The next project for Change2 is to be a search engine for the not for profit sector. Please can anyone with sites to suggest do so in the comments for this blog post.

Thanks!

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Here’s a presentation I have put together to explain some of the whats, whys and hows of creating a Google Customised Search.

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The latest stage of my attempt to take over the world of vertical search is KMSearch, which focuses on knowledge management resources.

As well as the search engine, there is a wiki to manage the site, which includes the list of sites searched. Please get involved if you have sites you would like to see added.

Big thanks to Lucas McDonnell, whose post on 46 KM resources kicked things off for me.

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BookZilla is another customised search site, like LGSearch, that I knocked together this afternoon.

I think it is pretty obvious what it does. I’m running it through Palimpsest, the books discussion site I facilitate, with any ad revenue going towards the maintenance of the forum.

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Jason Calacanis has launched Mahalo, a human edited search engine, based on the MediaWiki platform used by, amongst others, Wikipedia.

It’s funny, I remembered immediately the blog post Jason wrote about buying the Mahalo domain and not knowing what to do with it back in November last year.

Here’s how the FAQ page explains the model:

Mahalo is the world’s first human-powered search engine powered by an enthusiastic and energetic group of Guides. Our Guides spend their days searching, filtering out spam, and hand-crafting the best search results possible. If they haven’t yet built a search result, you can request that search result. You can also suggest links for any of our search results.

Interesting – so it’s Google crossed with DMOZ crossed with Wikipedia. Kind of.

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Now, this is the future of web search:

How can you really claim to explore the web when your search engine only returns the results you are looking for?

You can’t. That’s why ACrappySearchEngine.com returns results from all across the web regardless of what you search for…

Now some people will say our service isn’t useful but to that we say, “Look Michael Arrington, Jason Calacanis and every venture capital company we pitched this too - what people really want is to discover what they weren’t looking for! Heck, Columbus was searching for India when he found America and that seemed to work out for everyone didn’t it?”

Just what we all need!

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Couple of search related stories here, following my recent posting on whether or not search is broken.

Mike Arrington announces that Euekster have managed to grab $5.5 million in funding.

One of their products is a system for creating site specific search engines called Swickis, which also allows some user contributions in the form of voting for links.

Noel Hatch has set up a local government flavoured Swicki here.

Arrington also notes the launch of Wikiseek, which searches Wikipedia in a community-edited kind of way. It sounds pretty interesting, and I will be having a play. Their homepage looks familiar though…

Still, it’s interesting that these new approaches to search are starting to appear, and are working albeit on a fairly limited scale.

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Tom Foremski over at Silicon Vallery Watcher points out the things that annoy him about search:

- There are many publishers that try to make sure their headlines catch the attention of the search engines rather than catch the attention of readers. The same is true for content, editors increasingly optimize it for the search engines rather than the readers.

- Why should I have to tag my content, and tag it according to the specific formats that Technorati, and other search engines recommend?  Aren’t they supposed to do that?

- Google relies on a tremendous amount of user-helped search. Websites are encouraged to create site maps and leave the XML file on their server so that the GOOGbot can find its way around.

- The search engines ask web site owners to mask-off parts of their sites that are not relevant, such as the comment sections,  with no-follow and no-index tags.

- Web sites are encouraged to upload their content into the Googlebase database. Nice–it doesn’t even need to send out a robot to index the site.

- Every time I publish something, I send out notification “pings” to dozens of search engines and aggregators. Again, they don’t have to send out their robots to check if there is new content.

- Google asks users to create collections of sites within specific topics so that other users can use them to find specific types of information.

- The popularity of blogs is partly based on the fact that they find lots of relevant links around a particular subject. Blogs are clear examples of people-powered search services.

It’s my view that web search has come as far as it can based on algorithms and sheer grunt alone. There needs to be a human element in terms of whether or not a result is actually a) relevant and b) useful to the searcher.

This is the thinking behind the Search Wikia project which Wikipedia and Wikia’s Jimmy Wales is running. I wrote a little about this on my personal blog here and here.

It’s also why I am working on a human generated ‘search engine’. The aim will be for people to submit links they have found useful, tag and categorise them, and allow others to vote them as useful. This database of links will then be searchable, producing fewer results, but ones which have been recommended by others. I think it is going to be really useful, but it will need the committment of other people to make it work.

Watch this space.

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