Emergic.org has a good write-up on a Wall Street Journal article that explores the emergence of web-monitoring tools and their impact on the way we get news and information. Known as simply ‘feeds’ to most of us, WSJ calls these tools and their associated phenomenon “Persistent Search”. The author starts by giving a few examples [...]
Emergic.org has a good write-up on a Wall Street Journal article that explores the emergence of web-monitoring tools and their impact on the way we get news and information. Known as simply ‘feeds’ to most of us, WSJ calls these tools and their associated phenomenon “Persistent Search”.
The author starts by giving a few examples of investors who’ve relied on their feeds to make stock decisions, gaining access to insider information not yet available to the mainstream media. This information can come from a variety of sources and take on a number of forms, from posts on an employee blog to feeds from the weather bureau warning of impending natural disasters.
In our opinion, one of coolest things about persistent search is that you can examine a new bit of news side-by-side among several sources, giving you a more rounded context in which to make judgements about its accuracy and importance. Of course, more sources can lead to increased confusion and greater chance of spin, but we’d rather have more options than less.
Ramesh Jain further extrapolates on this point in this post titled The Changing Nature of Data and Search Perspectives. He discusses how search is moving toward a proactive rather than retroactive mindset, with people increasingly expecting to recieve rich information on an event, as it happens.
Here’s a nice quote:
They [people] will not be searching for pages, but monitoring, tracking, and prospecting for events of interest and for those events they will not be just satisfied by the link to an event, but will want a personalized experience of the event through multiple sensory mechanisms.
