The IntelliSearch page can be found at http://fluttercookie.zandrok.com/intellisearch.html (and yes, it's a weird subdomain).
Intellisearch is a concept thought up by team the Dundee based team which aims to combine Dasher, an on screen predictive keyboard made by a student at Cambridge University with Yahoo!'s predictive search functionality, in an accessible manner. The result followed these goals fairly accurately but used Google's suggestions rather than Yahoo!'s
Following our performance in Dundee, Yahoo were kind enough to fly us down to the Open Hack in London in which we took part and were rewarded with the Best Mozilla Hack. Thanks to the guys from Yahoo and the other judges there.
Have a look at our presentation at Yahoo Open Hack 2009 (Ogg Vorbis) (Youtube Video)
"Dasher is an information-efficient text-entry interface, driven by
natural continuous pointing gestures."
Dasher provides the functionality of a keyboard, while only requiring an
input device which can move in two axes. As such, it can be used by
people with motor impairment by using an eye tracker.
Example
Yahoo! provides the functionality to view likely things you may search for,
based on the text you have already entered.
Example
Using HTML 5's Canvas element, copious amounts of Javascript, a little AJAX and a few PHP calls to get the search suggestions and results.
For technical reasons, we did some research and ended up getting access to the page which served Google's suggestions AJAX call.
Unfortunately Canvas is not as thoroughly supported as we would like, given
that Microsoft's Internet Explorer lacks this functionality. As such, this
should be taken as a prototype aiming to display the potential of the
system, rather than a fully fledged piece of software.
Google's ExplorerCanvas may
fulfil the need for Microsoft Internet Explorer's support, however is
considered to be too slow for fluid animation by some.
As some of you will know, we cheated a little at the hackday by starting early. In fact, we started this for Yahoo's Hack U at Dundee University.
For the Hackday in London, we worked on not only allowing for searching for sites, but also for browsing within them. To accomplish this, we rendered a preview of the page you're looking for in the right pane and strip the links out of it. With those links, we populated the intellisearch pane and navigating to the links, changed the preview (as you'd expect).
The team consists of Laurence Hole, Chris Brett and Matthew Ross, all third year, applied computing students at Dundee University
Copyright Intellisearch team 2009 - We're looking into open sourcing etc.
