The November 10, 2003 issue of Business Week has a short report about a company called Dipsie. Dipsie is a new search engine scheduled to go live in 2004.
My understanding of both the Dipsie web site and the BW article is that Dipsie will search not just static web pages, but those generated dynamically in real time, searching three times as many pages as does Google. It’s not clear to me exactly how this will work since many pages are generated from database back-ends based on specific user inputs. BW also reports that Dipsie will use semantic analysis, “sensing content and context” and thus distinguish word meanings such as equity stock versus inventory stock.
Some lawyers want to use Google for searching their own work product. While it’s not a bad Boolean search engine, the feature that makes Google so useful – link analysis – is of no value for internal use in a law firm. To the extent that Dipsie offers new or improved semantic analysis, it may be of interest to law firms. Of course, the search engine space is crowded and the company may not even target selling its software for internal use. But it will be interesting to see if a start-up can compete against Google. And for lawyers and law firm staff who rely on the Web to uncover interesting facts, a tool that indexes more pages than Google could be very useful.