Friday, March 10, 2006

New Ways of Searching

Buzzwords aside sometimes examples are the best way to describe what Web 2.0 is about. A great example is search.

In the old days (which aren’t, really that old, they are still present and with us!) the best place to find something was a search engine. For example, if I wanted to research the Avian flu virus I could go to Google or Yahoo and type in Avian Flu Virus. The search results that I am given are provided by a proprietary algorithm that the search engine sites have worked thousands of hours to tweak, tune, and twiddle.

In the Web 2.0 model I can go a couple of different places to find information about the Avian flu virus. A great example is Technorati. Technorati indexes the real live web by checking the RSS feeds of the blogosphere (as well as the traditional press) constantly. Unlike Google which goes out and spiders sites on an un-real-time basis Technorait is the real time web. Let’s take a look at the same search on Technorati. The latest story is about the Avian flu virus is 11 minutes old, and the rest are all within the hour. Must more timely than Google. This is all powered by the ubiquity of RSS.

Another great example of Web 2.0 is searching through tag sites, the best known being delicious.com (recently acquired by Yahoo). Here websites are tagged as interesting by the larger delicious community. This is human-rendered search on a large scale. Real time search is not the result here, but filtered links are. Look at our same search on delicious. We don’t have the 100’s of pages of results that Google provides, but we do have a filtered list by the community.

Both these examples (and there are many more!) are examples of typical use cases being disrupted and enhanced by Web 2.0 technologies and phenomena. In this case RSS and community. Have any other examples?

Posted by Hadley Stern on 03/10 at 09:20 AM
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