Dooodle It

The first people to ever see Dooodle were senior folk at Google who initially asked permission from Martin Porter to use his language stemming algorithms known as the Porter Stemmers. Looked like the search king was always on the look out for great new code.

So we thought it would be fun to show them what new work Dr. Porter had up his sleeve - so we did the very first dooodle demo to Google using Moreover.com aggregated RSS feeds. That was back in January 2005.

Given the explosion of real time news availability on the web, we thought you needed a fighter pilot cockpit to navigate around the sea of information; much of it duplicated as sites repeat the same story. Hence the innovation of Dooodle Joystick as well as the Filter Panel (read taxonomy) and Focus Panel (read folksonomy).

With AJAX changing the way we use Web 2.0, we thought search could have a change too.

Google's Head of Search Quality, Peter Norvig, said he really liked the suggested terms on the left hand side. But he did not see the Dooodle Joystick or the dynamic word weights that change.... that needed a full year for Dooodle proper (with AJAX style joystick) to be released.

Go to http://search.dooodle.com

Hope you enjoy your doodling!

The people behind the "slow to mature" Dooodle epic are:

• Martin Porter - author of the Porter Stemmer and so much more! (including the Grapeshot search technology which underpins Dooodle)
• Chris Charlton - senior engineer who started working as a freelance consultant and ended up going full-time with Grapeshot (he liked the technology so much)
• Lee Daubney - the Web 2.0 designer with curves at his fingertips and full-on Black Pig Design vibe
• David Higgins - looks after the stable at Black Pig Design and kindly offered their creative services for free
• John Snyder - the guy who introduced Copy & Paste search back in 1999, filed a few patents and then woke up again when Martin Porter finished writing Grapeshot in 2005
• Black Pig Design - the whole crew has helped Lee and David come up with the goods, and very kindly they have given their time and effort gratis
• Moreover.com - the London technical team provided us with some great RSS data, and continue to grow their efforts under new ownership of Verisign Inc. Keep the XML coming lads! Again - all information supplied gratis, in the spirit of true dooodling
• Grapeshot - the software makes it all tick. The company has donated the software free of charge along with some ideas on how to change the search interface. A bit techie, yes? But it is coders who need to get Grapeshot into their own applications too....