Persistent Search

Another essay from Bill Burnham that explores the fascinating world of "Search" as it continues to morph from its past uses to its future...

"What do you get when you marry ping servers and RSS with stored queries? A whole new type of search that is destined to become the search industry’s next big battleground: Persistent Search. While Persistent Search presents search companies with difficult new technical challenges and potentially higher infrastructure costs, it also gives them powerful mechanisms for building much stronger user relationships which may increase the value of their advertising services. Simply put, Persistent Search allows users to enter a search query just once and then receive constant, near real-time, automatic updates whenever new content that meets their search criteria is published on the web. For example, let’s say you are a stock trader and you want to know whenever one of the stocks in your portfolio is mentioned on the web. By using a persistent search query, you can be assured that you will receive a real-time notification whenever one of your stocks is mentioned..."

"From a business and competitive perspective, Persistent Search has a number of very attractive aspects to it relative to traditional ad-hoc queries. Traditional ad-hoc search queries tend to result in very tenuous user relationships with each new query theoretically a competitive “jump ball”. Indeed, the history of search companies, with no less than 5 separate search “leaders” in 10 years, suggests that search users are not very loyal. Persistent Search presents search companies with the opportunity to build rich, persistent relationships with their users."

Continue reading Bill's article here. And, in other Google/GOOG news, is the following tidbit (via Briefing.com)...

Google buys new, Australian made search engine technology
ABC.net.au reports that a new search engine has been developed at the University of New South Wales, and has been bought by American internet giant Google. A PhD student at the university, Ori Allon, spent six months crunching the numbers, and he came up with a new algorithm that will significantly speed up the search process. Heading up the research team was Dr Eric Martin from the University's Computer Science Department.

-- David M Gordon / The Deipnosophist