Searsia Blog

Internet advertising is a completely messed-up, multi-trillion euro business that is controlled by a few big players, most notably Google and Facebook. Their business models are based on figuring out as much information about people as possible, and then using people’s weaknesses and vulnerabilities to persuade them to click on... [Read More]

What does “federated” mean in federated search? Like the European Union is a federation of independent countries, so is a Searsia engine a federation of independent search engines. When Searsia receives a query, it does not perform a lot of searching itself: Searsia forwards the query to a limited number... [Read More]

There’s a new search engine in town: Dr. Sheet Music is a search engine dedicated solely to sheet music. It retrieves results from more than 50 sites that provide sheet music; both sites that provide copyright-free sheets as sites from which you can buy sheet music of the latest popular... [Read More]

In many respects, advertisements drive the web. The biggest web companies today — yes, Google and Facebook — get most of their revenue from advertisements, but also many small web sites can exist because of advertising. So, as we work at Searsia to provide developers with open source tools to... [Read More]

Information Retrieval has come a long way since Cyril Cleverdon conducted his famous Cranfield experiments on 1400 paper abstracts in the 1960’s. At the time, searching the massive 1.6 megabyte Cranfield collection was a big deal. Today, we routinely take pictures that are much bigger, and even a crappy smart... [Read More]