Google and Yahoo

I am a huge fan of Google and Yahoo! I began using Google back in 1998 when the address was in the stanford.edu domain . I began using Yahoo! back before it truly was powered by a search engine - it was a limited index in those early days. I continue to use both Yahoo! and Google driven searches on a regular basis. In July 2008, an amazing 82.4% of all searches (more than 10 billion) are conducted through these tools http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=2405. While similar, Google and Yahoo! results are not always the same - click on the title to run a quick comparison of responses for keywords of your choice.

Google and Yahoo! refer many hundreds of readers to my blogs each day. These are tremendous tools that I would not want to do without. But, sometimes, they are not quite the best tool for the task at hand.

This blog is to share some of the other tools that I use to conduct a variety of searches. You may find some of these tools useful to you!

Search Engine Innovations

Folden maintains a massive site with links to a wide range of search engines. Examine the links at the site (click on the title "Search Engine Innovation"). There are links in the right column of the Folden site that identify hundreds of search engines of many varieties.

Alternative Search Engines

There are many, many more alternative search engines than you may think. Each month, Alt Search Engines, publishes its list of the top 100 alternative engines. Many of these are very specialized. They are in a variety of languages. They include a wide array of technologies.

I have chosen the ones that are representative of the range of alternatives available and seem most useful to a broad spectrum of users (including me) and linked them below with brief descriptions.

KartOO

One of the pioneers in visual search engines, KartOO is a metasearch engine that provides a graphical display of linkages and clusters. The larger the image on the graphical flash display, the more relevant KartOO believes it is to your search. KartOO also performs natural language searches if you include a question mark at the end of your inquiry. It allows for refinement of searches. Also provides video, image and Wikipedia searches.

TouchGraph Google Browser

TouchGraph provides a java-enhanced graphical display of linkages among returns from Google. Much like KartOO, it's a great way to view the inter-relationships among web pages. There is an excellent filter entry form to further refine your searches.

This search tool is one of the most visually interesting among all of the search tools. Check out the animations as linkages are built!

The Internet Archive

Arguably the most incredible search engine online is the Internet Archive - it allows time travel! This incredible database has crawled the Web since 1996. It hold more than 85 billion web pages. You can recover Web pages from a decade ago - news items - track the development of a Web site over years. You can restore broken links to material that has been removed from the Web. There are special sections for moving images, text, audio, software and education. And, there are special collections for historic events. This is an awesome resource.

Exalead

Exalead, like Page Bull, displays results with screen shots of the pages. This is a most useful display mode - saving much time. The screen shots are much smaller in Exalead, so I prefer Page Bull in this respect. And, Exalead includes sponsored links.

Grokker

Grokker has some nifty features that make it useful to many researchers. It is an engine that offers a choice of search algorithms, then provides an outline view as well as a map view. You can zoom in and zoom out of the graphical displays. You can prioritize your returns by date. It is easy to keep a "working list" and then email those research results to yourself or another.

Search the Tail

The term "a long tail" has become a popular one on the web. There are many nuances of the term, but in this case it refers to the long list of responses to a search. Long Tail helps you fine those more obscure references to something you are searching for - the ones that are less obvious and for which there may be only a handful of references. In Search the Tail you get a long list of suggested refinement tags to the standard Google search to help you get to the part of the tail you are looking for. You can access the list of refinements by "most popular" or alphabetic.

Hakia

The search for meaning often eludes us in both real and virtual life! The goal of Hakia is to search for meaning in the terms or question that is posed in the search. In many cases this kind of search can get right down to what you are looking for. Many returns include "news" and Wikipedia links.

Quintura

Combining many features of other alternative search engines into a single search utility, Quintura is powered by Yahoo! It provides a cloud that one can mouse roll-over to view groups of returns. As you roll-over terms, the listing of links and summaries changes dynamically. There is a nice "share" utility to email the cloud to others.

RSS Micro

One of the growing technologies online is the RSS "really simple syndication" update and summary system. RSS Micro searches RSS feeds. It provides searches of feed sources as well as posts within feeds. RSS Micro searches more than 16 million different feeds overall. It provides clustering through suggested associated keyword search terms.

Scitopia

The search portal scitopia.org is a collaboration of 15 leading science and technology associations and societies. Publishers from these associations developed a search engine gateway to the online published scholarly work. Scitopia.org searches the entire electronic libraries of these associations and provides results. More than three million documents, including peer-reviewed journal content and technical conference papers, spanning 150 years of science and technology can be searched through the site.

Mooter

Mooter has been around for a while. It provides clusters of results. Though not as visually exciting as some, these graphical clusters work well. Built into the search is a "refine" mode in which you can continuously add modifiers to refine your search.

Musicovery

Search engine for streamed online music. Choose music by genre and mood.

Spock - People Search

Spock is the first editable search engine for finding people on the web. This engine - still in beta - uses a combination of search engine technologies and user edits to aggregate the world's people information and make it searchable. Spock finds all kinds of information like websites, photos, videos, and blogs about people. Spock was started by Jay and Jaideep in 2006. Since receiving funding from Clearstone Venture Partners and Opus Capital Ventures, the Spock Team has grown to include engineers and scientists from top schools such as Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, Caltech, Princeton, and Carnegie Mellon.

WhoZat?

Calling itself the first interactive sematic people search engine, WhoZat? provides a "cloud" of areas of information about people. The focus is on meaning rather than words. Users are able to rate information, creating an interactive approach. This is a useful tool that will continue to expand and evolve.

blinkx

blinkx has built a reputation as the Remote Control for the Video Web. Now, with an index of over 26 million hours of searchable video and more than 350 media partnerships, including national broadcasters, commercial media giants, and private video libraries, it is a leader in searching online videos. Founded in 2004, blinkx searches videos in several ways, including speech to text that can translate from among many languages and capturing titles such as sports scores.

AltaVista Audio Search

AltaVista - a search engine that has been around many years - offers an audio search feature. It allows you to search for audio files in .wave .mp3, etc formats.

Congoo

Congoo is a news service, search engine and people index combined into one. It is a valuable tool for staying current on anything. Congoo News says it is the most comprehensive news source on the Web aggregating stories from over 25,000 free and subscription content sources.

Good Search

This is truly a "good" search engine. Every search you do - does some good. Every search that is done results in a contribution to a charity. A portion of the advertising revenue is sent to the charity of the day or another charity of your choice.

Rollyo

Roll-your-own search engine. This is a particularly interesting and flexible search engine that allows you to select the sites you want to search. If you have trusted Web sources in a certain area, you can simply roll your own search of those sites for information. By aggregating the search results from these sites together, you get a reliable list of returns.

Twitter: We Can Do What Google Can't - Michael Learmonth, Business Insider

Twitter sees lucrative opportunities in search, albeit a different kind of search than what Google offers, and, as co-founder Biz Stone told Ad Age recently, "we'll certainly be exploring those." In the future, searches won't only query what's being said at the moment, but will go out to the Twitter audience in the form of a question, like a faster and less-filtered Yahoo Answers or Wiki Answers. Users would be able to tap the collective knowledge of the 6 million or so members of the Twitterverse. http://search.twitter.com/

Wolfram Alpha: Next major search breakthrough? - Dan Farber, CNet news.cnet.com

Nova Spivack, CEO of Radar Networks, which developed Twine, an ambitious "interest network" Web application based on semantic Web technologies, said that Wolfram Alpha may be as "important for the Web (and the world) as Google, but for a different purpose." Spivack shared his initial impressions of Wolfram Alpha based on a two-hour conversation with Wolfram. "Wolfram Alpha is like plugging into a vast electronic brain. It provides extremely impressive and thorough answers to a wide range of questions asked in many different ways, and it computes answers, it doesn't merely look them up in a big database." "In this respect it is vastly smarter than (and different from) Google.