Vector One starts a good discussion on why current search is actually pretty bad. His proposed Doodle is just the beginnings of an idea. The premise is: search is dumb, will staring at a “gajillion” (or another aptly named large number) really help me find what I’m looking for? How many of you go beyond the second, or maybe third page of results? And what do you do to get better results, try adding some more terms which may or may not actually help you get to your answer.

There are several possibilies that could easily be added to increase the power of search:

My trusted sources

del.icio.us and ma.gnolia.com both provide very easy ways for me to bookmark and share interesting sites. Bookmarking a site is putting a stamp “I like/trust this source of information”. Therefore, when I search, I should be able to limit my results to this set of trusted information. I’ve already selected these as sites that I want to go back to for information, but currently I’m forced to go to each of these sites individually and look for the answer to my questions.

Google supports an insite: option. It would be easy to say, search for a term within any del.icio.us tag or bundle. del.icio.us itself could build this right into its own site. For example, say someone wants to find out about “Dog Fleas”. Putting this into Google may or may not yield results you actually care about. But you have bookmarks for a bunch of forums and sites you like for canine information. Google should use these as your most trusted sources.

Categorization of results

Google has started addressing this problem by having “split results”. For example, a search for magnolia shows results pertaining to the bookmarking application first, then a horizontal line, and then magnolia the plant (why the web application is first is a whole other post). This is a good start, though I don’t think a horizontal line really conveys the split in regimes.

A better solution would be to provide the user with some kind of categorization, perhaps on the right-hand side, based on the broad possibilities. When I search for “magnolia”, it would display: “bookmarking application, tree, japanese artist…”. I could then select any of these to narrow my search within that regime.

Another perfect example would be when you search for a person. My own example “Andrew Turner”, turns up the broader categories of:

• Andrew Turner: Isle of Wight MP
• Andrew Turner: Engineer and Programmer interested in Geolocation
• Andrew Turner: Professor of Biology
• Andrew Turner: Game and general programmer in Massachussettes
• Andrew Turner: Carburettor Specialist
• and so on…

Anyways, the point is, these generalizations could be presented to help narrow down that search. Currently, you’re relegated to having to try and enter more terms about the “Andrew Turner” you’re looking for, hoping this extra term is on the same page/group as the rest of the information.

Additionally, within a person or site search, using XFN relationship tags like rel="me" the result could pull up my blog, Flickr, LinkedIn profile, various projects, or even my other relationships like my fiancee’s blog, my friends’ blogs, or people I’ve met.

The power is in your hands

What is great about these suggestions, and the rise of mashups and services is that anyone can create this solution, with very little cost. Make a delisearch, or a relasearch. Just send me the links so I can start using it this afternoon.

Plazes released a Mobile Plazer. They are using cell-tower geolocation, similar to GSMLoc. It will be interesting to see how they handle many locations belonging to a single Celltower location, as well as cell-towers being carrier specific.

They address the issue in their FAQ:

After setting a Plaze the first time (e.g. by entering an address), it was necessary to enter an address again the next time I started the application at the same location. Why?

A newly discovered Plaze is bound to the GSM cell tower your mobile was connected to. The areas of cell towers overlap, so sometimes your mobile is connected to a different tower at the same location. Simply enter an address an set the Plaze a second time, then Plazes knows both cell towers and it will work better next time.

This is really cool. Geolocation by mobile without a GPS system is key to Location-Based technologies to take off and be generally accepted. Plazes is leading the edge of the community-based geolocated networks. Now time to build some services on top of their framework.

- via Henri Bergius

ajax3d.org. Looking at the comments, it’s funny to see people disdain the return of 3D to the web. Following history, 3D web technology is following the standard work we use it for creating and driving in both generated and geo-specific worlds. Engineers use it for visualizing vehicle dynamics, human-machine interaction, and new city-scapes.

Unfortunately, Media Machines isn’t helping their case by using a demo, Strike Fighter v.3 Game, that causes flashback to the early ’90s. And their plugin, Flux is PC only (meaning Microsoft Windows). They say “for now”, but the source uses DirectShow and ActiveX, two technologies that are most definitely not on any other platform.

Wonder what your site’s DNA looks like? Now you can see it rendered as DNA by using Web2DNA. It’s a bookmarklet (drop into your bookmarks toolbar) that pulls apart the HTML to display a DNA-like representation based on H-tags, tables, and formatting.

Though with a blog, the DNA is very volatile, and goes through many mutations, depending on the day.

Google trumps Sourceforge by releasing Google Hosting.

It’s Open-Source project hosting, with what seems like very advanced issue tracking. Fast, easy to understand, simple.

There are already some projects up, like Rails App Installer and Biometric API for Linux.

I assume all/many of the Google Summer of Code projects will end up hosted here. Also, I could see Google providing something like a Krugle source-code search for finding specific files and code snippets. Then why not go ahead and toss in a Code Snippets where anyone could highlight/mark source code as useful, and pulled out for others to then see these snippets easily.

Google Hosting FAQ