For those who haven’t yet seen it, Roogle could be one of the more interesting salvos fired in the search engine wars in a while. There’s nothing more annoying than searching for a phrase and ending up on a dozen pages that have the phrase contained somewhere other than in a block of content (say, in the copyright statement, or in a text ad). The search engines have all tried to implement various algorithms to decide what text on a web page is more important than the rest (wheat vs. chaff, as it were), but fifteen seconds with any of the engines shows that indexing the framing content of a site is an unavoidable part of the business. Roogle is the first to use a site’s RSS files as its own filter for the meaty pulp of content, index that content, and then point searchers back to the original web-formatted pages. It’s also implemented well (made all the more clear after after watching the development process unfold), and it will be great to see where it goes from here.

(Interestingly, after posting this, I ended up in the Google panel, where a lot was said about how the company decides what text on a page is important.)