I attended the meeting organized by Chris Phirillo were he was showing gada.be (a search engine that is like the Web 2.0 version of Meta Crawler) and that was supposed to be about OPML. On the gada.be topic, I think that the cool part of it is the idea of using the URL as a way to pass the search term. That is really innovative and I have not seen it anywhere else and it will certainly help when you are in a low bandwidth device (avoid going to the search engine page first) or on a small device like a cell phone (less typing). I also like how OPML is used as the main interface, that allows me to track a particular search topic from my RSS Reader using multiple sources without myself manually adding different feeds as I was doing so far. As for aggregating search results, there is nothing much new there (besides searching into Web 2.0 sites rather than just the "conventional" search engines) and the real value added I think that will come if the site can actually cluster or merge the search results and provide a consolidated view rather than a laundry list of all results. Meta Crawler actually does a decent job on this (yes, they are still around). Chris mention that he is looking at adding this into the future so look forward to see it. On the OPML discussion, I think that people focused too much on the technology itself rather on the problem which again is how to get access to the information that we need, deal with the information overload and avoid the inherent biased provided by any particular search engine. When the discussion was getting interested, we were kicked out by the people coming to the same space for the next meeting. Other interesting thing is that while we were having this deep discussion on OPML there were projecting Manga on a wall in the room next to us, welcome to the world of Mind Camp….
Btw, here is a pick from that session where Jim and I are sitting on the far right.
mindcamp
