Search Computing Blog

As many other Web 2.0 applications Mendeley also has Web API. Check out Read Meter by Dario Taraborelli for a great mash-up built on them.

The new Search Computing Web site is online!

The Search Computing Web site is the main source of information for the Search Computing project, and it  features:

• A brand new section dedicated to demonstrators, where you canfind several demonstration videos of the prototypes developed within the project, plus access to some live demonstrators
• Slides, pictures and audio footage of the second Search Computing Workshop, held in Milano and Como, Italy, on May 25-31, 2010. The workshop targeted several “hot topics” of the project, with roughly 50 participants (50% invited and 50% SeCo), including Ricardo Baeza-Yates from Yahoo!, Paolo Boldi, Gabriella Pasi, Roberto Verganti, Tommaso Buganza, Sonia Bergamaschi, Laura Po, Francesco Guerra, and Domenico Beneventano, Fabian Suchanek, Georg Gottlob, Sergio Flesca, Florian Daniel, Fabio Casati, Imran Muhammad, Dana Florescu, Donald Kossmann, Norman Paton, Neoklis Polyzotis, Ihab F. Ilyas, Frank Valentin, Paolo Missier, Angela Bachi, Paolo Romano, Luciano Milanesi, Marta Corubolo, etc.
• A whole section dedicated to the book “Search Computing Challenges and Directions”, edited by Stefano Ceri, Marco Brambilla (Springer LNCS, Vol. 5950, March 2010).
• Theses and open positions within the project, plus a lot of additional material like the slides of the MS course on Search Computing at Politecnico di Milano, publications and so on.

Check it out at: www.search-computing.org

Apple has recently announced the acquisition of Siri, an application that includes voice recognition and search capabilities.

As some experts suggest (see John Battelle’s blog), Apple could be looking for a search engine for its App Store. As of April 8, 2010, there are at least 185,000 third-party applications available on the App Store.

The engine should not crawl the web and will not be a competitor of Google; it will suggests applications and services to be download/bought, according to the user interaction with the device. continue reading…

Today we discuss on an article published by the Search Engine Land blog, where the author is making a strong case for Search Computing.

The author says:

Business buyers use search engines throughout the entire research and buying process.

We couldn’t agree more. Next Generation Web Search will be a switch in user behavior paradigms: asRicardo Baeza-Yates and Prabhakar Raghavan state in the Search Computing: Challenges and Directions book:

… people do not really want to search, they want to get tasks done…

So, What are business buyers looking for?

…  According to a B2B survey conducted by Enquiro and Marketing Sherpa, buyers are primarily looking for:

1. Pricing information
2. Product information
3. Reviews and comparisons

As buyers move into the research and comparison phases, they start to formalize their needs and evaluate alternatives. Product information related to features and functionality, technical spec sheets, buyer guides and comparison charts are valuable.

An holistic view over such a variegated type of information requires machineries able to query the Web and (meaningfully) join correlated data. This is one of the goals of Search Computing, and you may enjoy a first example of our vision by trying our first demonstration application.