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This site contains presentations, publications, lessons and training materials developed over many years. The site is continually updated so I hope you'll come back often. All content is freely shareable and linkable, but I'd love to hear your comments about any of it. You can always find me at sine@udel.edu.

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July 16, 2007

Search Goes Back to Being Human

For years I taught about the differences between directories (Yahoo, DMOZ) and keyword search engines (Google, Altavista). Then last week I did a presentation about searching and declared that the world of directories was pretty much dead. Everyone goes right to Google or Wikipedia these days. I've already blogged about how much more productive (or distracted) I feel since I added the googlepedia plugin to Firefox.

So today I heard about something new...Mahalo This is only in alpha now and is planning a full release about a year from now. All of the search pages are hand-crafted by humans. So, how can it possibly start doing collecting now and still be viable a year from now? The answer is by including a variety of technologies. The site is built in a wiki (although it doesn't look like that on the outside) and the pages are populated with RSS feeds.