A live search that's actually live?
by Carlos Menezes
For all the power of Google and Yahoo!'s search engines the amount of results that they return is surprisingly small compared to what is actually out there on the web. Essentially, search engines as we know them operate on a pretty simple premise – spiders are sent out to crawl through billions of pages, building an index in the process. It is this index that the search engine then refers to when a query is submitted.
There are two problems with this. Firstly, as has already been mentioned, it is by no means a complete representation of the actual content on the web – the spiders, as powerful as they are, cannot hope to reach all of the pages outside of the mainstream. There have been some estimates of Google having only indexed as little as 20% of the Internet. Secondly, the index will never be completely up to date – cases of sites that took months to be included, even though they were actively promoting themselves, are not unheard of.
Enter My Live Search. Using a browser plug-in, this new Aussie start-up uses the indexed search databases of the Googles and Yahoos of the world as starting points. Users' bookmarks and popular sites are also used as reference points for the start of any search. From there it explores connecting pages for any relevant returns on the original query. As the web changes, so too do the results.
Creator Rob Gabriel describes the appeal of his search engine, “Google can't search every page every day (to build its index). The web is so dynamic and changes so often - MyLiveSearch turns your own computer into a 'super-spider' to search it in real time.” On top of all this Gabriel claims that his product will also be able to search dynamically generated pages that existing search engines have trouble in picking up.
The effectiveness of MyLiveSearch remains to be seen, but there have already been murmurings of Google keeping some loose change on hand in case this turns out to be the latest addition to the empire. The search engine giant has been known to quickly snap up start-up technology that might help a competitor.
So far Google have refused to comment on My Live Search, with spokesman Rob Shilkin referring to it only in general terms and stating Google's eagerness in supporting Australian developers and entrepreneurs (think Google Maps).
Keep your eyes on this one – a public beta should be out anytime now.
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