Michael Grubb is the Senior Vice President of Technology and Chief Technology Officer at LookSmart.  He became an expert in scalability of web services after studying philosophy at Duke University and receiving a J.D. from the University of North Carolina. 

LookSmart's service Furl.net is a popular social bookmarking/tagging tool amongst librarians, researchers, educators and others. The company also offers 181 topic-specific vertical search sites.

The following interview covers two topics, first social bookmarking and second, vertical search. You can skip to the vertical search section if you wish to by clicking here.

About Furl.net

Note: All social bookmarking services are different and offer different features. People usually begin using a web based social bookmarking service because it enables them to access and share their bookmarks when they are away from their personal computer.  As the following interview makes clear, however, these services offer far more than just mobility. 

Furl may be a good choice of social bookmarking services for you if would like to save personal copies of the pages you bookmark, if you'd like to be able to export your archives in bibliographic format, if you'd like to mark some items as private, if there are especially good resources in your area of interest shared by other Furl users or if other tagging tools feel technically unfriendly to you. Non-users of Furl can still search inside the shared archives of Furl users.

Marshall:

In a general sense how can use of a service like Furl change a user's relationship with information?

Michael

Using a service like Furl allows you to begin to have a personal experience of and relationship with the web, without giving up the ability to share with and learn from others. People who get into the habit of saving on Furl - just about any web site they might want to come back to later - are often surprised by the quality of search results they get when they later search on Furl. This is your own personal web index, particular to you and your interests. Talk about the Long Tail!

The other big change people experience from a service like Furl is to rediscover the thrill, the serendipity of web surfing. Being able to see the latest items saved, or the most popular items being saved today, are examples of this. On the Furl.net site, we provide these and many more forms of recommendations or discovery. It's basically throughout the site.

There are furlmates, people who saved this also saved, hot topics, and so forth. Using these tools allows for a creative process to happen that isn't necessarily so directed as searching. It helps you discover those things you are going to be interested in that you did not know you were interested in beforehand. And that broadens your horizons and exercises your mind.

Marshall:

What should people consider when evaluating whether a particular vendor in the social bookmarking space will suit their work flow and needs?

Michael

I would boil down the major feature areas to:

• saving
• tagging
• searching
• discovering
• sharing
• privacy
• syndication
• interoperability
• tools
• ease of use

That's a long list, but there's a lot to it! Ultimately, the question is, how important are each of these to you? Note that for several of these - and this is the "social" aspect, such as tagging, searching, discovering, sharing - in addition to whether the service has the features you value, you will want to consider how many other people and what sort of people are also using the service, because the value of these features will somewhat depend on the other users and their level of activity.

Marshall:

Placing our bookmark archives and notes online, in the hands of a particular vendor, seems to require a lot of trust - what should a user or organization look for when evaluating the trust worthiness and stability of a social bookmarking service provider?

Michael

If privacy and trust are issues for you, first off, I recommend that you be careful about giving away information about yourself. On Furl.net, for example, the only thing we really need to know is a working email address for you. You can decline to reveal your name or anything else, if you like. Some people like to give their name or web site address because it helps other people find them. So it depends on what your level of concern is.

About stability and trust, I recommend that you avoid getting locked into a particular service, platform or format. On Furl.net, we give you tools to export your links or your full archive. We have no interest in locking people in; our goal is to provide the most useful site we can.

I also recommend that you look for services that are operated by teams that have the expertise and the resources to do a thorough and professional job. In addition to Furl.net, LookSmart also operates a full-scale web search engine, a high-volume, high-performance advertising business, and 181 vertical search sites. This is the kind of team that can keep the service running reliably and stably. We do have our hiccups occasionally, as we grow, but we try our best to be up front about them.

Marshall:

What is the legal standing of a cached screen shot I save in my Furl archive? I see that it requires my login in order to view it, but is there any standard or precedent available as to the legal viability of referring to it, excerpting from it, sharing entire or partial screen shots?

Michael

When you Furl something, several things happen: the fields you fill in the save dialog are populated in the Furl database, the text of the web page is indexed, and Furl saves the full-text of the web page. From that point on, this cached copy of the web page is only used in one way: to be displayed back to you when you want to see it. We believe that this is a legitimate use of the cached copy because, among other things, it is a "fair use" of the material under established copyright principles.

Marshall:

In as much as the value of a social bookmarking service is derived from the value of the contributions to the information shared by the community of users - what is Furl doing to ensure that its user base continues to expand, diversify and remain vibrant?

Michael

We've found that as long as we do our best to provide the most useful and stable service we can, the addition of new people and new items takes care of itself. Every day, there are more members, and so the usage of the system (and therefore the quality of the searching, sharing, and discovery features) continuously goes up. Furl.net is particularly of interest in the library, research, and education communities, and we see a lot of people from those walks of life joining and using the service.

We also promote Furl across LookSmart's 181 vertical search sites and license its use to other, high-quality publishers like the New York Times and Local.com, and we will continue to pursue licensing and cross-promotion opportunities.

Marshall:

Can users of other online bookmarking services import their archives into Furl?

Michael

You can import items into Furl from two different file formats. One is the favorites/bookmarks file format used by Internet Explorer, Firefox, Mozilla, etc. The other is the output format written by del.icio.us.

If the other bookmarking service you are using can write to one of those two formats (and I believe most can), it's completely straightforward to then import into Furl.

Marshall:

When can users expect an upgrade beyond the unwieldy drop down box for category selection?

Michael

I know what you're talking about and I hear your frustration. In the save dialog, the scroll list used for selecting topics (i.e., tags) can be difficult to use if you have a large number of topics because it involves a lot of scrolling around. I know it well; I have several hundred topics myself. We're currently testing some designs to improve this for everyone. It's taking a little while, but we want to get it right. The save dialog is the part of Furl you interact with the most and it needs to be smooth and effortless when you use it - for people who use lots of topics, for people who just use the default topics, and for people who just ignore topics. We'll have something finalized soon. In the meantime, some heavy users have taken to just typing in the list of topics (separated by semicolon) in the "new topics" box. This works too!

Users of other social bookmarking/tagging tools (like del.icio.us) who are curious about Furl.net can bookmark items into multiple systems simultaneously with a service called Onlywire. This may be a good option if you want to check out Furl but are concerned about not having pages bookmarked into your current system while you explore a new one.

Vertical Search

Marshall:

Why would some one want to use a vertical search engine?

Michael

Essentially, when you are oriented around a particular topic, passion or repetitive need, you may find that your results in a general, one-size-fits-all search box are not terribly applicable to you, or may require lots of browsing through multiple pages of results to find what you need.

So, for example: Perhaps when you're doing something for the first time, you go to Google, Yahoo, Jeeves or another broad engine, all of which provide a valuable service to their users. Over time, as you develop a passion about something, you may look for a site that's more specialized and where a group of like-minded people go. Enthusiast media is a real value to the enthusiasts.

Marshall:

Are there subject areas that Look Smart vertical search is particularly strong in?

Michael

LookSmart's vertical search results are a blend of various sources, including the publicly shared web pages from Furl. You can see the benefit of this, for example, on the 17 food search sites (all linked to from looksmartfood.com). Furl members love to save good recipes, and the vertical results on these sites reflect the excellent recipes and food resources from Furl. In other areas, we have health-related content coming in on those sites and you will be able to see the improvements there.

Our proposition is to continue to improve all of these sites as we go so that they can become a destination of choice: by improving our search results, continuing to add more content, and keeping our content free. This is another strength: that the content on these sites is free of charge, and does not require even so much as a registration page.

Marshall:

Why should people use vertical search instead of trying to perform a complex and specific enough query in a general search engine?

Michael

Well, first off, finding what you need shouldn't be so hard. But also, a general web search engine is just algorithmically crawling the web, and there are other, valuable sources of information, which are about the web, and outside of the web, or in the effectively uncrawlable "deep web". We believe we can bring all these sources together in an optimal way; that's what we're working on.

Marshall:

Does Look Smart's vertical search support RSS for search results?

Michael

That's not something we have today but is definitely on our list of things we want to do with these vertical search results: making them widely available and easy to use is important. It's our contribution to the larger "conversation" happening. We already do have RSS support for individual archive searches on Furl.net, for example.

Marshall:

Is there a way that users interested in using LookSmart vertical search can integrate the service into their workflow that overcomes the convenience of the ubiquitous Google tool bar search?

Michael

The one-size-fits-all search box is really useful to many people much of the time; I wouldn't dispute that. But over time, as the broader community becomes better educated and more sophisticated about the web, the same thing will happen with search as happened with cars a hundred years ago, or cable TV in the 80s and 90s - the market will naturally segment. Over time it will become the most natural thing in the world, when you have a particular interest or slant, to come to LookSmart and use one of our vertical search sites. Naturally, you'll get different results, the sort of results that are valuable when you already know about a subject and are looking to deepen your knowledge of it, and not so much for a quick, definitive resource.

Marshall:

How does LookSmart vertical search respond to the emerging body of user generated content available on the web? 

Michael

Of course, the web itself is an enormous example of user-generated content, as is Furl, or blogs. By blending all of these sources, LookSmart's vertical search sites have a shot at presenting you with a set of results that are essential, but not exhaustive. Who can page through tens of thousands of results, anyway? Talk about exhausting!

User-generated content, per se, is a lot of what we see getting Furled. Moreover, the comments, ratings, topics, etc., not to mention the number of people Furling a particular page, are all valuable input to the search process. So you see it's not just the user-generated content getting indexed and searched, it's the user-generated meta-content, if you will, informing the quality of the search results themselves, as well.

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