http://www.blogwise.com/search.php?q=idaho
Finally managed to get the new search engine for Blogwise up and running. Last night it was listed as a ‘beta’ and an optional trial. Tonight it’s the main thing (albeit still well and truly under a beta label). The old search engine really was that bad that I felt it was necessary to push the boat out this early.
Actually there are some pretty cool things (well, I think so…) that I haven’t revealed on the search interface yet. For starters the search tool is distributed across the Internet – the queries are done elsewhere which means the server is free to serve pages, and other computers pick up the bulk of the work.
There’s also search by proximity: have a look for sites near Heathrow Airport (51.3N, 0.3W), and a sort-of content filtering as a result of some work I did with ICRA over the past few months – the code is there but there isn’t yet a neat way to interface to that.
Performance is massively improved over the last search engine, as are the results themselves. Unfortunately I’m still not able to search within blogs (would be nice, but simply not enough resources to achieve the kinds of data processing that I’d need).
Expect many more bits & pieces over the coming weeks – I’ll probably post them here in advance.