Next in our series, “What’s New with
Exalead’s Ranking System,” the second major improvement in the GREMLINS
release:

Ingredient
Number 2: Ahhh…You Understand Me.

GREMLINS seeks to better understand who you
are and what you’re looking for, even if you’re a bit challenged in the
research skills department. Say for example you live in San Francisco

and launch a search for “dog
therapy.” You may actually be looking for:

1) Therapeutic options for
treating your Dalmation’s separation anxiety problem,

2) Information about
animal-assisted therapy for the aged or infirm,

3) A California manufacturer of skateboards and
skateboard accessories, named “Dog Therapy,” or

4) Recordings by a Berlin garage band named “Dog Therapy” you came across during your trip to Germany last year.

There was never a problem for a search like
1. Sites about therapeutic treatments and treatment providers for troubled
canines will top your results. Exalead has always privileged an exact match of
keywords in the order they are entered, even if they weren’t enclosed in
quotation marks.

If 2 was really what you were after,
GREMLINS has been refined to better understand that “therapy dogs” may be
closer to your intentions that “dog therapy” per se, and it will offer up links
like “Therapy dogs,” “Animal assisted therapy,” and “Therapy Dog Training”
under “Related Terms” in the “Narrow Your Search” panel.

For quests 3 and 4, the skateboard
manufacturer will be privileged in your search results over the Berlin garage
band as GREMLINS factors your location and language into its calculation of the
relevancy of results. This will save you a lot of time in 9 out of 10 of your
web queries.

But, if you really wanted to find that
garage band and didn’t think to add “Germany”
or Berlin” or “Band” to your request, all is still not lost. Check the “Languages” filter
under the Narrow Your Search panel. If there’s an option for German, it might
just be your band lurking there in the shadows.

EPILOGUE

Let’s try another search. Say you launch a
request on “Martin Luther King” because you:

1) Want to listen to one of his
famous speeches,

2) Are working on a report on
kingfishers for school,

3) Want to browse forums and blogs
dedicated to Martin Luther King, or

4) Need to find photos of Martin
Luther King with a landscape-orientation.

Curious as to what GREMLINS makes of these?
Have more questions about how search requests are analyzed? Grab a cup of
coffee and stay tuned for further details here on Exalead’s approach to content
relevancy.

Sebastien, Head Chef, Web Team

Are you on Facebook? Do you compulsively
log on every day? At all hours? Is the site always open in your browser? Set as
your home page??

How can one explain the remarkable success
of this umpteenth social network? Is it timing? A masterful technical
deployment? Ease of use? The non-stop, abundant flow of info on even the
slightest movements among one’s entourage? Or simply luck? Could it have as
easily been any other of the hundreds (no, thousands) of sites vying for your
attention and that of your friends? Who knows? In any case, it’s a runaway success.

I’m only connected to a dozen or so
friends, but already on my home page I can follow a continual stream of newly
posted photos and images, track relationships in the making (or unmaking), view
profile updates, follow fluff messages or plug into useful exchanges, or join
improbable groups, like the “I flip my pillow over so I can feel the cold
side when I’m sleeping” group, or the ever-popular and grammatically
challenged “If the End of the World was announced by Melissa Theuriau, I’ll
die happy” group.

You can easily connect every half hour and
find new updates. With more friends, make that
every few minutes. It’s a little like gazing out a window and following the
action on a street where only your friends pass, an insider’s view into what
your friends think and feel, and what they want.

What’s more, there is a whole host of
plug-n-play applications you can add to your Facebook home page to move from
gazer to player (some developed by Facebook and other by partners). Say you
belong to the group “Brits in New York.” You could already exchange messages with
members of this group, but now you can plug in the Calendar app and organize a
meet-up with Newcastle fans at Nevada Smiths. Plug in the Slideshows app, and you can share videos of
your Newcastletonians Night Out. And not happy with your latest Profile pic?
Touch it up with the app Picnik. The possibilities are endless. Are you still
going to need your buggy old OS? You, yes. But your kids?

Now some of my professional contacts have
started to send me Facebook connection requests. All’s fine and well when the
network is confined to your web geek friends, but imagine what dilemmas await
as the networks spread. Do you really want to leave up that photo of you
rollerblading in the leopard thong?

With that cautionary anecdote noted, the
consent-based social networks of Facebook are considerable and seem useful for
all sorts of purposes:

• Small Ads: I could privilege ads coming from my close contacts, those whom I trust most, followed by those from members of my groups, etc. (This is also the approach used by Microsoft’s “Live Expo” in leveraging your MSN contacts.)
• Professional networking: I could explore jobs and partnerships and maintain client contacts. All that you can do on LinkedIn or Viadeo.
• Travel: I could better choose destinations, hotels, windsurfing
  spots, tour operators and airlines.
• News: I could more easily sift through the endless news stories available on the Net by filtering them for those read or recommended by my contacts, or maybe even just those contacts with whom I share particular interests.
• Dating: This is already in place and well-used, judging from the categories available for one’s Profile: “Single”, “In a Relationship”, “In an Open Relationship” (?!), “Engaged”, “Married”, or “It’s Complicated”; and those that describe what you’re looking for: “Friendship”, “A Relationship”, “Dating”, “Random Play”, or “Whatever I can get”.
• Net Searching: Will Google be rendered obsolete one day by a yet-to-be-invented “social search” application? An application that responds better to exploratory requests like “What are the best vegan restaurants in Queens?” or “What’s the best way to break up with my girlfriend?” Yahoo Answers and the now defunct Google Answers have tried to address this challenge, but a real community aspect is needed for this to truly work, and Facebook has the most well connected communities on the Net…

Certain oracles even see Facebook
dethroning Yahoo and Google altogether one day …And you? What’s your Facebook
prediction? A soft fading into the sunset as with Friendster? Why? Perhaps you
find terrifying the phenomenal quantity of information and photos available to
Facebook and all the partner applications for whatever purposes are deemed
useful…