Collaborative Searching
I’ve been asked to come up with ideas for improving searching when lots of people are involved. Actually it was more like ‘MMORPGs are great, apply their ideas to search’. A bit vague but I get the gist, basically what is it that keeps people coming back to MMORPGs? The obvious answer is they’re fun. Other answers could be:
- Sense of community
- Discovering things new
- Reward for effort
- Meeting place
- Meeting new people
Keep in mind I haven’t played a MMORPG since the Ultima Online beta, and I was back in school then. World of Warcraft looks like to be the current ‘in thing’, but no computer I own can run it.
Applying these ideas to search is hard because I think of search as a solitary activity and you have a good idea what you’re looking for. Sure there are things like delicious, digg, etc. but those aren’t so much search, but more just collaborative filtering. My current domain of expertise is crawling the web and building searches.
In the Web 2.0 world the closest thing I can find is Yahoo’s MyWeb 2.0:
http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com
It’s a search engine where you can build up a collection of pages to form your own web. That by itself isn’t too exciting since it’s just a glorified bookmarks tool with a search across it. What’s more interesting is the community web feature. You can hook up with people with similar interests and form your own web of interesting pages. This puts a different spin on the whole delicious/digg thing, so instead of topical pages you can build up a database of useful information.
I think applying this to the web isn’t going to take off because there is so much information out there you’re unlikely to want to limit yourself, and people in your community are going to be covering a wide range of subjects. But the concept is good and the search engines I write are for corporate customers so when the community is a research team, this idea begins to make a lot more sense.
So I’m going to make Yahoo! MyWeb my default search engine for a while and see what ideas come from it.
