Thursday, May 3

Search engines and future gifts

I just looked at some of the latest items from the Innovation Lab centered in Denmark and thought I'd highlight just a few things. One of the older articles is called, "The Quest for Smarter Search Engines." This ties in well with our week 3 activity in the OCLS Learn 2.0 course when we took a look at Grokker. Two search engines that they highlight are Mooter and Blinkx.

First Mooter - A search engine from an Australian company that offers initial results as a series of clusters. I did a search for dolphins and it offered me three different cluster options, all offering spokes going to the mammal and the football team. Their quest is to create a search engine that can create more individualized results based on an algorithm that actually learn over time what a particular user is really after.

Blinkx is a video search engine. Unlike the conventional search engines that look at only file names and metadata, Blinkx actually watches the video clips to bring more precise results. I did a search for just the word "library" - see the resulting list here. Another feature of blinkx is the "Wall it!" option. It will create a wall of video preview boxes for you. What really caught my eye was that two different CBS affiliates showed the exact same video about today's libraries but with different titles - "Pubic libraries need to change with the times" and "Libraries forced to get modern day makeover." Interesting.

My final entry is just for fun. Innovations Lab has a list of the top ten Christmas gifts for 2016. I'm definitely putting a few on my list!

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