But we need to share and foster quality Boolean training in whatever blogs, classes, discussions, etc., we can. Otherwise, people won’t be ready to learn what comes next, nor be able to take full advantage of the kinds of functionality that Broadlook and others are (and will be) offering — a problem you already suffer with some of your advanced products.

While you are offering the promise of one valuable branch in the evolution of search, we cannot forget to mention another: semantic search. If we can accurately anticipate the user’s wants from context, then we can eliminate much of the human error and learning curve that advanced search currently requires. This field is barely out of its infancy, but VCs apparently are willing to fund wunderkind toddlers: Some interesting companies out there are DeepDyve.com (formerly Infovell) and here in the Boston metro, several companies profiled in this article: http://www.masshightech.com/stories/2009/02/02/weekly6-Smart-analytics-drives-the-semantic-search.html . But the business model so far has been subscription-based for enterprise-only releases. I believe these products will only become great when they’re tested on a wide scale: i.e., when a public search engine adopts it.

So finally, to your question on what Broadlean needs added, I think you need more semantic components. The SC: (same concept as) command appears to come closest. Can you offer that for other categories? For example, if I want events similar to a particular event, because that will likely find me other relevant people, show those, too! For clarity, maybe you should relabel SC to *Similar* Concept as, and keep the “Same as” for the concrete stuff like sentence, paragraph, etc. So now you have the potential for:

- SEVENT (similar industry events, mentioned above)
- SPERSON (similarly-skilled person, same team, etc.) which is what Shally’s Peer Regression Analysis concept focuses on.
- SCORP (similar companies in terms of industry niche for flagship products – which ZoomInfo.com’s free Company Search does much more easily/quickly than Broadlook Profiler and, considering the tradeoffs, fairly well)
- SORG (would be nice if you could apply this to the similar trade association, user group, etc., concept, though maybe you’d fold it under SCORP)

The ultimate result would be an Excel output with each type of data (companies, events, associations/portals, people, etc.) each on their own worksheet tab, and any new results found on an ongoing basis would be added automatically, but also allowing users to manually input new discoveries. With the important exception of some tracking data, this is basically the format of the sourcing research document that JobMachine espouses.