for abstracts as opposed to pure link lists. Still, worth a look -- this kind of stuff will only get better as XML hits the scene.

Posted to Search Engines-SurfWax