Friday, July 18, 2008

A Tale of Two Search Engines

If you're local to the Bay Area, you may be interested in attending an upcoming talk from the SDForum Software Architecture & Modeling SIG on August 27th. It's titled A Tale of Two Search Engines and will be given by our own John Mitchell, one of the developers on MarkMail. Here's his abstract:

Betwixt the rigid structure of relational databases and the unbridled chaos of random content lies the world of search engines. Search engines shine in the middle ground where the messy complexity of reality makes everything harder than we imagine.

While the soap operas of general-purpose search engines dominate the news, specialized search engines are coming to dominate their vertical niches. Special-purpose search engines can aggressively leverage domain-specific intelligence to return highly relevant results.

This talk will present the architecture, implementation, and stories behind the creation of two specialized search engines for code and email: Krugle and MarkMail.
If you're interested in MarkMail I think you'll enjoy it. (And no, John doesn't really use words like "betwixt" in daily conversations.)

3 comments:

Iago de Otto said...

But "betwixt" is such a wonderful word, ever so much more so than the overrated "amongst", though that said, I do have a fondness for "amongst" as well; still, "betwixt" has a very special place in my heart --- somewhere betwixt the aortic arch and the parietal pericardium amongst all that other vascular stuff.

John D. Mitchell said...

Thanks! :-)

Tom Tobin said...

Is there going to be a recording of the event or a flowgram or slideware of the deck after?