Ho John Lee’s Weblog

“Search attenuation” is a new term to me, but seems like a good description of the process of filtering feeds and search results to a manageable size. As more content becomes available in RSS, I tend to subscribe to anything that looks interesting, but am looking for improved methods for searching and filtering content within that set.

Catching up a little on the feed aggregator, I see an article at O’Reilly about Rollyo, a new “Roll Your Own Search Engine” site from Dave Pell of Davenetics.

ROLLYO is the latest mind warp from Dave Pell. Rollyo affords anyone the ability to roll their own Yahoo!-powered search engine, attenuating results to a set of up to 25 sites. And while the searchrolls (as they’re called) you create are around a particular topic (e.g. Food and Dining), they are also attached to a real person (e.g. Food and Dining is by Jason Kottke). The result is a topic-specific search created and maintained by a trusted source.
…
Rolly’s basic premise is one I’ve been preaching of late: attenuation is the next aggregation …

Recently, I’ve been looking at this from a related angle, which is how to infer topical relevance among people or sources you trust based on links, tagging, and search, and named entity discovery. People are already linking, tagging, and searching, so some data is available as a byproduct of work that they’re already doing. On the other hand, if enough people you trust take the additional step of explicitly declaring the sources they think are relevant, this would help a lot.

See also Memeorandum, Findory, Personal Bee.

More on this from TechCrunch

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 29th, 2005 at 5:39 pm and is filed under Search Engines, Front Page. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.