Microsoft is beginning their push to out-Google Google. They’ve launched a preview site containing their new search technology.
What do we have under the hood? A brand new algorithmic search engine — built from the ground up — on Microsoft technology. Give it a spin and tell us what you think.
This site will be available for a short time. After we have time to incorporate your feedback and add some features it’ll be back, new and improved.
Seems like a mixed bag so far. I searched for ‘Triage’, interested in finding out more about Microsoft’s new photo organizing technology. I got results for hospital triage stuff, as you’d expect. I tried ‘Triage photo’, and got… the Gadgetopia post I made yesterday, which means that either their indexer is blazingly fast, or I just got lucky.
Unfortunately, the post was a ‘recent entry’ at the time the site was indexed, so the search results contained every page on Gadgetopia, but the actual post about Triage was completely buried. I think Google has some way of filtering that sort of thing out. Looks like they have some more work to do.
Via SlashDot.
Building on it's planned technologies for Longhorn, Microsoft is developing a new technology called 'Triage' to manage digital photos. It appears they're tagging photos with metadata ala Photoshop Album, but check out this ZDNet Video and take a look at how they're presenting the user interface. Very slick looking, but will…
"Unfortunately, the post was a 'recent entry' at the time the site was indexed, so the search results contained every page on Gadgetopia..."
There should be a standard way to ask search engines to not index parts of the page, like a robots.txt for certain sections.
Swish-E, the open source search engine, will let you put <-- noindex -- > and <-- index -- > tags around stuff to stop the indexer and restart it again. I would stop the indexer just inside the BODY tag of every page, restart it when the main content started, then stop it when the main content ended. Thus, no menus, headers, or footers got in and corrupted the search index.
That was something a $14,000 Inktomi installation I used to work with couldn't even do.
