This is indeed a sad day for all of us, for on October 1, a great app will be gone. Though we hardly had enough time during his short life to get to know him, like the grass that withers and fades, this monkey will finish his earthly course. I know he left many things…
Category: search
This came from a comment on the prior post, and it’s worth a shout of its own. Don Norman on the importance of command lines, including the ubiquitous search box, in modern UI. -m
Thought experiment: are there any commonly-expressed semantic queries–the kind of queries you’d run over a triple store, or perhaps a SearchMonkey-annotated web site–expressible in common type-in-a-searchbox query grammar? As a refresher, here’s some things that Google and other search engines can handle. The square brackets represent the search box into which the queries are typed,…
Fed Thread is a front end for the newly XMLified Federal Register. Why is this a big deal? It’s a daily publication of the goings-on of the US government. It’s a primary source for all kinds of things that normally only get rehashed through news organizations. And it is bulky–nobody can read through it on…
The new feature called rich snippets shows that SearchMonkey has caught the eye of the 800 pound gorilla. Many of the same microformats and RDF vocabularies are supported. It seems increasingly inevitable that RDFa will catch on, no matter what the HTML5 group thinks. -m
I’ve been experimenting with the preview version of Wolfram Alpha. It’s not like any current search engine because it’s not a search engine at all. Others have already written more eloquent things about it. The key feature of it is that it doesn’t just find information, it infers it on the fly. Take for exmple…
I’ve been playing lately with this site, and it’s a fantastic resource. The word carboy probably comes from Persian qarabah “large flagon.” Who knew? -m
Today happens to mark the 6th anniversary of my blog. To celebrate going into year seven I’m refocusing it, including a new name: Micahpedia. Blogging is an important skill, a subset of the overall skill of managing your online persona, so it’s worth devoting some attention to. The ego-burst doesn’t hurt either. My concrete goal…
Roughly speaking, the innovator’s dilemma happens when a product progressively gets more and more advanced features, to the point that it misses out (by listening to customers) on an entire new opportunity. At that point, a simpler, competing product can come into play and make large gains. But what happens when a company is generally…
So today Yahoo! announced a major facet of what I’ve been working on lately: making the web more meaningful. Lots of fantastic coverage, including TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb (and others, please link in the comments), and supportive responses and blog posts across the board. It’s been a while since I’ve felt this good about being a…
As spotted on TechCrunch, full article. This is a game-changer folks. Check out the comments attached to the article. -m
OK, the majority of the buzz came from my talk, where I strongly encouraged folks to take a look at Hadoop. This article seems to be saying much the same things. If you’re curious about the future of distributed computation and storage, it’s worth a look. -m
The approximately seven readers of this blog have probably already heard this, but just in case: I have a new role at Yahoo!–working on next generation search. Lots of details are still falling into place. For now I describe it: “Imagining, specifying, prototyping, developing, and evangelizing next-generation web search experiences leveraging the full and unique…