When it comes to search interfaces, there are a lot of good ideas out there, but there is also a lot of potential for further experimentation. Search APIs are a great field for experimentation as they allow developers to play around with advanced functionality without forcing them to work on a heavy backend structure.

Together with Alex Beaugrand, a student of mine, I have built (a couple of month ago) another little search mashup / interface that allows users to switch between a tag cloud view and a list / cluster mode. contextDigger uses the delicious and Bing APIs to widen the search space using associated searches / terms and then Yahoo BOSS to download a thousand results that can be filtered through the interface. It uses the principle of faceted navigation to shorten the list : if you click on two terms, only the results associated with both of them will appear…

Post filed under search engines, society oriented design, softwareproject.

One Comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *


Tech support questions will not be answered. Please refer to the FAQ of the tool.