Tag: search

OneNote 12

Post ImageI really love OneNote. I think it’s probably one of the single most useful applications ever created. Of course, it works best on a Tablet PC because you have a pen and are thus able to handwrite notes, but there are ways to handwrite using your PC too. So what’s coming in the next version of OneNote? Chris Pratley, one of the application’s designers shares some of the new features:

One of the long term visions for OneNote is to bring together “your information” and make it findable and reusable, regardless of format. When we look at the types of info we try to help people organize, it is obvious that a lot of it lives outside the digital realm: Business cards, handouts, receipts. People always have a collection of paper that accompanies their PC because it is hard to include that stuff in their digital storage. Beyond paper, there are other analog forms of information such as speeches (audio) and “performances” (video). You hear and see things today, but all you have are your memories of that, or maybe a recording on tape or mini-recorder. As you know from the current release of OneNote, there’s a lot of value in just being able to capture various kinds of information in one place: text, HTML, ink, photos, audio/video recordings. In OneNote “12”, we’re going to go even farther.

More or less, anything you put into OneNote 12 becomes searchable.

I was instantly amazed that OneNote could search my handwriting without having to first convert it to text – definitely a major wow feature. Now it’s going to be able to search everything else too? Crazy. If you read his full post, there are more details on how the various searches work, and he mentions that OneNote 12 will in fact use the new Windows Desktop indexed search engine, which means a search should be pretty much instant.

If you haven’t yet tried OneNote, I highly suggest that you do. You can download a free trial here.

Read: Chris Pratley

Google Desktop 2

Post ImageLooks like Google isn’t slowing down their efforts to become a software company! Today the company released Google Desktop 2:

Google has rolled out a beta version of its desktop software, adding such features as “Sidebar,” which offers a personalized panel of information such as e-mail, stock quotes and news.

The software, unveiled on Monday, also includes a scratch pad style tool for taking notes and tools for searching one’s desktop and Microsoft Outlook inbox.

Looks pretty interesting, though I haven’t downloaded it yet. The sidebar is a very thought-provoking feature. Longhorn once included a sidebar, but it is no where to be found in Vista Beta 1. Perhaps the Google Desktop release will force Microsoft to rethink the sidebar feature?

Read: CNET News.com

Better Blog Search

Post ImageReporting on a Blogspotting interview with Bloglines CEO Mark Fletcher, Mark Evans thinks that the blog search market is “ripe for Google to steal the business”:

Fletcher’s hitting exactly on what I’ve been harping on for months that there has to be a better mousetrap for blog search. Despite all the attention it receives, Technorati – with all due respect – is being overwhelmed by its willingness to post everything and anything. Someone really smart is going to come up with an algorith/methodology that combines a blog’s traffic, relevancy and high ratings to product superior and effective blog search results.

I disagree.

One of the greatest features of Technorati is that it shows what everyone is saying right now (ignoring their growing pains). Why should my search results or the tag page only show content from the so-called A-Listers (that’s what you’re getting at with traffic, “ratings”, and to a lesser extent “relevancy”)? Their content should not be given priority over anyone elses. It’s not like PubSub only watches the A-List feeds, nor does Weblogs.com only show when the A-Listers have updated their blogs.

I’ve talked about the definiton of blogs before (via Jeff Jarvis): Blogs are the voices of citizens in conversation.

Why should the conversation be limited to or enhanced for a select few? The so-called A-Listers already have problems with including everyone else, we don’t need a search engine to make things worse.

Perhaps what’s required is not better search results, but better ways of viewing and interacting with those results so that they are more meaningful and can be processed more efficiently.

Read: Mark Evans

Testing BitTorrent's Search

Post ImageLast week I wrote about BitTorrent the company and the search engine they were planning to launch. Well that search engine is now live, so I figured I’d take it for a spin. The site apparently only indexes torrents that it’s robots can find on their own, so I am not sure how well they would do at penetrating the sites that require registration.

The first search I attempted was for something legal, Firefox. The entire site, front page and results page, look a lot like Google, but I suppose that’s typical of most any search engine these days. Anyway, there were 22 results for Firefox, and not one of them was the latest version. In fact, the latest version I could find was 1.0.2, which is two versions behind.

The second search I tried was Coldplay. Of the 20 results it returned, 9 appeared directly related to Coldplay’s music, with torrents for the new single, their previous album, and some rare songs among others. Search number three was for Britney Spears, and it returned 42 results. Keeping with the music, I searched for 50 Cent, and it found 33 results.

I figured software would be a good thing to search for too, so I tried Microsoft. Lots of torrents for Microsoft stuff, with 83 results. How about Linux? There we go, 333 results. Unfortunately, not many of them look like distros.

Based on that brief exercise, I was left unimpressed. I think for now I’ll stick to the torrent sites that haven’t been shut down as they do a better job of indexing and displaying torrents. The BitTorrent search doesn’t show how many seeds and peers a particular torrent has, nor how many times it’s been downloaded. These pieces of information are useful in weeding through the crap that is out there. Perhaps over time the site’s robots will find more torrents too, so the index will become more useful. Room for improvement I guess! Another thing that would be nice to see is stuff like Firefox manually indexed. The search engine would be so much more useful if legitimate software like Firefox was properly listed, and up-to-date.

One definite positive to the search engine is that it should draw new users to the protocol, because it definitely does lower the barrier to entry. What will most people do when they hear about BitTorrent? Either try to visit http://www.bittorrent.com or they’ll type it into Google, so either way they end up at the new search engine.

Anyone else try it? What did you think?

Read: BitTorrent Search

BitTorrent Search

Post ImageAccording to Wired News, Bram Cohen, who created BitTorrent, and his team of developers are getting ready to release an advertising-supported search engine for torrent files. Ask Jeeves is slated to provide the sponsored links for the search site, which will be available at the BitTorrent website. And apparently, the team is pretty confident that they won’t get sued either:

But [Chief Operating Officer Ashwin] Navin isn’t worried — because the new search engine indexes every torrent it can find without human intervention, the company can’t be held liable for results that happen to point to infringing content, he says. [Stanford University Law Professor Mark] Lemley says that’s probably right, at least as a matter of law: The Digital Millennium Copyright Act provides safe harbor for “information location tools” if administrators promptly remove links to infringing content upon notice by the copyright holder.

Lots of other people seem to think its only a matter of time until we see a lawsuit, mostly because the MPAA is just dying to sue Cohen:

The MPAA slammed BitTorrent last week for accelerating the spread of a pirated copy of Revenge of the Sith — a leaked studio workprint of the third Star Wars prequel debuted online even as fans queued up for Thursday’s theatrical release.

You would think that the MPAA would learn from the RIAA’s mistakes, but apparently not. Just like CD sales went up in recent years despite downloading, movies show no sign of slowing down either. Episode 3 almost broke Spiderman’s opening weekend record, taking in $108 million. Oh yes, that BitTorrent protocol is doing such harm! Please.

More importantly, even if they do somehow successfully sue the new BitTorrent search engine, they can’t shutdown the protocol, so there will always be torrent files available.

Read: BitTorrent