Search 1.x » Products

The Dawn of Conversational Searching

Felix — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 23:37:00 +0000

The popularity of the Twitter Service has created a lot of chatters, chatters that are

1. Less than 140 characters long,
2. Very easy to publish anytime, anywhere, ANY PLATFORM
3. Mostly rubbish about what people had for lunch!

However, similarly to what happened to the evolution of blogs, more reputable (and knowledgeable!) people and companies are starting to use twitter as a mean of communicating, branding and marketing mechanism. As a result, there are actual quite a lot useful information in the tweets that people produce today.

Now in order to leverage these information you can follow people’ tweets all day, or you can search people’s tweet, for me, searching is a better use of my time and that’s when a number of the new conversational search service comes in handy.

Twitter search allows to search for what about what is happening now and what people are talking about now. The results are gathered from people’s tweet now or in the last hour or so and hence the other name given to this type of search “Realtime Search”

Whilst you are mostly searching through people’s chatters which are not exactly high quality content, it does have some interesting and useful applications. Firstly, since it is much easier to twitter than to setup a blog site and provide good blog content, you will see contents you normally don’t see in blogs from people who don’t really know how to blog. What good is this search and what useful information can you find? I can think of at least 4 applications:

1. Verify whether some web service is down: There has been numerous time when I am having issues with Gmail and I wasn’t sure whether it was Gmail or something wired with my wireless/network/firewall/ISP, a quick search on twitter will easily reveal whether 3 millions other web users are complaining about the same thing.

2. Product Release: Twitter now is often the first place you hear about new product releases.

3. Search for discount coupons: This one I am keen to try out one day.

4. The very latest gossips about _ _ _: Now this could be a celebrity, politician or anything you have a interested about and can not wait for the bloggers to catch up.

I’d like to think of Twitter search as “a box of chocolates, and you never know what you gonna get!” hence the best way to find out its value and effectiveness is to just try it out.

If you use Firefox You can even integrate Twitter Search Results right into your normal Google Search Results by following these tips from the good folks at Lifehacker.

I am now so excited about what I will find in Twitter every time I do a Google Search!

Since Twitter is not the only realtime microblogging service, we are also starting to see the emergence of meta search engine or search aggregation site that allow you to search across these micro blogging sites such as Twitter and Friendfeed. One such site is Whostalkin.

I personally think this is one of the most exciting search development since the Googzilla has taken control of our search experience, watch out for this space!

I am also pretty sure there are lot of other interesting applications of conversational/realtime searching, so let us know what you think!

UPDATE: Just came across this fantastic post by Chris Allison on how to get the most out of your Twitter search with tips on how to use the advanced search features!Similar Posts:

Search Is The Most Important Skill Today

Felix — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 07:12:00 +0000

We have had the the Industrial Age that started in the late 18th century, followed by the Information Age of the last 10 to 15 years. Yes, I am calling it the Search Age today! We are in the Search Age today because it is all about search and SEARCH is the most important skill today!

Being able to work with and deal with digital information and use computing technologies has never been more important, and the skill of search is right at the centre of being an efficient digital work, because:

Digitalisation of all information means that it is now possible to find just about any information in digital form.
Explosion of Digital Information means that it’s now more about retrieval of information and less about memorizing and learning as much as you can.
Google: Love it or hate, Google has produced a fantastic web search engine that started it all, Google is now even considered a verb !
We are all expected to be skilful searchers !

Wether you want to learn nuclear physics from MIT, find the meaning of life or find the cheapest place to buy your iPod , it is all possible at the click of a mouse today, you just have to know how. Most people will be amazed at what they can find on the web once they know how to search for it.

Whether you are a high school student, corporate lawyer or stay at home mums, being skilled in the search can without a question make your life easier and make you more productive at work and at home.

Is it a skill though ?

Everyone thinks of Search as just typing a few keywords into Google and accept the top 3 results as the universal truth, but there are more to Search. For a starter, there are many other web search engines other than Google, some are useless whilst others are great competitors to Google. More importantly, to get the best results and unleash the full capabilities of web technologies, you definitely have to learn them. Knowledge is power, knowledge is freely available on the web today, search give you the mean to unleash that power.

Whilst the means is available to you, as with most things, it takes skills, experience and constant learning to be good at it. Whilst it is the most important skill today, it is also one that needs constant learning hence my goal in educating and sharing the skill via Search1.x. Go on, have a look around and come back often as I promise your investment in learning to be a better searcher will help you in all aspects of your life.

What do you think ? Do you agree that Search is the most important skill today ?Similar Posts:

Tell me more about this product

Felix — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 23:47:33 +0000

If you are a keen gadget user and online shopper, then you would be familiar with the experience of Googling your product of interest, checking out the product specification on the manufacturer’s website, trawling through online forums, reading all the online reviews about the product you can find and even having a pick at the product manual if you are really keen. Well, according to Retrevo, they can do all of the “CLICK WORKS” for you and save you from searching around the web so that you can focus on reading the relevant information.

Retrevo has been live Since late 2006 and has been continuously refining their services. I checked out their latest version recently and found it to be a fantastic service and they seem to have all the angles covered when it comes to product search.

I did a search for “SqueezeBox” which is a kick ass MP3 steamer from Logitech and Retrevo returned me a nice list of top results from review articles, forums, manufacturer info, heck it even returned me a screenshot of the product manual and a download link for the PDF file ! Pretty impressive. It even recognised that I am searching for some sort of MP3 player and suggest that I click on their top 10 MP3 players link.

You then have the options of drilling in and seeing more results from thee individual sections.

Click on the Top 10 MP3 Players link then takes me to a special product advisor page on MP3 Players

They seem to have compiled a list top products from various categories and ranked them based on scoring provided by the Retrevo user community. Great idea to leverage the social aspects of product searching and comparison, the results however is a bit interesting as I have never heard of the number 1 product presented here for MP3 player (Cowon D2) then again, maybe I am missing out on a fantastic product, maybe something I need to look into….

Just to check for their coverage of the latest products I did anther search for “HTC Touch Cruise” which is a smart phone that was due to be released around the world as I am typing this article, and here is the result I got.

No product manual provided but still a decent effort in terms of manufacturer’s info, reviews and blogs presented. I suspect there is a little bit of manual work required in the background to provide the full suite of information for each products.

Just in case you have been tempted by the overwhelming positive information you have seen on a particular product, Retrevo also provide direct link to the product page from various online vendors where you can purchase the product instantly. No surprise here as I also suspect this is one of their primary source for revenue.

Would I rely solely on the Retrevo service for my product research now ? NO, would I supplement (or even start my product research) on Retrevo ? Yes as it does do a good job of aggregating relevant contents (and links) into a single location and provide a good high level overview for a particular product.

For me, a search and scan through online product review is one of the most important aspects of searching about a product, and a quick search for “SqueezeBox Review” on Google gave me a result of which the top 3 does not even show up on Retrevo’s list of product reviews for SqueezeBox. This along will warrant me to at least always Google product reviews separately from Retrevo as when it comes to returning the best answer on a particular topic, I would rely on Google over Retrevo any day.Similar Posts: