I had a very brief comment during Chris' session "Should TagJag get funded?" On the stage with Chris and Rick Segal were two of my favorite members of the venture community, Brad Feld and Jeff Clavier. My feedback may have been phrased more negatively than I meant it to be, but what I was trying to constructively criticise is that TagJag would be a lot more unique and valuable to me if beyond merely listing the results pages of the different services it aggregates, it presented the results interesting and timesaving ways. For example: better categorization of time-based vs. authority-based sources; combining different results into a single list; de-duping and filtering results; filtering the spam that the different providers seem to be unable to catch; providing different notification thresholds and mediums beyond RSS and HTML, like email, SMS, IM. All of these would provide value to me beyond what the individual services provide, save me time, and provide something greater than the sum of its parts. tagjag freedbacking
I have found gade.be very useful since its launch. Let’s hope Chris the best of luck.
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. 😉
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.
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
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