Archive for March 2008
Bentley mentions an interesting custom search engine that searches food blogs.
Yahoo has new lab in India.
“Grave Guru” creating online databases in Petersburg, VA.
Oklahoma has a new lookup for licensed real estate professionals.
“Researchers link questionable mergers to CEO arrogance.
New word! locavore.
What a coinkydink! I’ve been doing a big physical plant project at work this week, and when I woke up this morning my back went Twing! And then I come home from work and read about a new resource called Twing, at www.Twing.com. That resource is not about backs, however; it’s about finding online discussion groups and posts.
Twing has a directory of discussion forums, and a “buzz” section that shows the most popular links and forums, but I’m going to stick to the search form. That’ll keep me busy enough because it has three tabs - one for posts, one for topics, and one for finding forums. (A preference link lets you set your filter level and specify how many results you want on a page.)
I searched for chiropractor. In the posts box it got me over 9,000 results, with search results showing what appears to be the name of the thread, a snippet, when it was posted, how many replies and how many view it’s had (very useful) and where it was posted. Though you could see when something was posted I didn’t see a way to sort results by date, but you could limit your results by a date range — look at the left side of a search results page for an extensive set of ways to filter your results further.
On the topic forum, the same search got me 99 results, with the results limited to the name of the topic, the posting date, and the replies and the views (no snippets, in other words.) And the search in the Forum tab brought no results at all. Here you would have to be very general. Even baseball found only six results, with the name of the forum and URL.
When you’re looking at search results for any of the tabs, look out for this little INFO icon. If you click on it you’ll get a graph of that forum’s posting activity over time. A very handy thing to have if you’re trying to find a place to monitor for information or to you join. (How much activity can you stand?)
If you’re at a loss for what to search, you can check out popular posts and community searches on the front page. (”Chips Ahoy”? “Hydrogen”?) Twing also has a blog, but so far I see only one post…
The first thing I thought when I read that Ask was abandoning its general search engine strategy was Well, that’s irony for you. (Wait, I tell a lie. The first thought was “It’s way too early for April Fool.” But the second was the irony thing.)
Here’s the irony: PG Wodehouse had a thing about aunts. If you’ve ever read his books, you’ve discovered that aunts tend to show up as villains, or at least party-poopers. (Notable exception: Bertie Wooster’s Aunt Dahlia. Most of the time.) His characters are not shy about expressing anti-aunt sentiments (See the Wikipedia entry on Aunt Agatha for some great quotes.)
So Ask goes from Ask Jeeves, to just Ask, to catering to married women. From much-loved Jeeves, in other words, to much-reviled (at least by him) aunts. Poor PG.
The SF Gate has an article on the whole situation and I see upon reading it closely that Ask is going from Jeeves, in fact, to me. A married woman, an aunt (heck, a great-aunt) who uses the Internet. Ask is going to concentrate on a small segment of the Internet population — married women who need help managing their lives — and abandon the general search engine thing entirely. In the process, there’s been a small number of layoffs, including my good friend Gary Price.
SF Gate refers to Ask as an “also-ran” among search engines. Five years ago I would have agreed completely. Now, I don’t think so. Had this shift in focus happened five years ago, I would not have much cared. Now, I care very much. Ask in the last couple of years has come up with some great offerings. The mapping service. The packed-with-data-but-still-usable search results. The terrific page preview with statistics. AskEraser. And Bloglines. (Hopefully, Bloglines will go on.) So many great things — I’m sad and sorry that Ask isn’t staying in the game.
So far all the announcements I’ve seen about the Ask shift have been from news sources — I have yet to see a blog entry or press release from Ask itself. Perhaps we’ll see something today.
