reports today that AOL has decided to publicly release the combined search data of thousands of it’s users. This is quite possibly the dumbest thing AOL has done in years.
They’re offering a free download of the statistics for research purposes here. It’s their research department that’s releasing this in an attempt at goodwill – but it’s certain to backfire.
There’s no telling how long the file will be offered for download but I’m 28% of the way to a full file transfer and I’m already building a front-end so folks can seaerch the results.
Come visit aol.6brand.com in a few hours and you’ll be able to search through this “research data” on your own.
Tags:search
Google lets you see your search history and a day-by-day total of how many searches you do. I’m pretty much always over 40 searches/day thanks to looking for code and trying to solve various development problems.
Enter Krugle. I forget how I got signed up for their beta but I just got the invite and checked it out. At first I thought “search engine for developers. cool.” That quickly turned into “holy shit. this changes everything.” They’ve clearly caught on to the fact that developers have different search needs than the regular consumer.
First off, Krugle lets you choose what language you want to search. THIS IS HUGE. When I’m working with Ruby I don’t care that Java has an implementation of “GoWild.new” – it can’t possibly help. The default is to search with a broad scope, but narrowing down by language is a sure way to get to a solution faster.
Secondly, they’ve parsed all the code they’re searching through and have divided information up based on whether it appeared in a comment, in a class definition, a function call or some other part of the code.
But the thing that really knocked me senseless was their wise use of AJAX. Its not clunky and it allows the whole search process to run that much faster.
Add all that together with a beautiful design, a good community, and a dedication to help developers find answers – and you’ve got a winner.
You can see a demo of their operation on their website
Following is a screenshot of a search I did on Krugle:
Tags:search
