The latest GuideWire Report takes a look at personalisation and discovery: the next big thing in our web experiences. We've already seen glimpses of it in things like Stumbleupon, which got itself bought by eBay.
The report goes on to examine the landscape for personalisation in some detail, concluding that hundreds of technologies are vying for attention at the moment. The market needs to shake out and recommendation and discovery will become as natural a part of our web experience as search.
Before tackling the new stuff, the report said "The search game has been commandeered by semantics and natural language, a burgeoning sector that merits its own analysis. The user intent on finding information online will turn to Powerset, Hakia, CognitionSearch, and others to find needles hiding in the Web’s haystack."
Hakia, CognitionSearch and Powerset. Who? The implication is that these are mainstream services to which we turn naturally. But, according to their websites, they are all beta or even pre-beta. Mind you, to call CognitionSearch a beta is a bit of a swizz because Cognition, the company, is well established in search circles. However, these innovations do give us an insight of the sort of thing that's coming down the track.
In terms of Google-like usability right now, Hakia is head and shoulders above the others. It works but it often doesn't seem to exhibit much more understanding of the question than Google does. A search for "What happened to Caxton Software?" delivered a good first result from Cardbox (a product Caxton published in 1982). In Google it was the second result. Hakia just about beat Google on the question "Why did Tony Blair resign?" But it did, rather cleverly, throw in a recommendation to read a 2004 Guardian leader suggesting that Tony Blair, rather than Greg Dyke, should have resigned following the Hutton report. So maybe Hakia does have brains and would be worth keeping an eye on.
Powerset is currently just website words and a YouTube movie, although it has a demo which it will be showing on July 24th in San Francisco if you happen to be passing. The product is scheduled for public testing in September.
CognitionSearch seems to be working its way through specific categories en route to a more general facility. At the moment it lists Case Studies, Government, Health, Political Blogs and Wikis as its active categories. Social Networks is there as a teaser, but greyed out at present. Within each category, it offers document sets although, under Wikis, it offers just one - Wikipedia.
Each of these companies, and many more, are looking for the holy grail of search - a way to deliver relevance without putting too great a burden on the everyday user.
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