The Day of Search

Ok, this can be called a big day for search. Big for one, because Google increased it’s index from roughly 5 billion to roughly 8 billion page as posted on their blog. This alone is probably a big leap for their architecture and nice indeed. It coincides nicely with the launch of the MSN Search Beta. The site is actually very nice, and it found out my location easily. What I think is good for the location bit though is that I can edit it if I want to. Microsoft also added the Microsoft Search Blog and as John Battelle posts they are actually thinking about opening up the technology to create a kind of ecosystem where third parties can plug into the system and build cool applications. Google obviously already has their public API but this is just the start and there are endless of opportunities, especially if you allow people to play with the ranking algorithms and such. Charlene Li’s post has some info that there is a natural language processer in there as well that will try to get some additional information out of what you asked. A very cool thing is their _Search Builder_ which allows you to play around in the search results. Nice to play around with.