Library clips

The choices (search/browse)

Directory vs. PageRank vs. clustering vs. social search vs. personalised search vs. human-indexed web vs. social tags vs. computer processed tags vs. rss

For starters (for me anyway) there was Yahoo! Directory, ODP, or Google search (based on Page Rank)

To alleviate overload of results and relevancy this was what followed (not sure if that equates to the old precision vs. recall issue):

Cluster results – Clusty, Gigablast, Mooter
Here is more on Clusty.

Keyword extraction – TagCloud
Here is more on TagCloud.

Refine searching (similar to Clustering) – Teoma, Ask Jeeves

Here is more on Teoma
Here is more on Ask Jeeves

Search by social network (re-ranking) – Eurekster
Here is more on Eurekster.
(there are also engines that base relevancy on social network ratings of pages)

Search by your search history plus implicit profile (re-ranking) – Google Personalised
Here is more on Google Personalised (mentions old explicit profile approach).

Search by your reading behaviour at the granular level (re-ranking) – Findory
Here is more on Findory.

Search by RSS - Technorati, Feedster, Blogpulse, etc…
See more on indexing issues:
SEW: How Search Engines Index RSS & Why It Doesn’t Necessarily Matter
For the Vox Populi, Part II: A Comparison of How Some Blog Aggregation and RSS Search Tools Work for Keyword Search

Browse social bookmarks - Furl, del.icio.us, Spurl, Simpy, Connotea, CiteULike, etc…
More here:
Ontology is Overrated — Categories, Links, and Tags
CollaborativeRank

Search full-text human/social web – Zniff (Spurl), Simpy, Furl, or meta-search (Gataga-now defunct)
Zniff searches the full-text of the Spurl bookmark community, as Furl and Simpy have full-text search of their bookmark communities.
I think Zniff has got the idea, just incorporate tags (human indexed web) as part of the ranking…Gataga would just augment this by being a meta-engine…then re-rank again for personalisation.

Even with tagging, search is still needed (discovery vs. findability)
See here:
Yahoo My Web Tagging & Why (So Far) It Sucks…and more.
Coming To Terms With Tags: Folksonomies, Tagging Systems And Human Information

Some of my related posts:
Zniff clusters
Gataga: meta-tag search
Google with del.icio.us clusters
RSS: full-text or summaries!
Blogs/RSS Engines: keyword search comparison

…and finally:
Tagging alone is not a panacea for retrieval!

All this re-ranking, when you can become search experts, using boolean syntax, fielded searching, etc..dig into the opaque web! (I think this means using your search intelligence to get those results that are relevant to you at the top of your results)…but will lay people develop skills..

That’s the issue, lay searchers, and also many experts are both finding relevancy and exhaustivity an issue (one more than the other)…what will the semantic web do…will it finally be a library catalogue for the web (DC) and probably more (ontologies and all that stuff)…Google don’t care, keyword search works for the lay person…what about the research needs of the scholar…even if people go to the trouble to add metadata to webpages to help relevancy in searches, the search engines have to take notice of this input in their indexing procedures.

Context, relevancy (re-ranking, metadata, concepts) applies more than ever in the time crucial environment of the enterprise…here are 2 articles on enterprise search:
Beyond keyword search: How a “concept” search can improve information gathering in a CI context.
Recent Trends in Enterprise Search

It comes down to ranking for relevancy (general and personalised), search syntax, user interface, education in searching and how search engines work, and most of all understanding there are an array of tools for an array of needs.
That is, web search engines are serving individual purposes and needs…because they can do a lot of things it doesn’t mean they do them all well…if keyword search doesn’t serve your purpose (eg. scholarly research) use a subscription database…maybe Answers.com is better for facts…there is more than one tool (a world outside Google).

[ADDED 10/10/05: Better query refinement]