Can a lightning bug help you do better research?

Micro-nets are the next evolution of the way searches are done. Doing a general search in Google for band information isn’t nearly as effective as going to MySpace and looking up the band there because the paradigm of MySpace is geared better towards bands. It’s easier to make a connection with a possible business associate using LinkedIn than it is to contact them from a standard contact form on their website because LinkedIn’s environment creates a better trust between its members. Lumifi is a new entry to the search and data organization community that claims to accomplish the same niche benefits for research by pre-parsing data to be more relevant to their research topic and giving the user tools to keep it all organized.

Lumifi has a unique search algorithm that claims to return more accurate and relevant results because their systems have already “scoured” the data for validity. When it comes to academic terms it really does provide a better response of data than a standard search engine would. Specific result options are offered with searches that may help narrow your search down to topics, milestones, attributes or aspects of the item or person you are researching. This feature in and of itself is very helpful when researching people, events, locations, items, etc. The resulting links and snippets of information can then be added to research projects you have in your account for easy data collection.

In addition to web-page indexing, Lumifi extends its indexing algorithm to any PDF, Word, or RTF file you upload to your account making it easy to filter through any local documents you have as well. The only downfall of this snippet system is that the snippets lose their context if you rename their title. The snippets are stored in your project, but the only thing that keeps them in context to where they came from is the title of the snippet, which is the name of the file the snippet was taken from. If this title is changed – which you will want to do since ten snippets from one document will all have the same exact name, that is, the document’s file name – you will never be able to figure out where you got the snippet from. This can pose to be a major problem when you get to that final works cited page in your report.

The real power behind Lumifi though is the data organization. Lumifi takes the search and bookmark model up a notch with its collaborative sharing features and project centric data organization tools. Lumifi borrows from existing familiar implementations storing projects as notebooks. You can upload files, take notes, grab snippets and list out links storing them in specific “chapters” of your project’s notebook. These items can all be shared with other colleagues that you may have added to your project’s notebook as collaborators enabling a central data repository for multi-person research teams.

With its pre-parsed and filtered search algorithm and data collection tools, Lumifi is pretty good tool for organizing your research. The system is still in its infancies though, so keep an eye out as it grows. There are a few features that are still on the table that look interesting, such as a project management tool and a research planning tool that aggregates content for you to your project automatically that look promising. Check out Lumifi and see how it can “enlighten your research”, as it were, at http://www.lumifi.com.