Cranking the Engines of Discovery.

@ppp@
First off, let’s talk about discovery engines.

In short, a discovery engine differs from a search engine in the sense that a search engine’s results are usually very linear: You’re looking for ‘fluffy bunnies’, and you’ll get ‘fluffy bunnies’. A discovery engine might also show you ‘fuzzy bunnies’, ‘bunny slippers’ (oh, hey, I could use a pair of those!), ‘lucky rabbit feet’ (doesn’t seem so lucky NOW, eh?). Basically, it helps you uncover things that you didn’t know you were looking for, but have an interest in. In essence, you could call it a ‘fuzzy search’, if you’ll pardon the pun.

With this in mind, Mark, over at The Fish is working on a discovery engine, named Repliqa. While it’s not available just yet, he’d like to get the word out, and invite you to read his blog, which talks about discovery engines in much more depth.

He even gives examples of other [tag]discovery engine[/tag]s to give you an idea of what you’d be dealing with, such as Pandora — Pandora’s sole job is to take a list of what musical artists you like, and help you discover other music similar to what you already like.

I just hope that when Repliqa becomes a public thing, that there’s some sort of easy integration into Firefox.
I’d like to be able to discover other things on the internet similar to what I already show an interest in.