Thursday, September 22, 2005

search repositories

A have recently become interested in the concept of search repositories. The idea is that when we are searching, a lot of information is found and then lost. How many times have you skipped a link that didn't seem relevant only to go back later and try (unsuccessfully) to find it. This is also true of links that we find in content pages that we navigate through during the search. It can even be true of content that is not a link.

Wouldn't it be great if there was some unobtrusive repository somewhere that we could review when needed that would show an organized display of everything we have seen relevant to a search activity, even if it spans several sessions? Even better if we could use it to create reports, divide it into subsections for later use, conduct relevance analysis, data mine it for internal consistencies, share it with others, have it automatically updated and set up alerts when new content is added.

Anyone know of a product that does this? Or want to help me create one?