Welcome to ManagedQ, and thanks for joining us. We wanted to take a moment and introduce ourselves.
It's a Search Application
ManagedQ's goal is to be the Internet's first Search Application. What do we mean by Search Application?
A Search Application is dedicated to helping you manage your entire Search Experience: from the keyword, to results, to previewing, to refinement and repeating with a new query.
The Search engine of Today is a Database
Search starts with the query. However, on most of today's Search engines it ends shortly thereafter. And the manner in which it does so is, frankly, quite rude. Most engines simply barf a pile of links and descriptions and say "Good Luck". This makes the Search engines of today little more than thin front-ends to large databases of the web. How much difference is there between the terminal output from a SQL select statement and today's lists of links and result snippets?
The ManagedQ Difference
ManagedQ is dedicated to guiding you throughout the entire Search process. We start with a keyword, just like the Search engines you're familiar with, but from there on everything is different. Firstly, each result comes with a large screenshot to give you a better idea of what's on the other end of that link. We then download the entire result set to your browser and scan it to find the important ideas and concepts, presenting them to you in what
we call the Executive Summary:
The Executive Summary (when querying the infamous "Valleywag")
We thought this was cool, but we wanted the results to be interactive. So when you mouse over the Ideas (that's what we call each entry) in the Executive Summary, we show you how that Idea appears in each result.
Managed Previews (when exploring the Idea "Owen Thomas")
Managed Previews let you get a good sense of what's going on in each document before you commit to clicking on it. But that wasn't enough. Clicking through Search results can be an incredibly painful process: you have to download a page from a potentially slow server, render it, and then visually scan it to see if it has what you're looking for. This part of Search is just as important the results page itself.
So we created Managed Viewing. Remember, we already downloaded each Result document to extract its Ideas. Managed Viewing takes this page and cuts out all the
JavaScript and anything else that would slow down its rendering. We then find all instances of the important Ideas from the Executive Summary and highlight them, while also darkening out all the Ideas that don't appear in the document. That way you can easily see what's there and what's not.
Managed Viewing (query: "Palo Alto Cafes", mouse over Idea: "Coupa Cafe")
Now when you mouse over the Executive Summary, we scroll the browser to the Idea. Clicking in the Executive Summary scrolls you to the next instance of each Idea.
So What's the Difference, Really?
The difference can be more elegantly summed up in a simple visual comparison. Remembering that you are getting the exact same result set, answer this: Which of the two below would you rather use?
Thank You
Thank you for joining us in Revolutionizing Search. We're brand new to this and welcome as much feedback as you can offer. We know the product still has plenty of kinks left to iron out, but its a start. In fact, in the above screenshots you can see some of the little bugs that are still kicking around, from miscategorizations in the Executive Summary to repeated result text in the Managed Previews. We didn't want to dress up our examples, so we just gave you the real thing sans Photoshop.
It is our belief that ManagedQ is the coolest way to Search (my Mom always said minor imperfections give you character). With your help, we will continue to improve ManagedQ. Together, let's spread the word that Search really has (finally) gotten better.
