Lots of press chatter in the last few days about a not-yet-public new academic search engine from Helsinki Institute for Information Technology called SciNet. It seems it’s been in development for some years. Here’s a screen capture of the UI sliders seen briefly in the video…

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AH_RD_hAOA&w=560&h=315]

I seem vaguely to remember similar style experimental search interfaces, maybe ten years ago now.

But the sliders made me think I’d like to see Google offer such a set of fine-tuning sliders, to change a variety of their currently fixed or on/off search parameters. Although I guess that might then be gamed by the SEO hucksters to winkle out a few of the secrets of Google’s algorithm weightings.