Comments on: TagJag Thoughts

By: Steven Ickman

Steven Ickman — Tue, 11 Jul 2006 08:24:45 +0000

Kevin, there are certain types of queries that *can* easily yield better results via a meta-search engine. If you’re looking to buy a book do you think you’ll get better results from querying Google or by querying Amazon directly? I always go to Amazon myself. But how do you know you’re getting the best deal from Amazon? You know you want the book but I bet you want it at the lowest price as well…

That’s where a meta search engine can do wonders. By simultaniously searching the 5 sites you like to buy books from you can be pretty confident that you’re getting a) high quality results (better then Google more offten then not) and b) a great price. There are plenty of shopping aggregators out there that already show just how powerful meta search is for shopping. But this same principle can be applied to other verticals as well.

If you want to find out information about “SkyLab” why not search *both* wikipedia.org and answers.com? Since both sites feature user authored content you’ll get two different perspectives about the same subject. Sure you can search Google for “SkyLab” and get decent results, one of which is from Wikipedia, but when you know the result you want falls within a specific vertical like “Shopping” or “Encyclopedia” I don’t think Googles generic bag of results will ever compare to what’s achievable via a federated search that goes straight to the source.

-Steve

By: Kevin Burton

Kevin Burton — Wed, 05 Jul 2006 23:45:59 +0000

I have doubts that the meta search model will actually work. At some point you’re adding so much relevance that it might just make sense to do a full crawl yourself…..

I’d love to be proven wrong though.

Kevin

By: Pearl

Pearl — Wed, 05 Jul 2006 20:32:45 +0000

Please pardon the off-topic comment but I wanted to say thank you for making Akismet. It makes my days so much more pleasant. No dread of opening moderation to see so much slow-loading spam there.

By: Chris Pirillo

Chris Pirillo — Tue, 04 Jul 2006 03:39:01 +0000

I totally took it constructively – and have had those ideas on the table from the beginning. We’re completely of like minds on this one, which is very uplifting. Shayne, as you well know, is able – but I need a couple more of him.

By: Happy TagJag’ed Publishers ~ Chris Pirillo

Happy TagJag’ed Publishers ~ Chris Pirillo — Tue, 04 Jul 2006 02:22:17 +0000

[...] I know it’s still too geeky, but that’s one publisher who understands that we’re helping him get his set of unique results out there. The filtering and sorting are coming – and after Shayne read Matt’s post on the matter, he believes he knows how to make “it” work better. The audience feedback wasn’t challenging, it was enlightening and reassuring (as I had been thinking along the very same lines, but lacked more than a single developer to execute upon them). Here’s the second email, from Brian Dear: I’m sitting here watching your TagJag presentation at Gnomedex… I noticed that there are “EVDB” results under “Entertainment” – cool! Could you rename the “EVDB” to be “Eventful”? That’s the name we’re using these days as the main brand (EVDB is the underlying business-to-business brand). [...]

By: Roy Schestowitz

Roy Schestowitz — Tue, 04 Jul 2006 02:14:41 +0000

I have found gade.be very useful since its launch. Let’s hope Chris the best of luck.