Having only just seen the Exalead press release, I’m reminded of a significant new enhancement that we introduced to the IDeA Communities of Practice (CoP) web platform earlier this year. The Exalead search service provides each CoP with a facility for creating a personalised community list of websites that enables more focussed and relevant search results to be returned for their particular domain of interest. Community members have the ability to select or deselect any of the web sites in the community list for each web search query they submit, providing greater control over the number and relevance of results returned.
Having a personalised community list of web sites has the effect of narrowing the web search to just these sites, which the community members will have previously verified as having content more relevant to their domain of interest. For example, a search for ‘Local Area Agreements’ on Google returns almost 49 million results. A similar search limited to the Regional Centre of Excellence web sites returns 136 results, all of which are likely to have more contextual relevance than the wider web search.
This is just one of the many enhancements to the platform that is scheduled for implementation this year. More about the other enhancements will be published in this blog over the coming months.
My version of the personalised search facility that was issued to our CoP users: personalised-search-release-note-final-08jan08.
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