Thursday, October 16, 2003

I was thinking about Google the other day and it struck me that we very much live in the Google universe. Google for me is the end all of search engines due to it's incredibly broad coverage of the internet and in general human knowledge. Simply put Google is the resource for searching for pretty much anything. Well that got us thinking @ Xao. How to improve upon that search? What features would we want that we currently don't have in Google? One of our solutions is a more extensive and permanent history of the user's search history. How many times have you been searching for something at Google, find what you are looking for after a couple of tries and then a few weeks later try to remember the exact same search? I do it all the time and usually it takes the same couple of tries (or a different set since you no longer remember the exact search query). So to address this we have created an application which remembers your search and visit history. That way you can quickly look up what you were looking for on a particular day, see the sites you visited and the terms you searched on.

You might say,"Well the browser history and bookmarks of IE all provide these features." While that is certainly true, those are seriously flawed ways of using the network. Firstly they are annoyingly machine specific. My search history is only on the current machine that I am using. Depending on the settings of IE, this history is set expire (usually within 30 days or so). Additionally the history function of IE is very difficult to use, clearly not much user testing has gone into the feature. So our first attempt as a complete search history is here at Xao. For the full set of features you will need to register, however, none of that information is stored in a form that we can read (we encrypt it all). Right now we are pretty quickly hitting our query limit with Google, so you don't get the full effect. We are going to Gigablast But try it and let me and let me know what you think.