We have been working very hard lately, sleepless nights and weeks, sprinting towards a plan. Along the way, we have expanded the type of content — data objects as we call it here in our lab, and the convention we will be using in this blog entry.

Back when we started in August 2008, we had two types of data objects. Namely - news and opinions, along with a preliminary search tool at the top right corner matching the keyword that’s being searched. The result looked very much like the listing of news and opinions data object.

In October 2008, we added ability for users to add stock picks. And we ended the year with a big bang by introducing stockezy profiles! In this fast train that we are travelling on, we decided to increase the speed even further, and update the search tool to the next generation. This is why we announce our “Search - Beta”

What new in this “Search - Beta” release?

• Instead of matching regular expressions, we now index the data. By doing so, it improves the speed of search with rapidly growing data and also has improved the accuracy.
• It crawls more type of data objects. At the moment, it indexes news, opinions, stock picks and stockezy profiles. We plan to add answers pretty soon once it’s baked.
• UI has a new design, away from the convention of news and opinions listing, and has a unique way of distinguishing every type of data object.

What to expect next in Search?

• There are few kinks (in IE 6) that needs to be cleaned up and usability improvements that we will be delivering soon.
• Indexing more type of data objects - answers being one of them. There are more to come in near future.
• There is room for improvement with respect to indexing. More optimizations.

That’s when we’ll drop the “Beta” in “Search”.