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Seruku Library
Every now and then, we find interesting articles, about search, and about personal tools and productivity, and
about the web in general. Some of them relate directly to Seruku's current
product suite while some are more general and relate to the products we'd like
to build. This page contains links to those articles, along with brief summaries.
Have you seen an interesting article somewhere recently? Send us a note and we'll include a link and summary here.
March 31 , 2004. Google announces Gmail.
Reacting to limited storage and search capabilities in existing web-based e-mail products
(such as Yahoo Mail or Hotmail), Google announced Gmail. The features are: 1 gigabyte of storage
for your web-based e-mail, and full text search of your mailbox. While we don't have a GMail account, and
so can't really comment on their implementation, we'd like to point out that we've been offering
these benefits (massive storage, full text search) for a long time now. To quote from our first press release:
Seruku Toolbar dramatically enhances web-based e-mail (like Hotmail or Yahoo mail) by providing full text search capabilities (including the ability to search through e-mails that you deleted from the e-mail server to save disk space
We also have an example in the help documentation of using Seruku ToolbarTM with Yahoo Mail.
January 22 , 2004. The New York Times has an article on how everyone is trying to figure out how to "fix" bookmarks. .
The article begins ELECTRONIC bookmarks were supposed to answer the problem of Web-site recall. If you came across a site that you expected to need in the future, you simply added it to your Favorites list in Internet Explorer for safekeeping and goes on to talk about the problems that make ordinary bookmarks unusable. We completely agree with what they're saying; the only problem with the article is that it doesn't mention Seruku!
Right now, the article is unavailable on the web (if you follow the link, you'll see the first paragraph, but you have to pay if you want to see the entire article). Which, of course, indicates another reason you should be using Seruku: not only do we help you find pages, our proprietary database contains a copy of every page you see (and therefore, we can tell you that the second paragraph, which is not currently on the web, contains the sentence Researchers are finding that despite the early promise of bookmarks, people seem to be abandoning them).
November 21, 2003. Microsoft Aims for Search On Its Own Terms
This is a glossy survey of some of the ideas underlying Microsoft's new operating system (due out sometime near the end of 2005 or early in 2006). The story opens with a very nice paragraph:
The Redmond, Wash., software giant is experimenting with different search technologies that will, among other tasks, conduct Google-like searches on an individual's hard drive or categorize query results in different ways intended to make the data easier to digest.
From our point of view, this is exactly the right thing for Microsoft to be doing. Many people have noticed the paradox of the internet: it's often easier to find things on the web than it is to find them on your hard drive. As Dave Winer put it,
It's so weird that it's faster and easier for me to find stuff on the Web than it is for me to find stuff locally. So much harder I usually don't even try.
Of course, from our point of view, 2006 is a long time from now. If you want some of the functionality Microsoft's talking about, but you want it today and you want seamlessly embedded into the applications you already use, well ... Have we mentioned that we have a very nice toolbar you can buy (and you won't even need to change your operating system to use it).
September 27, 2003. Creating a Personal Web Notebook
This is actually a fairly old technical report by Udi Manber, one of the leading lights in search algorithms and technology. The first paragraph outlines the problem he tried to solve:
How do you remember something you have seen on the web? Besides writing the information down by hand, there are currently only two major methods for keeping track of web information: Adding the current page to a hot list (or bookmarks, or favorite list), or using the SaveAs command to save the contents of the page. Both methods work well for small number of pages, but they do not scale. Anyone who uses the web extensively is running against this problem.
He then proceeds to describe a tool, called Nabbit which he, and his research team, built to solve the problem. We think this is interesting because Seruku ToolbarTM solves the same problem in an entirely different way. It's rather humbling to realize he noticed the problem years earlier than we did, and that he thought of an entirely different solution. On the other hand, we like our solution better.
September 15, 2003. IBM's Budding Innovators
Here's the money quote:
The tool with the broadest appeal is a desktop application called Total Recall (see the photo), which instantly retrieves computer documents you've viewed, whether they're Web pages, e-mails, spreadsheets, or Word files.
"When you think about all the e-mails, PowerPoint presentations, Web pages, and other documents you deal with weekly, you can see that there's a problem. How do you search and manage all this information?" says Mariano Pelliza, an MBA student at the University of North Carolina. With Total Recall, you simply key in a word or phrase you'd like to search for, and the application brings up a list of matching documents. You can then easily narrow the search to a particular time frame or document type.
Sounds about right to us. We think the search functionality should be embedded into every application (not in a separate application) and mostly be invisible during normal use, but, other than that, they're on the right track.
June 17, 2003.EBay
versus Google
Ebay does auctions; Google does search. You might not think they
compete, but they do, in an indirect way. And the competition's only going to
get more direct, and more fierce (there was also a short story related to this
idea published almost a year earlier. See FTrain's How Google beat EBay and
Amazon to the Semantic Web
).
June 4, 2003. Haystack:
A More Compelling View of Your Data
This article is actually a discussion on Slashdot about the Haystack project at MIT.
It's a bit hard to read (it's a set of threaded conversations) but the overall
content is very interesting. The Haystack project is an attempt to provide
people with a single application that manages all their information (and does
some very nifty indexing). It knows about your e-mail, your web-browsing, the
documents you've written or read ... everything.The only
downside (aside from the fact that it's an academic project and not really
usable by ordinary people) is that it forces you to learn another application.
Wouldn't you rather use the applications you're already using, and have
Haystack happen automatically, in the background? If so, why not try Seruku ToolbarTM? We don't do
everything Haystack does, but we do integrate nicely with the way you use your
computer (instead of forcing you to learn a new
interface).
March 6, 2003. Google's Memory Upgrade
This is an article that came out when were about halfway finished with
Seruku ToolbarTM. It's interesting because the author's clearly recognize the need
for our product, and yet suggest a much inferior solution. For us, the following
paragraph is the key one.
I've now spent the past eight years exploring the Web practically every
day, and over that time I've probably stumbled across thousands of documents
that were worth preserving, yet the tools I have for organizing that history
are minimal at best. Bookmarks are helpful if you're tracking a dozen sites,
but beyond useless if you're managing 10,000. If Google can organize the
entire Web with such efficacy, imagine what it could do with a much smaller
subset of documents. It could make each individual's long, meandering surfing
history into something genuinely useful. Right now, the best tools for
recording our surfing patterns are the family of Weblog tools on the market,
Blogger being the most widely-recognized brand. Google is a tool for
discovering new places to visit on the Web, and Blogger is a tool for
recording those visits.
Feb 28, 2003. Microsoft's
Science Fair
This is an excellent survey article from USA Today. It talks about
a Microsoft project calledMyLifeBits
that attempts to store each and every piece of information that you run across
(not just in your web browser) and make it accessible to you from a search /
query interface. Everyone wants something like this; the Seruku ToolbarTM is a good
first step.
Feb 03, 2002. Scripting
News
Scripting news is a weblog, written by Dave
Winer, that often contains perceptive comments about our industry. The
interesting part (from Seruku's point of view) is the
following paragraph:
I think Google is coming to the desktop.
When I first read that interview a few days ago I thought Schmidt as much as
said so. But on a re-read I realize he didn't. I still see
Google-On-The-Desktop coming soon. An easy to install HTTP server that
communicates with the mother ship via XML and can search the local area
network as effectively as the whole Internet. $40 per year. They'll make a
boatload of money. IPO. 
Google-On-The-Desktop. It's an interesting idea. (see also: Google is
Decentralizing
).
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