Search Engine of the Day: NoFoodHere!

August 9th, 2007 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Alts, Innovations | 2 Comments »

Today’s Search Engine of the Day is “NoFoodHere.” nfh combines two search results features in one place. First, it has tabs across the top, so in my example I was able to not only search for my usual “test” word, “Absinthe,” but also really research it by also searching “The Green Fairy,” “La Fee Verte,” “Thujone,” “Wormwood,” “The Absinthe Ritual,” and “Buy Absinthe,” all on one page!

All of the results do not show together, but it does save them, and it’s very fluid; as you tab back and forth the results quickly change in response.

The other feature is “continuous scrolling;” so as you roll your mouse down a list, the list keeps going, and going, and going! If you can’t see it well, the image I have here is of result #500 – without ever leaving the page.

Finally, the tongue-in-cheek FAQs were fun to read, so I’ll just let Jordan speak for himself.

What on earth is NoFoodHere???

NoFoodHere is a futuristic search engine created by time-traveling chickens from the 4.5th dimension. Just kidding. It’s not quite that exciting. NoFoodHere is an experiment in creating a new, improved search engine. Since the beginning of the Internet (and web searching), the web has changed, but search engine pages largely haven’t. NoFoodHere is a modern search engine that uses Web 2.0 technology to stream search results, instead of displaying them page-by-page. It incorporates tabbed searching.NoFoodHere is being developed by a small team (of 1 :-) ) in Melbourne, Australia.

Why are you doing this?

For fun. Because I can. Because it is a Good Idea (TM), and nobody else is doing it. To start a trend of re-designing search engine interfaces. Oh, and why not?

How do you make money out of this?
 I don’t.

How can we advertise on this site?
 You can’t.

Which search engine’s results do you use?
 This beta version uses the Yahoo! dataset (due to limitation with other search engines APIs. Unfortunately, this beta version is limited to 5,000 queries/day.

Why is this service limited to 5,000 queries/day?
 This is a limitation imposed by the Yahoo! Web Search API service. There are plans to migrate to a different service or otherwise remove this restriction ASAP.

Where is the next page link at the bottom of the search results?
 There isn’t one! just scroll down the page and more results will ‘magically’ appear! ;-)

What are these wacky colored things at the top of the page?
 These are tabs. You can click on any tab, and then search the web. This lets you have up to 8 searches running at the same time.

And my standard question: where did you get that crazy name? The reply:

Hi Charles,

The name “NoFoodHere” was chosen because it is different to most search engine names out there, and we really wanted something unique and that users could remember.

The name came about when I was doing some coding. It was around lunch time and I was getting hungry and was typing and “NoFoodHere” just came out, and we decided to stick with it!

Hope that answers your question.

Regards,

Jordan

Parametric Search

August 9th, 2007 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Guest Authors | 1 Comment »







Our Guest Author this week is Philip James, founder and CEO of the neat wine search engine Snooth.

His topic today is Parametric Search.


Google’s a great search engine and I use it daily. When I’m not exactly sure what I’m looking for nothing else comes close to making sense of the random strings I throw at it. But when I want to buy the new Harry Potter book, I go to Amazon, select books from the drop down and simply type in the eponymous hero’s name.

What Google does well is searching of text documents. Luckily for them html pages are essentially text documents. But, when the html page is merely an electronic representation of a physical item, Google often comes up short.

Go tell it to find the most relevant ‘document’ for the words “Harry Potter” and it dutifully returns movie times, the official site, the Wikipedia entry and so on. Even with the search “Harry Potter book” the top link (a news result) still isn’t what I want. It’s a simple example, but ramp it up and things break down fast.

We do wine search. Come to our site and type in “big cab” and you’ll get a list of big, fruity, cabernet sauvignon wines, which I hope is what you were looking for at that point. Google can’t hope to guess your intentions based off of just those two words.

“But that’s just vertical search” I hear you cry. Fine, but it gets much better. Staying with wine; some bright spark decided to call his Chenin Blanc wine “Chardonnay No Way Cuvee”. Unsurprisingly, this shows up on most search engine’s results for “Chardonnay”. I think we can all agree that a user wants a wine that’s actually made with Chardonnay at this point.

Parametric Search sidesteps this by setting this specific wine’s attributes as Varietal=Chenin Blanc and Brand=Chardonnay No Way and then performing a search on the attributes only. You type in Chardonnay, and the algorithm finds Chardonnay in the Varietal table, then just searches for wines which have Varietal set as Chardonnay. As we know its wine you’re looking for, it’s a logical step to then allow you to filter the results by vintage and price etc.

The limitations of this are just as obvious. Without good data you can’t extract the attributes, rendering parametric search useless, and unless you can determine the user’s intent you need to stick to a single vertical and let the users signal their intent by coming to your site.

Parametric search is really the tool of the vertical search engine, and companies like Kayak use it very well. The true panacea would be if a generic search engines was able to add relevant parametric search options to the results pane, after it had determined the user intent from the initial query. Until then vertical search engines will be able to carve out their own niches.