Ambiently

I quite like this.

In a conventional, keyword based search engine (I'm looking at you, Google) there's a lot of guess-work involved. It works like this:

• There is a 'thing' out there in the world that can be described many ways using 'words'. (And yes, this remains true when the 'thing' is made of 'words', as the majority of open-web 'things' are.)
• There is the author of a website. She describes her 'things' using certain 'words'.
• There is a user. She must guess which 'words' the author used to describe the 'thing'.

For top-level concepts, that works fine. Take the educational content-packaging standard called 'SCORM'. Search using word SCORM, and you'll find a bunch of sites about SCORM. So far so good.

But if your search is more specific, it gets tricky. Let's say the user has a SCORM package and she'd like a free piece of software to test it for compliance to the SCORM 2004 specification. Now she has to guess words: 'free' 'compliance' 'SCORM' '2004' (bearing in mind that google uses whitespace as a delimiter - i.e. a way of breaking up English into meaningful chunks). Lots of results, but no testing tool! So she guesses again. And again. And again.

Ambiently provides a simple, but potentially very poweful, change. Via a button on the toolbar, it will present the user with 'related websites'. Instead the user guessing keywords, ambiently (I'm guessing based on my own limited trials, here) uses the site you're currently in as keywords. Start in the almost-right-place, and it will show you what's close. No guessing.

It's a small change. It's not semantic (my standard test of semantic value - 'piracy' - returned as much on copyright as it did on high seas crime). You won't see substantially different results from google. But I suspect that for intricate and/or highly specific searches, it will prove extremely useful.

Also - it brands itself as a 'discovery' engine, rather than a 'search' engine. Full props to that - it's about time we stopped using 'search' as a catch-all term for discovery. 'Search' implies that you already know exactly what you're looking for, denying the value of serendipitous discovery. Sure, it's semantics, but semantics are the bread and butter of content discovery!

www.ambiently.com

...and the answer to the question is: there is an excellent free SCORM compliance tool at www.scorm.com. If you use SCORM, this site is invaluable.