[Search-l] Requirements?

[Peter Burden]

On 02/01/07, Keith Botley <Keith at botley.net> wrote:
>
>  Bill Surowiec made a fine post to the mailing list and ended it with this
> comment.
>
>
>
> "I believe that determining and articulating the target in enough detail
> to be actionable is the first order of business."
>
>
>
> I agree with his prioritization of business as the requirements being
> articulated clearly for all. I have seen numerous posts to the mailing list
> concerning architecture which is valuable and informative but possibly not
> the current focus.
>



Or, perhaps, to put it another way. What's it going to do
that existing engines don't do? Or in business speak
what's the unique selling proposition?

The underlying technology or the way the software
development team is organised is not important from
this point of view.

I can only speak for myself - but here's some of the
features I'd like from a search engine. No existing
engine, AFAIK, does all of these.

1. User tweakable ranking. I.e. I can choose the
parameters that control the ordering of results to
meet my particular current whims and fancies.
[BTW I have some serious doubts about the usefulness
of page ranking.]

2. Semantic searching. I can search for "pages"
that are relevant to a topic by describing the topic
rather than having to think of likely combinations of
keywords. [But keep the AI research community and
the ontologists at arm's length please.]

3. Site searching. I can search for sites that host
related material rather searching for pages.

Of course I'd like features such as global coverage (
including the "deep web" if possible), filtering by page
age, domain, page size, number of advertisement links,
up-to-date databases etc., etc.,

 _______________________________
> Search-l mailing list
> Search-l at wikia.com
> http://lists.wikia.com/mailman/listinfo/search-l
>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.wikia.com/pipermail/search-l/attachments/20070102/6980a6f9/attachment.html