April 18, 2004
It seemed like a good idea at the time...

Another job life or two back, I spent some time working on putting into place a small Ultraseek installation for my then employer. It was a lot of fun, and at the time it really did seem like Infoseek (not yet Disney really) was doing interesting things with search, including taking part in the STARTS initiative to allow aggregation of search results from many engines via a clean interchange format.

But then things changed, STARTS appears to have not moved terribly far since, and life goes on, even as the engines gather data and vend information.

All this came back to me in a memory rush this morning, particularly by an exchange in this ACM QUEUE article on Matt Wells and his search engine (via Slashdot), between the interviewer (Matt's former boss at Infoseek) and his subject:

MW Google is definitely the one to beat. It has a near monopoly on the search market, but that's because it wisely focused on quality search results when everybody else was too busy turning into a portal and neglecting their search departments. Ahem.
SK Hey, it was the thing to do at the time.
MW Yes, well, at Infoseek a minuscule amount of the people who worked there actually worked on the search engine. I thought it was quite a bit unbalanced.

Also on the search tip... James Fallows writes yet again about Personal KM systems. Nothing terribly new if you have read his thinking about this over the last couple years, but interesting nonetheless.

Posted by esinclai at April 18, 2004 11:09 AM |