Working on a difficult search problem requires issuing multiple queries with different combinations of search terms and browsing their result sets.  This is a frustrating thing to do when using a traditional search engine such as Google.  Traditional search engines let you dive deep into a result set, by clicking from one page of results to the next, but they don’t make it easy to go back and forth from one result set to another.  In other words, they are designed for depth-first rather than breadth-first search.

Noflail Search, on the other hand, has a special feature that allows you to do a breadth-first search or, more precisely, a breadth-first traversal of the combined result sets of several queries.  That sounds complicated, but Noflail Search makes it very easy.  The special feature is a search history that remembers not only earlier queries but also your position in the result set of each query, so that, when you go back to an earlier query, you can resume browsing its result set where you left off.  That makes it possible to use a breadth-first strategy for browsing the result sets of several queries.  You can, for example, look at the first page of each result set, then the second page of each set, then the third page, and so on.

Noflail Search even remembers your scrolling position within each page of results.  And it remembers all this even if you close your browser and turn off the machine.  When you exit Noflail Search, the positions within the result sets you were browsing are saved to Flex local storage.

To use this feature, make sure that the engine in the Engine box is Bing (or Bing Feeds, which searches blog posts only) and that Noflail Search is in Advanced Mode.  (Click on the blue button to go to Advanced Mode if necessary.)  In advanced mode there are four vertical panels, and the leftmost panel shows the search history:

Four-panel display with search history in Advanced Mode

When you issue a query, the first page of results is shown in the Results panel, and an entry for the query is placed at the top of the search history.  The entry has a checkmark, which causes it to go away when you issue the next query.  If you think you’ll want to go back to the query, remove the checkmark and the query will remain in the history until you reinstate the checkmark and click the Delete button or issue a new query.  The screenshot below, for example, shows a portion of the display after you have issued the query “diabetes stem cell” and removed the checkmark from the search history entry for the query.  The results of the query can be seen in the Results panel:

Retaining a query in the search history

Continuing with the example, suppose you go through two-and-a-half pages of results and then decide to try another query.  You may be looking for new therapies to cure diabetes, and issue the query “diabetes islet cell”.  Now there are two queries in the Search History panel:

Browsing the result sets of two queries

After looking at, say, four pages of the result set of the second query, you may want to dig deeper into the result set of the first query.  To go back to the first result set all you need to do is click on the first query.  You are then taken immediately to the third page of the first result set, shown at the exact scrolling position that you had reached when you issued the second query.

Breadth-first search using Google

If you are addicted to Google you may be thinking: can I do this in Google?  Well, you are in luck.  You actually can do breadth-first search with Google, using browser tabs.  Open two tabs, run the query “diabetes stem cell” on Google in one of the tabs, and “diabetes islet cell” in the other.  You can then jump from one result set to the other by switching from one tab to the other.  And the tabs are labeled by the queries:

Breadth-first search with Google

However, opening a tab, visiting Google and typing a query takes longer than modifying the query in the query box of Noflail Search and clicking the Search button.  And if your queries are long or you have many tabs open, the queries fill not fit in the tab labels.

Search history in Bing

Noflail Search is not the only search engine that features a navigational search history.  Microsoft introduced a search history when it launched Bing, and Ask and other search engines have followed suit.  (The search history in Noflail Search predated Bing’s by several months.)  The screenshot below shows the same two diabetes queries in the Bing search history:

Search history in Bing

Clicking on a search history entry in Bing, however, causes the query to be run from scratch as if the user had issued it again from the query box.  The browsing position within the result set of the query is lost.

So next time you have a difficult search problem, give Noflail Search a try.

Searching an individual blog

(The domain name has scrolled to the left.) Of course you coud go to Nikki’s blog and run the search there.  But if you want to search several blogs, or Web sites, the Site box lets you search them all from one place.

Noflail Search remembers the sites you’ve searched and suggests completions as you type into the box.  For example, when I type the letter c I get

Suggested completions for the letter c

because I have previously searched Nikki’s blog and Craigslist, and when I type the letter w I get

Suggested completions for the letter w

because I have previously searched Wikipedia and WordPress at large.  Under the hood, when you search Nikki’s blog, Noflail Search appends site:cookwithnikki.wordpress.com to your query before dispatching it to the Bing backend.  You can use the site: operator instead of the Site box, either in Noflail Search or in a traditional search engine, but you’ll have to do more typing.

While on the topic of searching blogs, Noflail Search lets you run your queries on several blog search engines.  You can find those engines by clicking on the folder icon for the tag Blogs in the engines panel:

Blog search engines in Noflail Search

Bing Feeds, Google Blog Search and Technorati do generic blog search, while WordPress is the search facility of wordpress.com.

Now click Search.  At the time of this writing, the query produces no results.  (Things may have changed by the time you try it, of course.)  But Noflail Search doesn’t just say that there are no results.  It also provides a zero-result analysis, in a box that appears at the bottom of the Search History panel and looks like this:

The third entry in the analysis says that there are no posts in the CookWithNikki blog containing the word mango and the word peach.  That tells you that you remembered the ingredients wrong: there was either mango or peach, but not both.  The first entry in the analysis tells you that there are 11 posts with banana, mango and smoothie, and the second entry that there are 2 posts with banana, peach and smoothie.  You may remember that it was a tropical-sounding recipe, so that mango is more likely than peach, and you may then click on the first entry.  That will run the query “banana mango smoothie” and show its 11 results in the Results panel.  The smoothie you were looking could be the Banana Mango Flaxseed Smoothie recipe of the first result.  (Again, things may have changed by the time you try this, and your first result may be different.)

I don’t think there is currently any search engine that provides zero-result analysis.  Please correct me if I’m wrong.  But the concept is actually not new, it has been known in academia for decades.  What’s new is the parallel algorithm that we are using to compute the analysis by issuing queries to a Web API across the Internet, in only a few seconds.  Previous implementations were sequential and would have taken minutes rather than seconds in the same setting.

What we are really proud of, though, is that we have taken a useful concept buried in academia for a very long time and made it available to everybody in Noflail Search.

This blog is going to be about search technology, how Web search is changing and where I think it’s going, the features of Noflail Search that you will not find in any other search engine, the pros and cons of using Adobe Flex to write the front-end of a search application, and the exciting research that we are currently doing thanks to a grant from the National Science Foundation.  I will also tell you about new features of Noflail Search as we introduce them over the next few months; we have quite a few coming up.

In this first post I want to introduce you to Noflail Search.  It is a combination of a search front-end and a search portal.

As a search front-end, it sends queries submitted by the user to the Bing™ back-end through the Bing Web API, gets results back as an XML data structure, and displays the results in a Results Panel.  What’s the point?  The point is that, if you run into a difficult search problem, Noflail Search has two features that can save you, the user, a lot of time: an advanced search history that allows you to interleave the browsing of the result sets of multiple queries, and zero-result analysis.  I will explain these two features in future posts.

As a search portal, Noflail Search allows the user to enter a query once and run it on many different search engines, including general-purpose search engines like Bing or Google and vertical (i.e. specialty) search engines.  There is an Engines Panel containing a tagged collection of search engines.  Clicking on an engine in the Engines Panel runs the current query (the one that is currently in the query box) on that engine and displays the results either in a Results Panel or in a pop-up window.  Today only Bing results are shown in the Results Panel, but in the future we will give the user a choice of display mode for many, if not most, engines.

By the way, the search history and zero-result analysis features that I mentioned above are available in Advanced Mode.  The first time you use Noflail Search on a particular computer you are asked to choose between an Easy Mode and an Advanced Mode.  You can later switch freely between the two modes at any time.  Switching from Advanced Mode to Easy Mode hides some of the features, such as the Search History panel, but the data related to those features is not lost: it will be there when you switch back to Advanced Mode.

In the next post I will tell you about one of the most unusual features of Noflail Search, and one my favorites: zero-result analysis.

Bing is a trademark of Microsoft Corporation.  Pomcor is not affiliated with Microsoft.