I wanted to find the trendy-but-good shop I stopped by yesterday: it’s not really a cafe or a coffehouse or a restaurant. They sell sandwiches and savory chicken pie and strawberry shortcake, with cartons of strawberries stacked high in the front. I knew where it was, but not the name, so I compared Yahoo Maps and Google Maps, to learn a little about geosearch.Yahoo maps knew where I live, so it started there, and then just scrolled and zoomed until I found the corner of 51st and Telegraph. (It would have been easier if I’d used the hybrid map & satellite photo, much better for me than plain maps). Then I used the “Find a Business” and typed “pie”. Instantly, Bakesale Betty’s came up, with the word “pie” harvested from a Yahoo user review (5 stars!) in which a customer praised their “pot-pies”. That was about 5 scrolls and 4 clicks and one short search, and successGoogle doesn’t know where I live, so typed in “51st and telegraph, oakland, ca” — and there I was. A couple of clicks to get to the closest street level. Then I clicked on the “Find businesses” link and typed in “pie” and got a display of… 20 results out of 5,645 hits and a much higher view, so they could show me all the other pie matches. Oops. I tried “pies” and that didn’t work, and I couldn’t think of anything else to search on as there area a million sandwich and cookie places. 2 searches (one long), 1 scroll and 4 clicks, but that got me stuck. Then I typed “betty” and of course it was right there, with links to reviews. Just to check, I clicked the Explore this area link, no luck, all about garbage pickup. I tried using the “Street View” and looking at that corner, but in one view the storefront is too dark to see, and in the other there’s a big truck in front of the shop.Why did Google not find me the store when I searched for pie? You may ask, and I have an answer. Because their index and/or their query parsing did not match “pie” with “pot-pies” in one of the customer reviews that Google automatically connected to the business. If they’d used even lightweight pluralization, it would have worked. And zipping me up to the whole Bay Area view was really annoying.Yahoo did a stemmed match and showed it right there, without changing my map level. It wins this comparison.

Swish-e - Searchtools Report Updated
Swish-e, a free open-source Unix search engine, Swish-e is fast at indexing and searching, and quite flexible. It can handle simple authentication, indexes HTML, text, XML, and (via converters), PDF, MS Word, Excel and MP3 ID3 tags, with an emphasis on storing feilds/tags for specifying during search. Resuts can be sorted by relevance, date, size, and other fields. It runs as a CGI to a web server (Apache recommended), and has a fairly active user and developer base. New features include adjustments to the relevance algorithm, “near” operator and “?” single character wildcard operator (in addition to “*”).

DolphinSearch - Searchtools Report Updated
DolphinSearch, with an unusual search algorithm based on neural networks and dolphin research, this search appliance is designed for legal research and corporate compliance, and integrates into an enterprise document management system. (May 3)

IBM OmniFind Yahoo Edition - new Searchtools Report
OmniFind Yahoo! Edition is a free search engine based on the open-source Lucene core, is a reasonably full-featured search that can index up to 500,000 pages, making it an interesting competitor to the Google Search Appliance, Autonomy Ultraseek and Solr, as well as lower-end search engines. Features include an automated install package for Windows and Linux, browser administration, a powerful web crawling robot, file system remote crawler, index support for over 400 file types (using the Inside Out system for file reading), query parsing recognizes Internet Query Operators and Boolean operators, provides a spellchecker, synonym and suggestions, and Lucene-based stemming. It indexes and searches Arabic, Czech, Danish, German, Greek, English, Spanish, Finnish, French, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Dutch, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese. Searches can be sent via REST, and the results formatted within the admin interface, or sent back as ATOM, HTML with XSLT or XML, and linked to optional local document caching. Enterprise support is available from IBM. There are some first-release glitches, but it’s a well-designed package that’s easy to use interactively, with some powerful automation interfaces ready for those who need more flexibility. Definitely worth a look.

where has Entopia gone?
One of my clients is interested in Entopia, so I was taking a look.I tried to go to the web site and it was replaced by one of those placeholder spam sites which pops up several spammy windows. It seems like the kind of thing that might have viruses, worms or trojans, so I’d suggest against opening the site in IE, or really, at all on a Windows machine.No one answered at one phone number, the other two I found were disconnected.Casualty of the recession? Acquired by someone? It’s a mystery, and I’m curious.ETA: The Wayback Machine (archive.org) has an actual home page as of June 13, 2006 and an empty page as of July 1 of that year. I always thought they were promising more than they could deliver, so this is perhaps confirmation.

partly offline due to injury
I slipped on a stepladder and broke my left leg (tibial plateau fracture) and then chipped my right heel while on crutches. My office is not really wheelchair accessible, nor can I go down my house’s steps without great effort, so I’m working remotely, part-time. I am trying to read email every day and respond in a timely way, so if you’ve left a voice message or sent email that I have not answered, please try again (by email if possible). Apologies for your inconvenience.Avi

Bass Fishing Basics.
Learn to catch more Bass even if you’re a beginner. Bass Fishing Basics. - CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) — From Christmas trees to cattle, West Virginia’s agriculture industry is still feeling the impact of last summer’s drought. The baked landscape tested the mettle of the state’s 21,000 farms. Since then, fuel and fertilizer Sowing […]

Search Conferences Listing updated
This list covers all the search and related related conferences I know about. At the Enterprise Search Summit West I will be doing a pre-conference workshop on Critical Success Factors (how search engines work and how to make them better), a presentation on Tuning Search using Analytics and a moderating a panel on Good Practices for Search User Interfaces. At the Web Builder 2.0 conference, I’ll be presenting on Web Site Search and the User Experience. If you are a reader of this web site, please come and say hi, and if you’d like an online presentation to your organization or company, I do those as well. To suggest a conference or the listing, please leave a comment and I’ll add it.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008 at 1:50 am and is filed under Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.