brainespot Search Engine

Mental Notes:

We developed this metasearch engine because it emphasizes the point that User Interface design solutions do not always require throwing technology at a problem, they just require discovering what a user needs.

The original purpose of brainespot was to provide searching for specific topics, for example the power industry. Rather than using spiders, which took time and were limited in the pages they discovered, we used the individual site's search function. This gave us access to "deeper" and "fresher" results, something that more recently has been referred to as the "hidden web". We were interested in the problem of how to organize the results. Since with fresh results we did not have the hits in advance we could not build directories. We used fast clustering techniques to organize the results. It turns out that this flat organization, built from the results themselves, where very popular with users. While the need to do the organization in real-time drove the functionality, it turns out that this relatively low-tech solution gave users a great deal of functionality.

We are sorry to report that brainespot is no longer available. We were a casualty of our own success as we can no longer support the growing traffic and maintenance this web search tool generated. The design lessons learned, however, will be carried forward to future projects.