Centrist Search byoms
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Blogging, General Politics, TechnologyLook over at the far righthand sidebar. Notice anything different? I now have a header that says “byoms Feed.” Yes, I’ve decided to provide everybody with a demonstration of the technology that my company developed to search for information through IM.
Using it is easy. If you have an AOL IM client, click the button and a “Centrist Search” byoms should be added to your buddy list. After that, you simply open up a chat with the byoms and start searching as you would a search engine. In most cases you’ll get back three relevant results from about a collection of centrist blogs I’ve specified as sources. Sometimes answers will only come back from one source. Sometimes it’ll be multiple. But hopefully all will be highly relevant to what you’re searching for.
Now, if you click the button and nothing happens, simply add the words “centristsearch” to your buddy list and go from there. My apologies, but we are still in beta testing right now, so these bugs will eventually be worked out.
Feedback is welcome and appreciated.
Thanks!
This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 14th, 2006 and is filed under Blogging, General Politics, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
June 14th, 2006 at 7:08 pm
It’s an interesting concept. I tried it; the technology seemed to work fine for me. However you might want to note that it’s picking up comments as well as posts. And while a blog itself may be centrist (or left, or right) that’s no guarantee its comments will be. E.g. One of the three it brought up for me was a rant about ” fascist right wingers.”
Might save you some time and work to just limit it to posts, not comments. Nothing against commenters, but not one in 100 adds anything substantial to a post, and if you want to read the comments you can get to them once you pull up the post.
June 14th, 2006 at 9:13 pm
Good comment. That’s going to be tough since we use other company’s indexes (Google, Yahoo, MSN). We basically have to work with what they give us. However, what I can do is change it to Yahoo and see what happens to the results. Drop me a comment after you read this and tell me if the results change for the better.
Blogs are also a different beast. You’ve got all this extra comment, and the search engines don’t distinguish between what is the post and what is the comment. Hopefully, though, a centrist blog is going to have fewer of the inflammatory comments than most.
June 15th, 2006 at 2:18 am
OK, I’ll try it tomorrow. Not working for me tonight from home. Probably a firewall issue.
June 15th, 2006 at 2:18 pm
“Nothing against commenters, but not one in 100 adds anything substantial to a post . . .”
Oh no. Nothing against commenters. I see.
June 16th, 2006 at 10:15 pm
Like that one, for instance. It might be relevant in some ongoing cross-thread dislike of commenter A for commenter B, but if I’m Joe Customer doing a search for “comments,” and I get that, it means sweet fuck-all to me.
June 17th, 2006 at 5:24 pm
And if somebody searched the byoms for “fuck-all”, they’d get that. Heh.
In the end, everybody assigns different values to this type of information. What may have been nonsense for you may have been highly relevant for somebody else.
June 21st, 2006 at 8:07 pm
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