Barriers to Entry in Search Getting Smaller
Jeff Dalton, Jeff’s Search Engine Caffè, makes a good argument that the barriers to entering the search market are getting smaller.
Jeff observes that blekko can succeed with a small number of servers only because its search demand is low.
True, but how many intra-company or litigation search engines are going to have web-sized user demands?
Start-ups need not try to match Google in its own space, but can carve out interesting and economically rewarding niches of their own.
Particularly if those niches involve mapping semantically diverse resources into useful search results for their users.
For example, biomedical researchers probably have little interest in catalog entries that happen to match gene names. Or any of the other common mis-matches offered by entire web search services.
In some ways, search the entire web services have created their own problem and then attempted to solve it.
My research interests are in information retrieval broadly defined so a search engine limited to library schools, CS programs (their faculty and students), the usual suspects for CS collections, library/CS/engineering organizations, with semantic mapping, would suit me just find.
Noting that the semantic mis-match problem persists even with a narrowing of resources, but the benefit of each mapping is incrementally greater.
Questions:
- What resources are relevant to your research interests? (3-5 pages, web or other citations)
- Create a Google account to create your own custom search engine and populate it with your resources.
- Develop and execute 20 queries against your search engine and Google, Bing and one other search engine of your choice. Evaluate and report the results of those queries.
- Would semantic mapping such as we have discussed for topic maps be more or less helpful with your custom search engine versus the others you tried? (3-5 pages, no citations)