ETECH Notes: Bezos on vertical search and A9

By at 10:32 am Tuesday, Mar 15

Here are my notes from Jeff Bezos's talk from the 2005 O'Reilly Emerging Tech conference, called "Vertical Search and A9." A9 has added a ton of tools to let people design their own domain-expert searches.
There are lots of things you can do if you're a domain expert in vertical search. If you're a medical pro and you search on Vioxx, you'll get different results from Web search and PubMed.

The data-sets are different and the relevance ranking and the transformations on the query are all different too.

PubMed takes the user-query and does sophisticated transformations, e.g. "Heart attack" into many medical terms.

The Web-search on Vioxx is mostly about class-action lawsuits, while the vertical is about medical info.

A9.com has a visual metaphor for vertical search -- columns for web results, image results, and reference results, your bookmarks, etc...

Link

Cory Doctorow

Upcoming appearances

* Feb 9, 2012, DeKalb, IL: Day of Doctorow, NIU
* Feb 10-12, 2012, Chicago, IL: Capricon 32
* Feb 13, 2012, Arlington, TX: UT Arlington College of Engineering Distinguished Speaker Series
* Feb 16, 2012, Victoria, BC: 13th Annual Privacy and Security Conference

Recent books:
* Context (essays)
* With a Little Help (short stories)
* For the Win (YA novel)
* Makers (adult novel)

Comments are closed.

Where not otherwise specified, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution. Boing Boing is a trademark of Happy Mutants LLC in the United States and other countries.