Interesting concept: Moveover announced that they are offering an "Enterprise-Grade Weblog Search." Ignoring the fact that the word "enterprise" rivals "solutions" for the title of dumbest marketing-speak ever, there is some interesting stuff going on here.
First, they've identified 25,000 "business-critical" weblogs to spider (or, rather, to grab RSS feeds from). They've apparently "hand-selected" these, but there's no info on the criteria. Twenty-five thousand blogs sounds like a lot at first, but remember that most weblogs are quite narrow in focus. It would be interesting to see how much coverage is given to any one specific area.
The next interesting bit is here:
To overcome the issue of the variable quality of blog content the team of human editors at Moreover Technologies assigns each blog a ranking that corresponds to the reliability, integrity and caliber of the blog thus enabling users to instantly identify high value information. Additionally, each blog is tagged with a wide range of metadata including, but not limited to, the number of incoming and outgoing links to it as well as the blog's status in the wider blogging community.
So they're slapping metadata on each post. Very cool. I'd love to see the thesaurus/taxonomy they have driving the search. I wonder if they're really hand-tagging each post. Sounds pretty expensive and time consuming with 25,000 sources, but it looks like they do similar things with other content. They're probably using a combination of automatic and human classification. Since most weblogs come with some amount of metadata, this task could be make a bit easier. Still, its pretty cool.
I couldn't find any other info on their site outside of the press release.
(via Gilbane)
Posted by Karl
September 23, 2003 11:50 AM