Personal Search Engine + hmmm = Personal Web Crawler

Just another thought today. Search engines are built on extremely complex grid like infrastructures. At this point, with the given technology it is not feasible to miniturize these applications so they may run with the same power on our disconnected little lonely laptop or desktop PC. blah blah blah ...

With all this talk about Google saving my search history and relating it to my email and so on and so forth I got to thinking about a Personal Search Engine (PSE). Sure my PSE would probably still rely on Google, but it would do this in a much less trackable way (say by building custom high level indexes on my PC and using a shared Personal Search Engine tracker cookie to agg all PSE user search content). In essence PSE would be a privacy proxy to keep your personal information personal - and a free search history tracker.

The catch would be that PSE could be enabled to auto download content. As such, I could download all .pdf files on a topic to be explored when offline, I could automatically download any .flv file etc. This could all be done VIA Regex patterns the user could build in a slick interface.

Further, this PSE wouldn't be a start page like destination site, it would actually copy content to your hard disk that is shared in any HTTP ring. I mean, at the end of the day, we use the web for content, not for the funky look of a page with all it's advertising.

I like the idea of having a search bar embedded on my desktop for web, or local search. I don't care if you think they have this now, it isn't a proxy and it doesn't auto download stuff.

Google Search Appliance Info? Try Windows Live Search!

In it's promotional video, Google boasts that over 4000 corporations around the world are using their Google Search Appliance. I really love how the first half of the presentation I'm watching is a marketing vehicle. I mean, as a developer who is sold on the technology, it only makes sense to market it to me again.

Well, I decided to try searching for infomation. Seems about right, right? Well, to my shock "the Google" isn't indexing information on it's own products very effectively.

As an IT consultant, I find myself using new technologies all the time. I usually dive in fairly late in the game when information is abundant. So why is Google hiding the sweet pictorial big picture slides from me?

Could it be that as the promo video states that 1/4 of our time is actually spent looking for information? Is it possible they want me to keep using Google web search to find information? Are there really more sponsored links I could click on?

I figured after browsing 3 pages of Google search results that I wasn't getting best results, I should try switching search engines.

After a quick Windows Live Search I found all the information I needed on the first page of search results:

Live.com


Google.com


I was quite shocked about this truthiness. Is it possible "the Google" is actually trying to make more money off us poor suckers who have invested in their enterprise technology? I sure hope not.

Over And Out