There are a whole mess of questions wrapped up in this project, some of the interesting ones are:
1. Can a targeted search provide a better experience than G/Y/M?
2. Even if that search is a better experience, would anyone use it?
3. Managing relevancy on results from unreliable sources.
I think, depending on my integrating more resources and greatly improving the handling of mediocre resources (i.e. the current results of the solr based search for my blog's content, which are often totally irrelevant...), search verticals will be an interesting trend to watch.
This experimental search is very well done. Will definitely recognizes a problem a lot of us are having with trivial day-to-day stuff such as looking up documentation for a Django function or class. I know a lot of my time is spent looking up functions.
Because of this, I've been working a light-weight search-engine to sift through the Django source code:
Hopefully it'll help you find the code you're looking for, fast.
In regards to vertical search, I feel like the biggest barrier to competing with G/Y/M is the relative difficulty a user has to go through to reach the actual search page before entering in the information. If its more than a few key strokes away, then the user has a natural tendency to resort to the Big 3 engine which are situated conveniently in their search bar.
Adding a Firefox Keyword Search would definitely be a step in the right direction, but unfortunately the other browsers don't have that facility.
Josh Gourneau setup a MyCroft plugin which makes it pretty trivial to use Findjango 'in browser' for IE and FF, but not sure what the options are for WebKit or Opera.
I agree that exposure is a huge issue there, as we're not likely to sign and distribution deals in the near future.
1. Can a targeted search provide a better experience than G/Y/M?
2. Even if that search is a better experience, would anyone use it?
3. Managing relevancy on results from unreliable sources.
I think, depending on my integrating more resources and greatly improving the handling of mediocre resources (i.e. the current results of the solr based search for my blog's content, which are often totally irrelevant...), search verticals will be an interesting trend to watch.