• At minute 9 of a forty minute Q&A Sergey Brinone, one of the co-founders of google, talks about the idea of a king's search engine. He states that as they where developing google they used the idea of designing the perfect search engine for a king, who has infinite resources and who would be the only user. In short, they tried to create the best search engine for one person and worried about scaling it up to be useable by many people only later. He stated that they have used these criteria several times and have never had trouble finding a way to scale it to the masses. This is the spirit of our project, to create the best search results for a user with no processing, bandwidth, or screen limitations.

• When Google was a Stanford research project, it was nicknamed BackRub because the technology checks backlinks to determine a site's importance. (Source Google.com)

• "Google is the closest thing the Web has to an ultimate answer machine." (Source Google.com)

Search Research

Metaspy lets you watch others search. We used this service to see what people actually type in. In general 2-4 words up to 11 or so.

Competitive Research

A9.com - This site is a good model for parallel searching.

Clusty - Does a good job categorizing, but majority of them are irrelevant. Beyond clustering, it is basically similar to Google.

Visual Thesaurus - We like the relational nature of search at this site.

10x10 - Dynamic real-time representation of news. Great for grazing, but not for searching.

News Map - Model for use of scale for representing information on the web.

Getty Images - Clarification feature is useful for searching.

alexa.com, donbusca.com, metaeureka.com
All three of these search engines give you information about the sites that appear in your results. Among the information is how many sites link to it, the websites rise or fall in popularity, and much more. We are not including this feature in our design but found it interesting.

Search Engine Homepages
For this project we have compiled a visual map of 56 different search engines. This was originaly a print piece but we have begun to migrate it to the web here.