Dick: Did you run that 37Signals SearchSniffr tool against the site? What does that thing do anyway?”
Jane: It takes terms from our logs and related sites’ logs and uses them in search queries, and then generates a report. I have it here somewhere… here it is. The Sniffr Sensitivity is 87, which is too high. We’re still getting too many empty results and not enough best bets.
Dick: So what do we do?
Jane: We use the Synonym Makr and Zipfr to fine tune things until we get that Sensitivity score down below 60.”
Dick: Nice.

Yahoo and Google have made search the dominant finding paradigm out there, but once you arrive at a particular website the search is usually much less useful. It’s time we had better tools to make search great everywhere. Lou and Richard are addressing the ideas behind this and opening up a rich area for innovation.