Always Tinkering We're always working on something new, either for clients or just as research. Whether those new features or tools make it into the public demo is hard to say. Much depends on the hardware resources that will be required. However, we still like to give visitors a small peak behind the scenes at some of the things currently under development ...

Video Search With the rise of Web video, the demand and capabilities of video search technology is certainly destined to grow. Our video search is still very much in the experimental stage, but we're very excited to see how we can use the core Solara platform in this area. Thus far, we've just been playing with some prototype code but we've already got a number of ideas that may turn out to be very interesting.

Comparison Shopping Although in the very early stages, we've began exploring the development of a comparison shopping search engine based on the Solara platform. This type of search engine has appeal to a broad internet audience and lends itself very well to the pay-per-click revenue model. We hope to post more information on this project in the near future.

New Visual Basic Control Panel Initially, many of our management applications were web based. However, given that these apps are primarily run by only a few administrative users we decided to convert everything over to Visual Basic. For us, VB just offers a much richer development environment when it comes to adding various graphical controls. In short, it allows us to be more creative and to make changes much quicker.

Improved Ranking Diagnostics Having the ability to adjust in real-time how Solara ranks search results was one of the cooler features we initially coded. However, the various metrics that are evaluated for each page were only visible when logged into the query broker. Now, querying Solara while you're logged in as an administrator enables you to click a metrics link. This link allows the administrator or developer to see the various weights assigned to each result link, query i/o times, term distribution, etc.