Vertical search is hard

I just checked out yet another search engine, SiloBreaker, on the recommendation of information industry analysts Outsell.

Their gushing report, about SiloBreaker and another search specialist called Collexis, said these tools "take vertical search to the next level and show the way forward for value-added search services."

You can see why I thought it was worth a visit. So how did it do?

According to Outsell, SiloBreaker "indexes news and blog sources from the open web and analyses occurrences of concepts to infer summaries, group similar stories and add visual analytics." Sounds impressive!

So I entered the term "Smoking ban" - an important issue in the hospitality industry in the UK - and this is what I got:

Only one of these "entities" seems in any way relevant to the search.

The results returned for news stories were just as bizarre:

I was intrigued enough to click on the story about Dutch police serving up canabis cake, but the results don't seem at all relevant to the search term.

Comments

[andrew]

they seem to default to OR searching...bizarre!?
searching for "smoking ban" and filtering on UK gives better results.

http://www.silobreaker.com/Search.aspx?q="smoking+ban"&DrillDownItems=11_81111

[Kristofer Mansson]

Karl, many thanks for checking out Silobreaker and for mentioning us in your blog. You're right, something's gone awry with our relevance filters for certain free-text searches. Don't want to hide too much behind the fact that we're still in beta, but rest assured we're looking into it. The idea behind Silobreaker is to bring together content aggregation with analytics to present and visualise search results in what is hopefully more insightful ways than traditional linear results of just headlines. I’d be very happy to describe in more detail should you have an interest.
Best regards,
Kristofer Mansson (CEO, Silobreaker)