SEL: "Revolutionary" Search Engine Sounds Pretty Much Like Ask Jeeves

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September 09, 2005

"Revolutionary" Search Engine Sounds Pretty Much Like Ask Jeeves

VNU has a little story on Orion, a "revolutionary" search engine out of ~~Wales~~ New South Wales that "is designed to find pages where the content is about a topic strongly related to the keyword."
It sounds suspciously like Ask to me:

Allon cited a search on the topic of the American Revolution as an example of how the system works.

Orion is designed to bring up results with extracts containing this phrase, but it would also give results for American History, George Washington, American Revolutionary War, Declaration of Independence, Boston Tea Party and more.

Would that be anything like the Ask Jeeves search for American Revolution that delivers both the zoom function so you can drill down contextually into and out of the war and search through related names?

One difference, which I picked out of the news article, is in how they display their contextually related results.

"The results to the query are displayed immediately in the form of expanded text extracts giving you the relevant information without having to go the website, although you still have that option if you wish," said Allon.

It's interesting to note that ~~Gates~~ um, someone related to Orion even commented on Orion (see comments... thanks for the catch Ken), saying that it would "take search way beyond how people think of it today." Right. All the way to what Ask's doing.

Check out the article and let me know what you think. I'll see if I can contact the inventor to see what's actually different between the engines, as VNU isn't likely to have laid those out too clearly.

via SearchViews

Update:

Just also wanted to let you know that he's from New South Wales (a state in Australia) not Wales (a country in the UK) :)

Cheers,
Laura

Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |

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