Retrospective Search, Prospective Search, and Your Library
November 22nd, 2004Bob Wyman (of PubSub) writes:
“Ideally, users would have both retrospective and prospective search built into a single user interface — instead of having to use two different tools each of which only addresses half the user’s needs. Thus, at PubSub.com, we’ve been looking for retrospective search partners that we can team up with to provide a unified search experience. If we can find someone to work with, or if we end up building retrospective search ourselves, then you’ll be able to first do a retrospective search and when you’ve found results that you’re interested in, you could then click a button that would say something like: ‘Keep searching!’ or ‘Tell me whenever…’ Similarly, if you had started with a new prospective search, you could click a button to retrieve the history of items that would have been delivered had you created your search subscription earlier.”
PubSub is a prospective search tool, since they don’t store any data. No need to keep the past if you are only searching in the future, Bob would say. I don’t think that I agree, however, that Feedster is a retrospective-only engine. One can also “search the future” with Feedster. Run a search, then grab the feed and you will be notified of any new content prospectively. Just because it has a database doesn’t mean that it can’t be prospective.
Google is definitely a retrospective-only search engine. It searches “older” content and doesn’t provide a way for us to monitor what new stuff comes into their database. Their loss.
Here’s an idea. Since PubSub aims to be prospective, how about teaming up with large library book databases (OCLC or RLG) or fee-based databases like Proquest and have prospective monitoring devices set up for any future keyword criteria in certain databases. Or, if a business profile has been updated in the many business databases, let me know with a feed. Or, work with individual libraries to have new titles of books in certain subjects (or via DDC) delivered into my aggregator. Not only would that be prospective, but it would be “Innovative”.