DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Ask Jeeves announced some keen new search technologies at Etech. The main new innovation, which comes from the founder of Teoma (which Ask.com acquired several years ago) won’t be online for two weeks, but it’s compelling: basing relevance rankings on clusters of expert communities rather than on inbound link-count (aka PageRank). It’s a mouthful of buzzwords but it may mean their results are better. Certainly it’s likely to mean the results for ambiguous queries are more diverse, e.g. a search for ‘apple’ should turn up both Apples and apples — which is not the case at Google today.

Jeeves’ new technology can’t be seen for a couple weeks on their text search, but can be seen on their image search. Compare Ask Jeeves’ image search results for John with Google’s image search results for John. The Google results shows a bunch of people you’ve never heard of, with one exception; the Jeeves results page shows Travolta, Elton, Wayne, Kennedy, Cassavettes, etc.

But this may be a corner case. I tried numerous other searches, both ambiguous (bread, cardinals) and not (herman miller aeron chair). Results in all cases were similar. Neither engine showed a picture of a shrub in a search for ‘bush.’

The promise is there, even if the implementation doesn’t yet fulfill the promise. It’s worth watching.