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"What we are about to get is a Social Relevancy Rank. Whenever you search streams of activity, the results will be ordered not chronologically but by how relevant each is to you based on your social graph. That is, people who matter more to you will bubble up. How does this work? Well, there will be a formula, just as there is a formula for Page Rank."

"(...) the relevancy ranking within Summon is based on term frequencies as Aaron said, but many other algorithms are used as well, such as field weightings and inverse term frequencies to counterbalance any skewing from the full text content. Additionally, each record in Summon has a static rank that allows for balancing records from one collection against another to ensure all records are treated equally. "

"The Google Search Appliance (GSA) is a black-box system in that you install it, set up your options, and it runs. It is certainly standards-based: it indexes HTML and other popular formats; and the results are typically defined using XML and style sheets. But the options you can customize with regard to data sources, relevance ranking, and extended search (thesaurus, taxonomies, and parametric or faceted search) are somewhat limited. FAST, Autonomy/Verity K2, OmniFind and other traditional enterprise search engines have always been toolkits. You install the software and begin the process of customizing it for your environment. Data in databases or content repositories? No problem. Custom security implementation? Modify the indexing and search methods. Have custom thesauri or existing taxonomies? Plug them in. Need parametric or faceted search results? Small matter of programming - although not much. Want to change the way results are ranked or sorted? Use the native query syntax - for example, FAST Query Language (FQL) or the Verity Query Language (VQL)."

Project Lefty is a search system that, at a minimum, adds a layer on top of traditional federated search tools that will make the wait for results more worthwhile for researchers. At best, Project Lefty improves search queries and relevance rankings for web-scale discovery tools to make the results themselves more relevant to the researcher's specific query. Project Lefty has three components, each directed at a particular right.

"SearchWeb is a tool for finding BBC content by generating a tree of links to relevant pages throughout the site. This system complements the BBC ranked-list search by enabling users to see the context and structure of a large number of results simultaneously, and also by drilling down for results in specific sections of the site.\n\nThe form of the visualisation is a navigable tree of web page nodes, with the BBC homepage at the centre and the result URLs forming branches around it. The main branches represent sections of the BBC site such as News or Learning, and are colour coded to show the proportionate number of results for each area.\nSearchWeb was developed in ActionScript3, using the Polygonal 'AS3 Data Structures For Game Developers' libraries http://lab.polygonal.de/ds/\nWe hope to release the source code for this project. We will make an announcement on the blog if we do so."

"Web Search engines most often operate on the idea that their tools are supposed to represent the fastest way between a user's search query and a site that will represent a fitting information content to satisfy a "information need". The main challenge is therefore about building ranking algorithms that will find the "best" site and put it into first place. While this approach has been highly successful it also neglects the user's ability to interact, select, navigate, analyze - in short, to be an active agent and a stakeholder in the search process. Our proposal is the technical manifestation of a simple concept: instead of reducing the search phase to a minimum we believe that there is much to be gained by presenting a semantically rich interface to users; this interface can be used to either navigate in a list of results (1000 in the case of our current prototype) or to refine the search query. The "termcloud" and "cluster" views give a quick overview of a topic by showing which terms are significant, their relative frequency and the relations that exist between them. This way the user gets an idea of the topic before even visiting a Web site from the result list. We hope that this approach will help users in digging deeper than the first couple of results and explore the regions of the Web that might not be so easy to find with a regular, hit-driven search engine."

"Zebra is a high-performance, general-purpose structured text indexing and retrieval engine. It reads structured records in a variety of input formats (eg. email, XML, MARC) and allows access to them through exact boolean search expressions and relevance-ranked free-text queries. Zebra supports large databases (more than ten gigabytes of data, tens of millions of records). It supports incremental, safe database updates on live systems. You can access data stored in Zebra using a variety of Index Data tools (eg. YAZ and PHP/YAZ) as well as commercial and freeware Z39.50 clients and toolkits. Zebra is free software, available under the GPL license."

"The Engines win by a landslide, at least according to current college students. They preferred searching on Google or Yahoo versus their college library systems, based on the attributes of: speed (90%); convenience (84%); ease of use (87%); cost-effectiveness (71%); and reliability (63%). Libraries, however, won on more trustworthy measures including credibility (77%) and accuracy (76%). While students prefer library sources, they also heavily count on the engines. Over half (53%) say the results from engines are as trustworthy as libraries. Google, Yahoo and Ask all rank about the same, without much differentiation."

"WorldCat Local is the single search that connects people to all your library materials-physical, electronic and digital-as well as to the delivery services that get them what they need. It displays multiple types of library resources, formats and locations in a single relevancy-ranked results set, provides high-level Web visibility for your library, interoperates with existing locally-maintained circulation and delivery services, connects seamlessly to everything in your collection and simplifies the discovery-and-delivery experience for your library users."

#1: Semiotics: the power behind SOPHIA Search #2: Why Search by Meaning and in Context? #3: The Power of Thematic Search #4: Document Semantic Neighbourhoods #5: When is Similar actually Similar? #6: SOPHIA's Intelligent Ranking & Filtering #7: Understanding meaning in Documents #8: Search by Example #9: Functionality: Sharing & Intelligent Alerting #10: SOPHIA Architecture