admin

The two most important things on the web are publishing and searching. Three and a half years ago when I stepped off the plane at SFO with my carpetbag, I had two meetings lined up, one with Autonomy and one with Evan Williams from Pyra, a search behemoth and a tiny publishing (actually collaboration software) startup. Pyra was more exciting. Evan and Meg Hourihan had developed a product that was designed for people who needed to update websites often and easily. To do this they had to produce a beautifully elegant piece of software. Blogger along with Manila seemed to point to something profound, what happens when the web becomes two-way. Weblog publishing tools allow you to create embedded meaning within documents and they embed that meaning where it is relevant – in the nugget of information that is published as opposed to a web page. RSS syndication and the…

Searching for people is one of the most difficult problems for search engines. “Surnames cause the biggest problems in genealogy… In one document, my ancestor’s surname appeared as Mury, Murry and Murray. Samuel’s surname is Murry on his headstone. On the stone of his son Levi, it’s Murray.” The most widely used standard for searching for name variants is Soundex, however this does not take account of non Anglo-Saxon sounding names and does not work with a thesaurus of known variants. NameX, which was developed for use on Originsearch was designed specifically for looking at the name variants used historically, as well as phonetic variants. For example, it picks up 56 variants of Mury. It would be interesting to take the Namex concept further and allow you to choose name variants based on the ethnicity or language of the search. Floridian: How well do you know your name?