How many ways to search a site?

I'm fascinated by the many different approaches to search that are emerging to challenge the "inside search" we all know and love (hate) on web sites. You know, where you type in a keyword and get a large and random set of search results returned from a basic keyword index.

I've written about Ultra Knowledge before and how their automatic tagging sets them apart from the crowd but now the crowd are starting to take differing (and potentially complementary) approaches.

Collarity sits on top of the existing site search and monitors where the users click through to for each keyword. This then creates a "wisdom of the crowds" intelligence so that when the next user types that keyword, the system will suggest the most popular destination URL's. This is interesting as Collarity don't actually index the content which makes it fast to deploy. The downside of this is that it's only as good as the underlying site search so if that doesn't return relavent content then the value of the wisdom is reduced to the lowest common denominator.

Eurekster takes a different approach, allowing the users to rate the search results thus increasing the weighting of the most valuable results. It also allows users to create their own search results based on their knowledge of the subject making it a mashup of search and wiki functionality.

And this week I met with a UK company called Synature who have yet another take on "inside search". Much more focussed on specific sectors (initially holidays) their product is about connecting like minded users using something they call "Attitudinal Matching". They employ a psychologist who sets a series of 4-6 questions about how you feel about a particular subject. For example in holidays you would be asked to rank your requirements on a scale between "Beautiful" and "Exciting". The results of these questions are then fed into a sophisticated system that can match you to like minded people and their holiday recommendations. Again, the system doesn't index the content, just the user who created it and allows you to locate relevant content via the social network that this creates.

There are many others of course, if you know of anything interesting going on in the search space, please leave me a comment as it's such a fast moving area it's impossible to keep up.

Which is right? Well all of them have their pros and cons in different applications and the possibilities for combining them with each other and the social networking platforms is intriguing. Watch this space...