A Tale of Two Search Engines, Revisited

As Jason announced previously, last Wednesday night I delivered
A Tale of Two Search Engines — a presentation for the Software Architecture and Modeling SIG of SDForum — about building and running the Krugle and MarkMail vertical search engines for code and email, respectively.

Here are my tidied-up slides.

Note carefully that my presentation style is a very visual, story-telling approach for live, interactive audiences -- i.e., the slide deck is quite large and not geared towards a reading-at-home audience. Heck, I only broke down and used bullet points on 4 slides right at the end. :-)

That said, I'll start blogging some of the stories, go deeper on various technical details, and/or get into any of the "fun topics" that people are interested in. Feel free to leave comments here about any that you particularly want to hear about.

Special thanks to Ron Lichty for dragging me into giving this presentation and the wonderful SAMSIG audience for making it so much fun.

Enjoy,

John

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.)