I'm going to be testing y!q search for the next few weeks and see how it goes (thanks Jeremy for the invitation). It's an interesting concept---it's been out for a few weeks I think though. You set a few words or a paragraph and you get a search related to the text. The more text you search the less relevant the results get, unless for some reason the text is very focused on a particular topic. In my case, I'm using weblog post titles as context, since I generally have titles that are fairly descriptive. I tried using post summaries but the results weren't as good--what with my tendency to start (and sometimes to continue) off-topic and all that.

Another thing I'm doing this week, when I have some free time :), is looking at the Yahoo! search APIs and related stuff. Should be interesting.

PS: I've also taken a further look at A9's OpenSearch. When I first noted its release I thought that A9 was providing their own results in RSS as well as aggregating others, but that's not the case, or at least I haven't been able to find how to do it. Although the "search exchange standard format" idea is cool, it's a bit weird of A9 to not adhere to their own output standard. Maybe this is something that will be added in the future (one hopes...)

Categories: technology
Posted by diego on April 5 2005 at 7:25 AM | TrackBack (1)