March 11, 2010
The New Browsys
Browsys, an all-in-one place for search tools, has had a makeover that I have just noticed.
All-in-one is still the theme but presentation is completely different. And of course all the Web 2.0 thing for sharing has been added.
+ Virtual Folders: Collections of tools - such as for Finance, Do-it-yourself sites, Sports. You can easily create your own - no signup required. But Browsys does not search all at one time - you pick from the folder where you want to run the search.
+ Search: Pick of a variety of search tools - enter the query and pick the tool. Unfortunately, does not group them into type - so Bing, YouTube, and Twitter are all in a line. There are 14 popular choices. It's not completely tested - Flickr is a choice and it returns the error message that it doesn't allow display of results inside frames.
+ Twoogle: a Browsys invention - search Google and Twitter at same time - results show in separate columns.
+ Advanced Finder: Nine overall categories. This looks like the old Browsys (and previously Intelways). It has not been updated - or fixed. Old names linger (Live), defunct sources (lii.org), and some search engines I wouldn't touch - not to mention links in the Academic set that don't work.
+ Sidepad: Like a bookmark list that sits on the left side. If you like the choices, you've got it made. I don't see a way to customize it.
+ Quiclip: "Here you can create a quick note containing text and/or URLs,
then share, tweet, IM or bookmark it with one single link."
+ TwoFind: Search Google and Bing - see results in separate columns will all the features of the two search engines. Saves on running two windows and resizing on your own. That's a keeper.
+ Maspedia: It's a mashup: wikipedia, video, twitter, image, news, blog, books, web - and then you can add a comment to facebook.
February 26, 2010
Yabigo has 3 great engines
Searching Google, Bing and Yahoo At The Same Time, Intelegia (Feb 26)
Describes new meta-search engine Yabigo - Yahoo, Bing, Google. Shows results in three columns, a keyword cloud, related search, and related video. Good find.
February 19, 2010
Getting the Web Buzz
Where to go to find what’s hot on the Web, The Next Web (Feb 17)
1) Why be interested in real-time at all? Charles Knight points to Why Right Now is a Big Thing: 5 Users Who Care About Real Time Search (April 13, 2009) - only the "brand manager" has to do with real work - others are curiousity, ego, and getting ideas (a good reason).
2) Sources to use to find out current popular topics and keywords.
+ Google Trends
+ Twitter trending topics
+ Yahoo Buzz
+ Bing XRank
+ The Surchur real time board - a metasearch of trend trackers including the four above.
Warning - most buzz is about celebrities and news stories in the United States. Today, of course, it's Tiger Woods and many Winter Olympics events.
February 16, 2010
qrobe.it
Qrobe.it - new metasearch engine with several attractive features.
Qrobe.it (pronounced Krobe) will search the web using Google, Bing and Ask (you choose) and collate results, and images using Google and Bing.
+ it shows sources for each result
+ offers a More search (sets up a site search with your query)
+ has continuous scrolling - no need to page through
+ has cached copy at the source engine.
+ the Peek opens in a "modal" window - almost full window on top of Qrobe that gives the full view. Controls at the bottom let you go back and forward through the results using this view.
There is also location - where you can identify your country. The search interface then offers the option to search only Canadian - except it didn't work when I ran the search. To my knowledge the US Government (gov) has not relocated to Canada - (though we might consider the inverse). But ranking of results was a bit different - location is doing something.
I was very impressed at the ranking. Running my standard search of arctic exploration I found three terrific resources that I hadn't seen before in the top three spots.
But the coolest feature is the box that appears when you mouseover the arrow to the right of the result (in the style of Bing) that presents tools for sharing, saving, verifying, shortening the url (for Tweeting), and translating.
For another review, see Qrobe Is The First Metasearch Engine That Adds To What Bing And Google Offer, The Next Web (Feb 16)
January 31, 2010
SearchZooka Video on Advanced Search
SearchZooka helps people create advanced search queries at Google, Yahoo< Bing, Ask, Digg, Technorati, Delicious. The video describes the advanced search options and explains how you can use these. The first 5 minustes is an excellent tutorial on advanced searching. The remainder shows how to use the SearchZooka interface and take advantage of its features to save and rerun searches. Only 9:19 min.
January 25, 2010
Blind search test
Test the search engines up against each other, by Pandia (Jan
Hakia has launched NoBrandSearch to show non-branded search results from two engines - out of a possible set of Yahoo, Bing, Google, Hakia. Click on the result set you like to get the names of what you are looking at.
January 17, 2010
AddALL for Book Search
Metasearch eBooks With Addall, Research Buzz (Jan 7)
AddALL -- "searches over 30 ebook sites to find stuff for you to read. " Searches ebooks, in print, used books, magazines, music and movies.
Search Zooka for Advanced Search
Create and Launch Advanced Search to Several Places at One Time, Research Buzz (Jan 12)
Tara Calishain points out that with meta-search engine Search Zooka you can compose advanced query using fields and limitations. Searches are done sequentially on engines - not collectively. You can recover a search done earlier and continue with modifications.
I agree that SearchZooka simplifies advanced search by showing the options and by allowing one to run the same query against different engines. However, the interface is complex. If you use this, be sure to click on the engine name to get results - these will show on a separate search engine results page - not Search Zooka's page.
Search engines: Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask, Digg, Technorati, Delicious,
January 02, 2010
Comparison Search Engines
4 Comparison Search Tools You May Not Know About … But Should by Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Dec 29. 2009)
These comparison search tools show results from different search engines side-by-side - making it easy for you to see the differences.
+ Search3 - Google, Twitter, Bing - you can change the order and substitute eBay for one of the columns. Does the same for image search but the choices are Google, Bing, Yahoo and Flickr.
+ Googawwho? - - pick 2 out of 8 engines - but there are only four you'd want: Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask.
+ Panabee - two side-by-side from Google, Bing, Twitter, Amazon, Wikipedia, and others - shows the actual search results page.
There's also a tool for comparing maps. MapsCompare - Maps Compare lets you compare the map search results of four sites on a single page: Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, Bing Maps, and Google Earth. This is much easier than setting up four windows.
December 12, 2009
Leapfish - meta real-time search
LeapFish Integrates Digg, Facebook, Crunchbase and Scribd, Altsearchengines (Dec
Reminder: LeapFish, a new multi-media and real-time search, communication, and sharing platform, announced today the integration of four new services. The search platform now includes results from Digg, Facebook, Crunchbase and Scribd, expanding its reach for consumers on every search.
December 07, 2009
nowGoogle Guide to search tools
nowGoogle is a new all-in-one type of meta-search. Select type of search - web, books, downloads, ebooks, images, video - and more; and a list of search tools for each. For web search, this includes Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask, Clusty. Alltheweb and Altavista are on the list - rather pointless since they use the Yahoo database. This search engine is interesting for what it brings together for the non-web-search groupings.
But - how do they get away with the name nowGoogle?
October 08, 2009
HealthMash - vertical search
HealthMash is a (somewhat) new federated web search engine for medical and health materials that uses the semantic search technologies of WebLib.
From the About page:
"Our mission is to promote health and well being in the world by providing personally relevant information from trusted health sites on the Web. HealthMash™ is powered by the world's most sophisticated Health Knowledge Base that captures the expertise of medical professionals and people everywhere practicing the art of living and healing and the Wisdom of the Ages."
A broad search at HealthMash nicely shows methods for exploring related concepts, tests and treatments, and health concerns. The federated search across the health sites organizes results by topic (semantically determined), and shows boxes of different resource types - articles, books, images, news, video etc. As well, there are controls to limit the search to any of those sources. All of this creates a dashboard of tools for the searcher to explore and refine line of inquiry. I find it easy to use, and on my queries, the sources were "trusted".
Altsearchengines' medical librarian Hope Leman interviewed the CEO - Hope interviews HealthMash CEO Endre Jofoldi (Jan 23, 2009)
The interview reveals that HealthMash uses Pubmed/Medline and MayoClinic among others, and identifies the Health Knowledge Base as the distinguishing feature and advantage of HealthMash.
HealthMash was developed by WebLib, the same company who created the federated search engines, AllPlus and PolyMeta, both of which are very useful for general web searching.
September 12, 2009
The new Kartoo
Try an interactive search experience with KartOO, Altsearchengines (Sept 9)
Kartoo Technologies in France has developed a new visual search engine. There is this demo site with a topical presentation.
The Kartoo that we used to know with map-like presentation of results as notepads on a desktop has changed. The new interface at Kartoo.com shows results in two ways: a page with three results three at a time, each in its own panel and with a thumbnail shot; and as a map of nodes with connectors. You can toggle from one to the other using two controls in the search bar. There is also a scrolling news bar on the left.
Those are the default settings. You can change everything under Options. There are button-like symbols for changing the content of the sidebar - news, games, topics, images, sponsors. There are other buttons for changing the form the map page takes. There is certainly lots to play with here.
Kartoo also keeps search history.
(Note - entry revised Dec 29, 2009)
September 09, 2009
Super Search All-in-one
The Top 160 search engines – Super Search Add-0n, by Charles Knight, AltSearchEngines (July 27)
Assembling and organizing many search tools into one has been done many times over the latest of which is this new Super Search Add-on for Firefox. This article lists the 160 search tools in Super Search. There are some advantages to having this - search tools are nicely organized to make it easier for you to pick the right one for the job, and it will save you the time of assembling these. The downside is that there may be some you will never use and others you need that aren't there - Canadians won't be interested in all the US Government search tools on the list. Keeping these up to date is always a challenge too.
July 10, 2009
Ixquick is now Startpage
IxQuick Changes Name To Startpage, by Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Jul 7)
Ixquick, a metasearch engine that was one of the earliest, has cloned itself into Startpage . It changed its name but still shows Ask/Teoma - Ask hasn't been Teoma for years. However, it does list Bing (not Live), and Cuil (relatively new), and QkPort, a portal in the UK.
Scoring system for ranking seems to be the same - a star for everytime a result is in the top 10 of one of the search engines.
Of course, Startpage complies with the Ixquick privacy policy to not save the IP number or any other private data on any search. You really can search anonymously here.
Ixquick still exists but it has slightly different search engines (no Lycos, Qkport, or Cuil) and slightly different handling.
Official Announcement: Announcing Startpage: A New Name for the World's Most Private Search Engine
Maybe Ixquick, based in Netherlands, thinks that Startpage will be more attractive to English-speaking users.
June 17, 2009
Google and Bing
3 Tools to Compare Google and Bing Search Results, by Ann Smarty, Search Engine Journal (Jun 8)
Here's a good idea - use metasearch tools to search Google and Bing and compare results.
+ Compare Google and Bing - based in Germany
+ Bingle - pretty basic.
+ Bing and Google (that really is the name)
But surely there is a Firefox extension for this somewhere.
May 11, 2009
Search Me Stacks
SearchMe, the visual search engine, displays results in thumbnail pages, easy to read and easty to click through to the next. It's a meta-searcher in that you can move smoothly form web, to video, to images and blogs. Gather your picks into a Stack, and share that collection with others.
Postscript Dec 29, 2009 - Searchme ran out of money in mid-2009 and closed. Pity.
April 03, 2009
Previews at MelZoo
MelZoo is a new metasearch engine (in beta) whose distinguishing feature is that it shows visual previews - results in the left pane, and full page of result in the right.
There is no information on which web search engines it uses, and it is clearly in the early stages of developing and demoing the interface.
March 29, 2009
Social Media Metasearch
Social Mention searches social media: blogs, microblogs (twitter), bookmarks - and more. You can control on date and source - though you have to figure out sources on your own.
Bookmarks come from diigo, clipmarks, stumbleupon - but not delicious!,
Reviewed by Wendy Boswell at About.com - Social Mention. - Says that "Social Mention is a great way to grab what's fresh and new on your topic from all across the Web, organized into one tidy stream of information."
Pandia on Leapfish
Innovative metasearch from LeapFish, Pandia (Mar
Pandia likes the new metasearchers LeapFish.
"LeapFish is a relatively new metasearch engine with a click-free search interface that delivers search results as you type: instantaneous results as each character of a search term is entered. You don’t need to click the search button, then wait and click it again after you have refined your search."
March 08, 2009
Agent55
Agent55 - metasearch engine from Sweden with many country versions. It's a kind of all-in-one with several tabs with search tools grouped. Results are displayed by engine - page by page - and not collated. It does show "what's new" - most meta search engines tell you nothing at all. Has an option for creating your own search categories and engines.
The US version is at http://us.agent55.com/ - in case you can't find the button to click.
February 01, 2009
Full Privacy at Ixquick
Dutch search engine ignores IP addresses, by Out-Law.com via The Register (Jan 29)
Ixquick, a meta-search engine based in the Netherlands, will not collect the IP address on searches at all. Previously, the IP address was deleted at 48 hours.
"Google reduced the time that it kept addresses first to 18 months and then, last September, to nine months. Yahoo! announced in December that it would only retain the addresses for three months.
Search engines have said that they need to keep IP addresses to improve the usefulness, security and functionality of their services. Privacy watchdogs have said that the information should not be kept for longer than necessary to make the services work."
January 24, 2009
Dogpile Helps Pets
Here's a good reason to use Dogpile for web meta search.
"Dogpile has raised $250,000 in just two months for pets in need, the metasearch engine announced Friday. Its goal is to raise $1 million by the end of 2009. Dogpile raises the money each time a user conducts a search. The more searches conducted on the site, the more Dogpile can contribute to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), as well as other animal-related charities. The Dogpile "Search and Rescue" program will continue through the end of 2009."
From Daily Tidbits - Webware.
January 23, 2009
Microblog Meta-search
The Rise (And Fall?) Of Real-Time Search by Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Jan 22)
Want to search what people are microblogging about this very moment? Some say this is good for picking up instantly breaking news. Two new services will do it, but for how long? They are Twingly and PubSub.
Twingly searches Twitter, Jaiku (Google has shut this), Identi.ca and others.
I tried a search on Osgoode subway for stories on the shooting in Toronto on January 22 and got a respectable set of results including a twittered link to Mathew Ingram on Live Blogs - A Learning Process (Jan 23)
But Twitter is making motions to block access to its stream which will make it more difficult for the meta-search microblog engines.
LeapFish is Fast Meta Searcher
New Search Engine Hopes to Leap Over the Competition—LeapFish.com by Paula J. Hane, Newsbreaks (Jan 22)
Leapfish is a new meta-search engine, offering a choice of Google, Yahoo, or MSN as the main search and combining that with Google blog search, videos, images, news - to name the main ones. It shows results from several media types using the look that Ask.com introduced and abandoned. Leapfish is yet one more (Allplus.com is another) to adopt this design to good effect.
From the review:
"Currently, LeapFish aggregates and organizes content from many portals—YouTube.com videos, blogs, news websites, photos, and more—with a single search on one page. The search box seeks to reassure visitors, "It’s ok, you’re not cheating on Google." It even claims to learn a user’s habits. The company says the "revolutionary new search service uses proprietary hyper-threading technology to communicate with a growing list of over 200 online authorities, currently under development, to deliver more than just relevancy to users." The site says it uses technologies similar to those found at major portals such as DogPile.com."
It is fast - showing results as you type - there is no search box to click on. For web searches, you can use the target search engine's advanced syntax (eg intitle:). It's attractive because of the two-pane display, and at the moment, it is not loaded down with sponsored ads.
January 07, 2009
Search Social Media
SocialMention -- "Social Mention is a social media search engine that searches user-generated content such as blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, news, videos, and microblogging services."
Digs into many sources
Use the Advanced Search to limit by type of source or even a particular location. Can also use quotation marks to force words together.
Try it for someone you know is very active on the Web or view this search for Stephen Abram.
December 07, 2008
Four Oldtimer MetaSearch Engines
Can you ditch Google for a metasearch engine? by Don Reisinger, Webware (Dec 5)
There aren't many articles that promote metasearch engines, and least of all these oldies: Clusty, Dogpile, Kartoo, and Mamma. Article seems to recommend in an offhand way Clusty and Dogpile. Frankly, I'd reduce that to only Clusty because it uses the Vivisimo clustering technology.
December 03, 2008
Dogpile Search and Rescue
Dogpile raises money for pets in need by Don Reisinger, Webware (Dec 2)
Here's a good reason for using Dogpile in spite of the way it intermixes sponsored results with organic.
"Metasearch engine Dogpile announced Tuesday that it has raised $100,000 toward its goal of raising $1 million to help pets in need."
November 29, 2008
GoshMe is Back
GoshMe is back online. (Thank-you to Eric Sieverts for this news).
GoshMe assists in identifying databases that might have an answer to your interest. In 2006 when it launched Beta 3.0 it said that it could search 1,350 search engines and databases simultaneously. Search could be ALL or ANY and the Advanced Search Advanced allowed filtering on category, subcategory, and sub-subcategory of interest.
It's still in beta but the number of databases and engines is now 2,520. GoshMe requires registration to use - and it's worth it. Search broadly on a topic to see what databases GoshMe can recommend. My experience has been that GoshMe can pick out very relevant sites to explore in depth. The GoshMe link takes you to a search at the target site - and you can refine it as needed.
November 02, 2008
GoshMe Gone
Goshme, which enabled identification and search of target databases, seems to have closed. The dreaded "Address Not Found" comes up because the host server could not be found. This had been an experimental search project by a Brazilian company. It began around 2005 and required registration to use the beta. It held great promise, but perhaps lacked the marketing budget to become widely known. Also - it's hard to fight the impulse to just search Google.
October 25, 2008
Federated Search Primer
Introduction to Federated Search by Jill Hurst-Wahl, FUMSI (Oct 2008)
Federated search, as this article so clearly describes, is "a discovery tool that allows the user to find information quickly from multiple sources". On the Web we know it as metasearch, and Vivisimo / Clusty has been an example of this for many years.
Federated search software is bought by organizations who are looking for a single interface to search across many data sources in the organization. Jill Hurst-Wahl gives us a very clear and concise account of what the software does, the features it may have, shortcomings and benefits, and considerations for choosing.
7 New Search Tools
7 Search Tools You May Not Know … But Should by Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Oct 21)
These are 7 new search tools each with a different twist. Some do web - offering selection of several tools, some do images, one does recommendations and one finds tickets. The twists are mainly in interface and display.
+ Fasteagle - multi-tool, all-in-one kind of search - except choices are limited.
+ Kedrix - meta search - Google, Yahoo, Live, Ask - individual tabs. This approach has been used before (many times - Zuula is one). Some love this kind of engine, but it's tough for these guys to stay in business.
+ Soovle - wonder if they meant swivil, or maybe it's so-o-vle? Either way - Soovle expands search terms as you type to show suggestions from 6 centres (Google, Ask, Yahoo, Wikipedia, YouTube, Answers) - and you then choose which suggestion you want to try and where. Interesting idea, not very helpful in practice. Screen is difficult to read (Firefox 3.0), and suggestions are always going to be very elementary, common phrase expansions.
+ Facesaerch - great film-strip type of display of faces matching your search term.
+ CompFight - has features for searching Flickr, whether on text or tag, Creative Commons or original, safe search. Search for Utah rocks - some fantastic photos.
+ Tastekid - recommendation engine - these are always time sinks where you can spend hours telling the engine about your likes and dislikes and sometimes get a good recommendation, but most of the time not.
+ Fansnap - finds tickets - works with ticket providers in the United States
September 21, 2008
Njouba metasearch
Njouba - meta-search engine that will search the Web and variety of audio / video (MP3, Torrent, Image).
No information on which web search engines. Very basic.
August 30, 2008
Metasearch hohum
10 Meta-Search Engines Reviewed and Compared, Ann Smarty, Search Engine People (Aug 27)
This overview of metasearch engines is not a warm endorsement - says that mos are "are no better than an individual search engine " but that could be because of the ones listed: Clusty (deserves better recommendation for its Vivisimo clustering), Mamma, Dogpile and Metacrawler (siblings), iXquick, iBoogie (old and not supported), Surfwax (also old).
Based on these (except for Clusty) I wouldn't recommend metasearch engines either. However, article does mention some exceptions -
+ Fuzzfind searches Google, Yahoo, Live and Delicious
+ Langreiter compares placement of results Google to Yahoo - this idea of showing lines connecting dots has been used before.
Many metasearch engines wil l cluster results into topics. Look for that type and don't bother with the rest. AllPlus and Polymeta (siblings) are of that type.
July 22, 2008
Scour for points
Social Search Engine Scour.com Launches EContent (Jul 15)
"Scour.com launched as a "meta" social search engine, which encourages voting and commentary on search engine query results called from Google, Yahoo! and MSN." Users can vote and comment on search results, and indicate preferred engines. Scour also lets people redeem search points for VISA gift cards.
June 09, 2008
Katapulco All-in-one
Katapulco - Search Faster With Multiple Shortcuts AltSearchEngines (June 6)
You have to love shortcuts to use Katapluco - but it's got what it takes to be an all-in-one page. Has a version for Quebec.
"Shortcut-driven search home page Katapulco just launched a new feature called “Multiple Shortcuts,” which now allows users to query multiple search engines at once using only shortcuts such as “gi” for Google Images and “w” for Wikipedia – no clicking necessary. For example, to search “Mozart” on Flicker, Google Images and Yahoo Images, users can type “Mozart” and then “g gi yi” in the shortcut box. Katapulco includes shortcuts for more than 90 English search engines and 50+ in other languages."
May 29, 2008
AllPlus - impressive new metaseach engine
WebLib Launches Universal Meta-Search and Discovery Engine Newsbreaks (May 30)
AllPlus - new metasearch engine with "universal" search qualities. Has adopted the three-pane design used by Ask to show clusters on the left (tree and graph), web results in the center, and selections from news, images, video and blog on the right. The cluster tree shows topics - fairly descriptive rather than the one-word form used at several metasearchers. The graph is done through Java - will be slower to load but is worth the wait in order to fine tune the search.
"AllPlus, the web’s first universal metasearch and clustering engine has been released by WebLib (www.weblib.com). AllPlus simultaneously searches the major U.S. search engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask.com) for webpages, news, videos, images, and blogs, and it presents all the results in an intuitive and clearly organized way through its Web 2.0 interface."
Web 2.0 interface is effective. Tool does show source search engine for result (MSN, Google etc). It doesn't provide any controls on choice of engine, number of results, or an "advanced" search form. But that's fine - it's still impressive. Allplus is a keeper.
May 12, 2008
Addict-o-matic is addictive
Addict-o-matic Angles for Web 2.0 Metasearch Turf by Woody Evans, Newsbreaks (May 12)
Addict-o-matic -- "This search engine pulls from the "best live sites on the web for the latest news, blog posts, videos and images." Some of these live sites include major blogging houses (WordPress, Bloglines, and Twitter) and blog search engines, video and vlogging sites (YouTube and Truveo), and all the likely suspects for major folksonomic searching (Digg, Technorati, and even Flickr, plus 15 other sites and engines)."
This really is meta search for news. News items from the 22 sources appear in squares. These can be moved around according to need. Browsing is very easy.
Would be nice to be able to select the sources and do own mix-and-match.
April 25, 2008
Update to Dogpile
Dogpile.com Updates Search Algorithm, Design and Content Search Engine Watch (Apr 24)
Dogpile, the meta search engine owned by InfoSpace, has "an updated search algorithm, design and new partner content".
Dogpile searches Google, Yahoo, Live and Ask, picks up sponsored ads from Google and Yahoo. It also has search tabs for images, audio, video, news, white and yellow pages.
April 11, 2008
Tag Metasearch
Taggylicio.us searches tags at Flickr and Photobucket (for images), YouTube (for video), Digg and Reddit (for news stories), and del.icio.us (the only social bookmarking entry). I don't see the advantage of combining the image/video with text - entirely different bodies of information. Also, tags don't have much information and are idiosyncratically used. Keep to simple words - one at a time.
March 27, 2008
TripleMe MetaSearch
Tripleme.com is a new metasearch engine from independent software developer Andrew Sorokin. It searches MSN, Google, and Yahoo and displays results in three columns (ads are in the fourth).
Mr Sorokin lists these as being "new and innovative" features:
- new way of displaying results: only TripleMe displays results in three columns on one page in the World. It fetches results from Google , MSN , Yahoo on one page.
- Most of metasearch engines supports only English, TripleMe supports all languages !
- It supports all results - maps, news, products, books. It automatically analyse results structure.
- Spelling suggestion from 3 search engines!
There is also a button for removing duplicates (which you will want to use).
See the New Way of Internet Searching Today by Andrew at the TripleMe blog.
March 25, 2008
Try iSeek
New metasearch engine, iSeek, does a nice job of clustering by entities - for example, topics, people, places, date, source. It will search the Web or Education (selected sites). The Web appears to be Yahoo, Google, MSN, Ask, and iSeek itself.
It uses "advanced linguistic, conceptual, and AI technologies to make web search better - more relevant, direct, productive, and intelligent".
See iSeek About Us.
Mentioned in The iSEEK Search Engine - Targeted Discovery AltSearchEngine (Mar 24)
Worth trying.
March 06, 2008
SortFix Search Aids
Metasearch engine SortFix offers new take on search results Pandia (Mar 6)
Pandia interviewed Yohay Barsky at the new metasearcher, SortFix.. It has some tools for suggesting refinements.
"SortFix is a metasearch engine that searches Google, Yahoo and dmoz. What sets it apart from other metasearch engines is the way it presents the search result. SortFix gives you a drag-and-drop interface which assists the user to describe a detailed and precise query."
February 23, 2008
Pandia MetaSearch Engines
Pandia Search updated its guide to metasearch engines.
It has its own powersearch metasearch that takes in Yahoo, MSN, Altavista (duplicates Yahoo), Fast (now Yahoo's Alltheweb - happened years ago), Hotbot (which picks up from Ask, MSN, and LyGo Beta - which is Lycos' new visual search engine and it uses Ask (I think). It's all very incestuous.
However, I wouldn't say that the list of metasearch engines is compelling. It's mainly due to the nature of the business. Metasearch engines are aging and many are down to a couple of sources. Ez2find used to be excellent - and still has nice features - but the 'metasearch' only used DMOZ and MSN.
Might also use my list in WebSearchGuide Research - select Best Meta-SEs (though I too should be doing some updating.)
I would add the new clustering engine - Carrot2.org.
February 08, 2008
SearchQuilt does big sweep
SearchQuilt is a new metasearch type engine that finds videos, images, web, blogs and more. Google is the underlying search engine for web, news, blogs, and likely video. Also searches Google Groups.
Try it for Elizabeth May.
Some syntax appears to work:
site:ca tarsands - finds web, news, blogs, images - no video
intitle:winter olympics - picks up web, news, images, video, blogs
From Mashware: "SearchQuilt is a new "universal search engine" where you can search for videos, images, blogs, news, auctions, and products all on one page. It's basically a birds-eye view of what you're searching for. The homepage features popular searches from Yahoo, AOL, Google, and Technorati, so you can also use SearchQuilt to keep on top of what's buzzing."
A worthy addition to metasearch.
Sputtr collects more engines
Sputtr.com Aims to Unite Entire Search Engine Industry in a Single Multi-Search Engine -- Announces Release of New Feature Press Release (Feb 4)
"Sputtr (www.sputtr.com), the leading multi-search engine with thousands of users worldwide, today announced the release of a major new feature that gives its users the ability to actively participate in building the world's largest and most comprehensive multi-search engine."
Yikes - Sputtr has a gazillion buttons (actually 100 search engines) already - now people are being invited to add more. Charles Knight at AltSearchEngines likes it, which counts for something.
"Charles Knight, editor at influential blogs ReadWriteWeb (www.readwriteweb.com) and AltSearchEngines (www.altsearchengines.com) adds: "I have watched Sputtr's progress for a long time, and this is the moment that I have been waiting for, the ability to select from the vast array of alternative search engines that we enjoy so much on AltSearchEngines. Congratulations, Sputtr! ""
January 30, 2008
Zuula Added Stuff
Zuula Adds Video Search, Launches Search Toolbar, and Increases Blog Search Options PRWeb (Jan 30)
"Zuula LLC today officially announced several important upgrades to its Internet search service, Zuula (www.zuula.com). The Zuula service has been significantly enhanced with the addition of video search, the release of the Zuula search toolbar, and the addition of Blogdimension to the blog search engines available at Zuula."
January 24, 2008
Remix Clustering at Clusty
Introducing Clustering 2.0 By Raul Valdes-Perez, Search Done Right (Jan 22)
Vivisimo has taken clustering results into folders one step further by offering the option to have a second pass to see the less dominant topics. Vivisimo determines the topical folders on the fly from analysis of the first 250 words or so. With remix-clustering, it looks for the secondary topics.
"With a single click, remix clustering answers the question: What other, subtler topics are there? It works by clustering again the same search results, but with an added input: ignore the topics that the user just saw. Typically, the user will then see new major topics that didn’t quite make the final cut at the last round, but may still be interesting."
This can be seen at Clusty. Run a search, review the topics, and then click on the Remix button in the left panel. Eg recession economics
The user can remix the same set repeatedly for a deeper and fuller view of the overall topic.
Also see Consummate Clustering, KMWorld (Jan 23) - "Remix clustering functionality is built into Vivisimo's Velocity 6.0."
Clusty has added other features over the past 2 or 3 months to make results more "universal" or "blended".
- weather for US cities; eg Seattle .
- news headlines; eg iraq (News comes from Yahoo along with photos)
- shopping results from Shopzilla; eg cameras
- cached copy for each result
But it has not added to its list of target web search engines of Ask, Gigablast, and Live.
January 17, 2008
Carrot for Clustering
Clustering Search Results With Carrot ResearchBuzz (Dec 15, 2007)
Short review of Carrot, a clustering search engine with several algorithms.
"I did find some of Carrot’s clusterings not particularly useful; “Easy” and “News” aren’t much in the way of topics. Carrot however does offer different clustering options. Click on the “Show Search Options” and you’ll get a dropdown menu with six different ways to cluster your search results. “Lingo” appears to be the default, but I liked STC as an option as well (it’s the last item on the drop-down menu.)"
January 16, 2008
Carrot Clustering Engine
January 2008 InfoTip: Clustering On Demand by Mary Ellen Bates (Jan 2008)
Evaluating search results and deciding on what to look at is enormously assisted by search engines that cluster results into topical groups. Mary Ellen Bates describes her use of the Carrot Clustering Engine which will cluster search results obtained from the meta-search engine, eTools.ch. Carrot2 has six clustering algorithms that can be used.
December 26, 2007
Best Metasearch engines
Get Your Meta On with One Dozen Metasearch Engines SEO Scoop (Nov 26)
Names 12 meta-search engines. Some are really the same InfoSpace-based engine - Excite, Dogpile, Metacrawler and Info.com - and of these I recommend Info.com as the clearest for display and variety of collections.
Myriad Search looks interesting but it lists Ask Jeeves, a telltale sign that the metasearch engine is not being kept up to date.
There is also my list of Best Meta Search Engines
October 24, 2007
AfterVote says search socially
AfterVote - a new metasearch engine - takes results from Google, Yahoo, MSN - and then weight them by votes from members.
"weight them against our own database to see what our users have said about where positions should be, and apply that weight to the results. Sometimes users have their own custom algorithm, and in that case you choose how to rank the results, not us."
You can get Google's page rank and the Alexa rating. To cap it off there is a sort by Digg.
Has possibilities. But these new metasearch engines come and go - especially after Google blocks access.
October 18, 2007
Update on Infospace
With Dogpile Beating Google In Satisfaction, Owner InfoSpace Needs To Reinvent Itself, Be Risky With Metasearch Search Engine Land (Oct 18)
Update on Infospace, rapidly disappearing into the Web sunset as it sells of its assets. "So what's left? Specifically Dogpile and its cousins Metacrawler, Webcrawler and the domain InfoSpace.com. " But people still like Dogpile. Must all be in the name. Metacrawler, a near clone, has better features, and Info.com who must license Infospace in some agreement, has a much better display of the web metasearch results. Just a matter of time.
October 13, 2007
Thagoo for metasearching tags
Information Trapping for Tags: Thagoo ResearchBuzz (Oct 7)
"If you’re looking for more tag sites to do information trapping, check out Thagoo. It’s a tag meta-search site that offers RSS feeds for search results."
Thagoo really is a metasearcher of social bookmarking sites - BlogMarks, del.icio.us, Mr Wong, MyWebYahoo - more. Hope it's around for a while.
October 09, 2007
Ixquick adds Blinkx
Video Search Blinkx Meets Meta-Search Engine Ixquick Search Engine Journal (Oct 8)
"Powerful meta-search engine Ixquick announced today that it has partnered with top video search engine blinkx. Under the agreement agreed upon by both companies, Ixquick will be displaying the blinkx search box on its website to give Ixquick users a powerful way of doing video search into blinkx more than 14 million video content."
July 03, 2007
Sputtr
Sputtr gives you one single interface to a large number of search engines , Pandia (Jun )
Sputtr is a new all-in-one engine with 35 search buttons - too much.
May 25, 2007
History of Metasearch
Let’s Talk Metasearch, Federated Search, or Universal Search, ResourceShelf (May 16) excellent article reviewing the history of metasearch.
May 16, 2007
Diigo Research Tool
Diigo does a very good job of searching tags across several sources and presenting results, and can also serve as a collaborative research tool.
On a search for classification it picked up results from del.icio.us, Yahoo MyWeb, Bloglines, Technorati, and Digg - a mix of social bookmarks and blog postings. Google links comes into play when you inquire on a specific article - but the Google backwards link search is known for being incomplete and weak. This information is displayed on the About page for each result along with tags, bookmarking names, postings, and comments -- all in all a very informative page.
But Diigo is more than a metasearcher. It's a collaborative research tool. You can form groups here, and add your bookmarks to Diigo and other services you use. In addition you can clip pages and add stick-notes.
From the Diigo about page - " Diigo (dee'go) is about "Social Annotation". By combining social bookmarking, clippings, in situ annotation, tagging, full-text search, easy sharing and interactions, Diigo offers a powerful personal tool and a rich social platform for knowledge users, and in the process, turns the entire web into a writable, participatory and interactive media."
CNet editors gave Diigo a 7.3 rating in CNET editors' review, Reviewed by: Elsa Wenzel (Sept 28, 2006)
"Diigo is an online bookmarking tool with a twist. Sometimes, merely saving a bunch of tagged Web sites to a list of favorites is not enough. Ever wanted to highlight one cool corner of a Web page? Do you wish you could scribble on various Web sites to collect recipes, plan a vacation, or write a big research paper, then share your notes? Diigo can help you do that."
April 03, 2007
fissh! shmish
fisssh!, a meta search engine, is launched SEW Blog (Apr 3)
Another new meta-search engine. fisssh (like anyone is going to be able to remember how many s's) seems to give lots of choice but the layout makes it very hard to take in what came from where.
March 30, 2007
eTools.ch from Europe
A "Swiss Army" Meta Search Engine by Chris Sherman, Searchengineland (Mar 30)
Chris Sherman speaks warmly of this new meta-search engine - eTools.ch . It's unique in that it lets you weight the importance of the source engines - Altavista, Ask, Google, MSN and others. I like it for the way it shows results from each source in the side panel. I would like it more if it had clustering.
"Enter a query and eTools.ch searches the four major search engines (Ask, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo), several European engines (Seekport, Entireweb and Bluewin) and oddly, AltaVista and Lycos, two all-but-forgotten stars of yore. Results display your query terms highlighted in yellow, a preview link, and the source of the result. Each source is linked, allowing you to quickly re-run the search in any of the ten engines queried. By default, results are multi-lingual, but drop-down boxes let you limit results by country or language."
March 21, 2007
Search Agent Allth.at
Allth.at looks like a search engine but it's really a search agent that will keep searching on your behalf. Cool tool - searches several engines (you can add more), search can be refined (focus on, filter out), and saved, and you can be alerted of new results through email or by subscribing to a RSS feed to Google Reader, Yahoo page and others. I found that although I could add Ask.com and Exalead, they didn't return results. There are three groupings for the meta-search: Web, SHopping, and News - each with a small selection of services.
Allth.at Launches Innovative Search Agents App by Richard MacManus, Read/WriteWeb (Mar 20)
"It's a search agent that allows you to define a search topic, then refine it with the use of filters, and finally subscribe to it via email or RSS. It's similar in many respects to PubSub, the now defunct 'future search' engine that I was a fan of. "
February 21, 2007
Info.com Adds Product Research
Info.com partners with Become.com for Best of the Web Product Research and Comparison Shopping, Business Wire (Feb 20)
"Info.com, a search platform for broad web and vertical search engines, today announced a partnership with Become.com, the only online shopping website that allows Info.com’s millions of users to research products comprehensively with full featured comparison shopping and pricing through their powerful shopping service."
January 30, 2007
SearchGuy.com Redesign
Searchguy.com is a metasearch engine that uses Google, MSN, Yahoo, Ask, and Looksmart. It has similar functionality to Metacrawler or Jux2 in that it can show what a selected engine is missing. There are a few extra tools for News and Product search.
The Premier Meta-Search Engine, SearchGuy.com announces launch of the beta version of its refreshing new design with enhanced features., PR Newswire via Marketwatch (Jan 29)
January 25, 2007
Meta book search
BookSearch X3 - a meta search engine that claims to search inside books from Amazon (A9.com), Google.com and MSN Live Search - at the same time
Reviewed in Search Three Book Searches at Once, Researchbuzz (Jan 20)
January 16, 2007
Faganfinder update
Michael Fagan Updates Image Search Portion of FaganFinder, ResourceShelf (Jan 15)
Michael Fagan has been updating at the image search section of his excellent mega-directory of search tools - FaganFinder.
January 12, 2007
Zuula Meta Search
Zuula is a new meta-search engine for web, news, images, and blogs. For the Web, it searches Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, Gigablast, and Exalead, but it does not collate results; results are presented for each engine through tabs.
See review at Zuuala Meta Search Engine Search Engine Land (Jan 11)
December 09, 2006
PageBull Metasearch
PageBull — new visual metasearch engine, Pandia (Nov 29)
"Pagebull metasearch engine presents results as screenshots of the listed web pages."
You have to like a checkerboard layout and be able to adjust your eyes to different fonts, colours, and styles.
November 07, 2006
Info.com
Info.com Expands Its Search Capabilities -- Pixsy and Oodle added to best of breed search tools, PR Newswire via Marketwatch (Nov 6)
Info.com, an all-in-one plus metasearch search service, has added more search tools.
"Powered by the Pixsy Media Search Platform, Video.info.com enables Info.com users to search and discover millions of online videos in popular categories including celebrity, news, viral, entertainment, sports and travel. This flexible, private label media search engine aggregates video content from across the web from leading providers including YouTube, Revver, Blastro, BusinessWeek, Hollywood.com, AddictingClips.com, Grouper, MetaCafe, Reuters, Sharkle, USA Today and dozens more."
November 02, 2006
SearchItAll - All-in-one
SearchItAll.com -- the ''Big Kahuna of Web Search Portals'' -- Delivers One-Click Access to 20 Top Search Engines Plus over 200 Popular Web Sites; ''Lightning Fast'' on Both Desktop PCs and Handheld Devices, Business Wire via Marketwatch (Nov 1)
It's hard not to like an all-in-one search site that calls itself the "big kahuna".
"SearchItAll.com provides rapid searches on Alexa.com, Alltheweb, AltaVista, AOL Search, Ask.com, Excite, Gigablast, Google, Hotbot, LookSmart, Lycos, Mamma, Metacrawler, Microsoft Live Search, Netscape Search, Open Directory, Search.com, Webcrawler, Wisenut, and Yahoo."
But, this has the weakness of many of these tools - there is no value in being able to search Alltheweb, Altavista and Yahoo - it's the same database; or Ask and Lycos - Lycos uses Ask. SearchItAll isn't doing a meta-search - you must select the engine you want from a pull-down list.
"The Web site won't win any awards for glitz or glamour, but its beauty resides in its remarkable functionality. SearchItAll.com is built without a single graphic, with 100% of the site's focus on the highest density of quality Web links and fast access to the Web's top search engines."
It is true that Searchitall presents a very grey, bland page of about 200 popular web sites. These sites, however, are top quality ones and are well organized on the page into sections. The page will be of most value to people in the US especially for the collections under money and finance, jobs and careers, government, shopping. However, non-US users will appreciate the collections for web and computers, super reference, entertainment and possibly humor (which is overweighted on this page).
October 24, 2006
WebFetchPro for the UK
WebFetchPro by Phil Bradley, SEW Blog (Oct 23)
WebFetchPro is a new metasearch engine from Infospace with tabs for the Web, Images, Audio, Video, News - and more. This is intended for the UK market. It has Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask - Infospace may be the only one to have agreements with all of these. Phil Bradley was not overly impressed.
It's not bad - has "are you looking for", preview, identifies the search engine, gives choices for ranking. It's very similar to Dogpile and the other Infospace metasearchers.
October 03, 2006
Amazon's A9 Turns to Metasearch
There have been significant changes at Amazon's search engine, A9. This was once a leader in personalized search for search history, bookmarks, diary entries, and access to specialized databases including Amazon's own book search.
But the creator, Udi Manber, left A9 in February to join Google - perhaps he felt blocked, because very little had happened at A9 for several months. The new CEO, David Tennenhouse, the former director of research at Intel, has other ideas.
A9 had never been the success that seemed within reach when it shot forth with the new personalized search features two years ago. At that time it used Google as the main search engine and had arrangements with many speciality sites for searching their content.
However, A9 then stalled. Windows Live replaced Google as the web search engine in April 2006. There were no new improvements to the personalized search. Nothing was happening with local search. By August 2006 traffic had dropped 21% compared to August 2005. I stopped using A9 after it switched to Live. Also there wasn't sufficient need to use the other features, since Yahoo and Google had far surpassed A9 in personalized search.
Amazon must have realized they needed to do something. This is the something - a meta-search engine that can be customized by adding predefined groups. One of these is Books with Amazon, a couple of libraries, and RedLightGreen. This itself could indicate trouble. OCLC announced that it is closing RedLightGreen in November.
The search site is attractive, but there is no compelling reason to use this over other metasearchers.
On the general search it has retained the panels for showing web results from Live.com in one column, and Amazon book search in another (complete with jacket covers). Web results still have the popup for Site Info with traffic and ownership information from Alexa.
September 29th, 2006 — A New Look and Focus for the A9.com Website describes what they dropped - the A9 toolbar and personalized services. There are instructions on downloading any that you had saved.
Gone also are A9 maps and A9 Yellow Pages that had the innovative block view of the area near an address.
A9 redesigns, simplifies by Greg Linden, Geeking with Greg (Oct 2) - liked the new look but said the functionality is minimal - "something that has been around for a decade".
Amazon's A9 Becomes, Well, Sort Of Nothing, by Danny Sullivan, SEW blog
A9.com's features scaled back By Monica Soto Ouchi, Seattle Times (Oct 3)
"Amazon.com has discontinued several distinctive features of its search engine, A9.com, including a search history that recorded all the searches ever made by a user, and mapping technology that captured street-level images of businesses in the largest U.S. cities."
Most see this cutback as signifying failure. Sullivan says the result is "sort of nothing". Amazon neglected A9 and let others surge far ahead. Perhaps they should never have got into the search game, and now perhaps they should get out of it. A9 doesn't offer anything you can't get elsewhere, unless you're fond of doing a book search side-by-side a web search. But it is nice to look at.
New Clusty
Clusty, Vivisimo's consumer search service, has had a makeover which has introduced blue and red colours - somewhat reminiscent of signage and ads in the 1940s. There are some new features:
+ adjust the font size
+ adjust the display - number of results, number of clusters, tabs
+ can group web search results by source (search engine) or site (actually top level domain), in addition to Clusty's folders. Other groupings available for other types of searches.
But you can't select the engines you want to use. Sources for web search appear to be Ask.com, Gigablast, MSN, Open Directory, Wisenut, and of course Sponsored Listings.
For the News search below, Clusty got results from Reuters and Yahoo News.
There's a new Clusty Labs. The latest development here is the Clusty Cloud. Enter the query and get a "cloud" of clusters, essentially terms that occur frequently for that topic. Below is the cloud for tagging.
See Vivisimo Upgrades Clusty.Com and Leverages Site for Search Experiments, eContent (Oct 3)
August 14, 2006
Make YurNet Yours
YurNet.com is a new metasearch engine with several search options for different kinds of queries.
There is a plain Web metasearch against Google, Yahoo!, MSN, WiseNut, Altavista, ODP and some others. This has some viewing options to provide summary, show sources, and group results. 'Find more like this" creates a new query based on your chosen result. It also appears to handle the Boolean OR and compound queries reasonably well. - to exclude terms works better than NOT.
Even better is the comparison page where you may choose three engines from groupings for Web (which includes Yurnet itself), Images, Video, Blog, News or Resources, and see the results displayed in three panes.
The Internet Toolbox offers choices for Whois / domain searches at Alexa and others.
'Search terms quickly' under Specialty Search seems rather magical in its ability to match the query with a suitable source. A search on findability tagging goes to Del.icio.us - a tagging centre. Quicktime troubleshooting goes directly to a page at Apple. Other choices under Specialty Search will look for answers (from Ask.com and Brainboost), get weather, check eBay and several other vertical slices.
So many metasearch engines are just another excuse to show ads. But YurNet shows results and would be a good first choice for breadth and versatility. Follow development at the YurNet blog.
July 03, 2006
Privacy at Ixquick
Ixquick Makes Privacy Promises, ResearchBuzz (June 27)
"Ixquick has announced that they are going to permanently delete all personal search details gleaned for its users. This is in response to various privacy concerns and issues that have bene popping up all over the Internet."
June 08, 2006
Info.com adds Answers
Info.com Partners With Answers.com Adding Reference Vertical Search to Robust Search Platform; Partnership Enhances Info.com's Value Proposition of Delivering Comprehensive and Quality Information Business Wire via Marketwatch (June 7)
"Info.com, a search platform for broad-web and vertical search engines, today announced a partnership with Answers.com, the leading Internet encyclopedic reference site dedicated to delivering answers covering over 3 million topics."
April 19, 2006
Huckabuck a Metasearch
Huckabuck is a new metasearch engine that searches Yahoo, Google, and MSN but with a difference: you can adjust which search engine is used most through sliders in the "search tuner". The tuner is quite fancy, but basically it appears to change the number of results taken from a given engine. Other things you can do:
+ change the colour
+ increase the number of results on a page
+ change from metasearch to research, blogs, shopping. Oddly, this just changes the proportional use of the engines, where Research uses more Google, and Shopping uses more MSN.
There's also a "virtual keyboard" - click on letters instead of entering them on your own keyboard.
Huckabuck comes from New Orleans and will be reinvesting some of its profits to the city.
Mentioned by Jonathan Dube in New Search Sites: Taking on Google, Poynter Online (Apr 18)
March 17, 2006
Clusty More Like This
Clusty helps you refine a search using the clusters. After you run the first search, choose a cluster from the left panel. At the bottom of the new page you'lls see Search for more results like these. If you like what you see, click on that link. Clusty will add the name of the cluster to the search query and run the new search. Of course, we could do this ourselves just by looking at the clusters to get more ideas on what words to use.
March 13, 2006
WebFetch UK
InfoSpace Launches New Web Search Comparison Tool With MSN Additions, Cheap Hosting Directory (Mar 9) -- WebFetch metasearch engine (name for Dogpile in the UK) has been redesigned.
"The new design and improvements take the user through a Flash demonstration and allows them to make real-time searches displaying the results that have been returned by each search engine and shows how many results appear on the first page of that search engine and how many results are completely unique to that search engine."
December 26, 2005
Mamma-Copernic
Mamma buys Copernic, CP via Globe and Mail (Dec 23) - Canadian meta-search engine takes over another Canadian search engine.
Copernic was by far the better search service. Hope nothing is lost in being acquired by Mamma.
November 30, 2005
iPureSearch - new metasearcher
iPureSearch.com is a new metasearch engine from the UK that maximizes use of rollovers in its effort to have you "search like you surf".
It's interesting to use:
+ 28 channels
+ highlight text and click on channel to run a search from search results
+ has a quick look
+ claims to not include sponsored listings
+ metasearch on the movie channel is good - picks up from a variety of sources.
But it doesn't:
+ show the source search engine
+ cluster results.
New Engine Lets You 'Search Like You Surf' PrNewswire via Marketwatch (Nov 29)
November 16, 2005
GoshMe for metasearch
GoshMe - new metasearch engine developed in Brazil - searches collections of databases and search engines. The welcome page has 17 "verticals" for searching. GoshMe comes back with links to results at a variety of search engines. It's not possible to control on selection, or syntax (as far as I can see). GoshMe might tell you about some databases you hadn't considered, but it's better to get to know the resources well and search them directly.
October 23, 2005
Ipselon Metasearcher
There's a new metasearch engine - Ipselon - that claims to "return results from the four leading search engines along with the Ipselon search results". Unfortunately, the announcement doesn't say what four engines or anything about Ipselon itself. Nor is there any indication at the search engine.
However, in its favour it does support clustering - though you have to ask for it through the Advanced Search page or set preferences.
Preferences page also offers "regional customization" that will add an option to search a particular country on the search page.
The nicest feature is that you can save a result and rank it; also sort saved results by the search query.
This is still in beta. It might return some odd error messages - like " Data Expired !!! Please make a fresh search". There a few kinks to work out but this might develop nicely.
Ipselon, Brand New Meta Search Engine, Breathes New Life Into an Industry PRWeb (Oct 19)
October 19, 2005
Jux2 Back for a bit
Imagine my surprise to see Jux2.com, that wonderful little metasearch engine, back online today. But it is only until the owners manage to sell it. What to Buy a Meta Search Engine? Jux2 is For Sale on eBay by Gary Price, SEW Blog (Oct 17)
October 15, 2005
Myriad Search
Myriad Search: Meta Search Your Way by Chris Sherman, SearchDay (Sep 22) - reviews a new metasearch engine called Myriad Search that may help search engine optimizers "with competitive intelligence research on keywords". It compares results from Ask Jeeves, Google, MSN Search and Yahoo.
August 08, 2005
Dogpile has big 4
MSN Search Is the Newest Dog in the Pile in Microsoft Watch (Aug 2) - Infospace added MSN Search to its set of search engines at metasearcher Dogpile.
"Displaying search results from Google, Yahoo!, Ask Jeeves and MSN Search, alongside each other, Dogpile also shows "best of all search engines" results that are a mixture of all 12 of the search engines with which Infospace contracts. Others include About.com, FindWhat and LookSmart.
"The big four search engines cover 98% of the indexed web," said Bowman, and were therefore their first priorities for inclusion. "After that, it starts to get vertical so we look at what's relevant to our consumer network.""
June 02, 2005
FirstStop Web Search
FirstStop Enhances Meta-Search Tool with "Social-Bookmarks" in EContent (May 31)
"FirstStop WebSearch, LLC has announced the addition of a "Social Bookmarks" search category within FirstStop WebSearch, its meta-search engine software product.
With a single search, users can now obtain an aggregated list of search results from popular social bookmarking systems such as LookSmart's Furl.net, CiteULike.org, and Zniff.com, a search engine for the Spurl.net. The new search category will be pre-installed in all new downloads and will be available via update for the existing users of FirstStop WebSearch."
Jux2.com Not Found
Jux2 Goes Offline in SEW blog (May 31) - Sad news indeed - Jux2.com has closed its site. The site was part of a project to show overlap of results and doesn't have funding to continue, popular as it had become as a metasearch engine. Gary Price recommends Dogpile's> new feature for showing results by engine, and Ranking Thumbshots.com.
May 12, 2005
Dogpile Redesign
Dogpile has taken a leaf from the Jux2.com metasearcher and will let you compare results across engines. Click on buttons for Google, Yahoo, and Ask Jeeves to get columns containing the first 10 or so results. You can highlight results found only at that engine. This shows the low overlap in results - at least if looking at the first 10 to 20 - and may reassure the searcher that it was a good thing to run the search at Dogpile.
Engines listed are Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, Overture, Looksmart, and About, but MSN will surely be added. MSN has entered into agreement with Infospace, who owns Dogpile, to deliver search results.
More about Dogpile metasearch.
Dogpile Redesign Emphasizes Metasearch by Christine Blank, DMNews (May 12)
Also Dogpile Enhances Meta Search, Offers Comparison Tools By Chris Sherman, SearchDay (May 12) -- Mentions a Missing Pieces Tool that shows graphically the results from Google, Yahoo and Ask Jeeves and colour codes for found only on one, on two, or on all three. This is done in flash. It's effective for showing the distinctive results, tho I wouldn't want to use it as a regular interface.
Sherman wrote, "The missing pieces tool combines the best features of jux2 (winner of the Search Engine Watch 2004 best meta search engine award) and the thumbshots ranking tool. Together with Dogpile search results, the missing pieces tool offers a great, easy way to explore search engine overlap."
April 19, 2005
Infospace + MSN
MSN has signed an agreement with Infospace to provide search results to the Infospace family of meta-search engines.
"With the signing of this agreement, Infospace is the only metasearch provider to have direct distribution agreements with all four of the leading Web search algorithms -- MSN Search, Google, Yahoo and Ask Jeeves (Teoma)."
Infospace Signs Search Distribution Agreement with MSN - "Infospace to feature MSN Search Results on private-label partner sites, the award-winning Dogpile.com search engine and other branded properties". (April 19) Business Wire via CBS Marketwatch
April 12, 2005
Yagoohoogle
Yagoohoogle shows results from Google and Yahoo in side-by-side frames. www.yagoohoogled.com. This is being run on a home computer and is not industry strength yet. Donate if you like it.
April 01, 2005
All4One Very Good
Metasearch engine All4One looks quite promising. It has 8 engines including Yahoo and its two offspring, Altavista and Alltheweb, Hotbot and Netscape presumably with Google content, and MSN and Wisenut - not a pay-per-click on the list. It presents a summary of results by engine immediately. There is a panel of "grouped results" where the topics seem to be determined from frequently used words on the pages. Results show the source search engine and you can select the engines you want to use. In all, has all the main criteria I look for in evaluating a metasearch engine. One major shortcoming though is it does not have a help page or an about page.
Metasearch Filters Out Noise?
Meta-search: More heads better than one? - By Raul Valdes-Perez, ZDNet News (Mar 31) -- Vivisimo CEO of Vivisimo, Raul Valdes-Perez, takes issue with the recommendation of librarians at the University of California Berkeley NOT to use meta-search engines. He points out that meta-searchers can help reduce noise, similar to the averaging of noisy signals done by electrical engineers to reveal the "noise-free signal".
1) "Web crawlers today are harmed by the noise of blog cross-linking, link-bombing or Google-bombing, and commercial efforts to skew PageRank scores".
2) "Since Web noise affects regular search engines in different ways, meta-search filters noise by averaging the votes of the underlying engines, revealing the consensus best results."
Worth considering.
March 29, 2005
Topic Hunter All-In-One
Topic Hunter is a new all-in-one-place search service. It groups engines by their type such as major, answer searching, blogs, reference, invisible web and several other categories. The major category includes Google, Yahoo, Looksmart, Teoma and on the second page, lesser known ones like HomerWeb, Zerx. Mouseover the image for the engine to get a bubble of information about the engine. Not all groups have this feature, and the Topic Hunter staff may find it a brute to keep the annotations up to date. To use this service pick the group you want, enter your search terms and choose an engine (only one - this is not a meta-searcher).
The collections in several of the categories are quite handy -- News, Blogs, Audio Video. The Invisible Web seemed the most unlikely and unsatisfactory collection: Ixquick, a metasearch engine, in the same grouping as LII.org, a 'scholarly' subject directory. There was also Gary Price's Direct Search, which he stopped updating ages ago.
Worth a visit if only to see the engines that Topic Hunter has listed.
Tara Calishain reviewed it in Topic Hunter Meta Search In Several Different Categories (March 29)
Inside Ixquick
IXQuick.com Q & A With David Bodnick & Alex van Eesteren - By Jason Dowdell at Searchengineguide (Mar 28) -- Insight into the goals and operation of the metasearch engine Ixquick. Reviews latest enhancements for international phone books, international comparison shopping, metasearch for pictures, and multi-language web search and options for "honing" the search.
March 25, 2005
Improved Ixquick
IXquick metasearch engine gets some new features - Pandia Search (March 24) -- "Metasearch engine Ixquick adds an international phone directory, shopping search and other useful features."
IXquick is a Netherlands-based company. Pandia Search likes this metasearcher for (in its view) an "ability to translate more complex Boolean searches into the syntax used by the various search engines harvested by the metasearch engine."
The International Phone Directory is truly international. Using this for phone numbers is very much easier than dealing with Infobel.
The shopping engine is also international. Select your country, and Ixquick will find a comparison shopper. For Canada, it uses PriceGrabber.com, but PriceGrabber, though it claims to have a Canadian version, has never been satisfactory.
For Web searching, Ixquick has new search refinement options - get more results like a page, or exclude results that are similar to a page.
Ixquick has spruced up its look and cleaned up the search engines too. Engines include Yahoo, MSN, Gigablast, Netscape (Google based) and a few others, mainly pay-per-click. You can disable an engine to exclude it as a source.
March 21, 2005
US Government at Clusty
Clusty, the metasearch engine that clusters results so well, has added a new tab for Goverment search -- http://gov.clusty.com/. The main page spotlights US Government news from political news stories at CNN, Reuters, Yahoo. The Advanced Search page offers search choices from MSN, a few Think Tanks, First Gov, DefenseLink, State Senators Keymatch, plus the political news sources.
The MSN search appears to pick up from all domains - not just .gov.
There is also a shortcut for finding senators and representatives for a state. Type in name of state for senaotors (doesn't work for Washington State) or zip code for both. Public Citizen provides the information.
Clusty Now Offering Government Info Search and Cluster at SearchEngineWatch Blog (Mar 14)
March 01, 2005
More at Info.com
The New Sights and Sounds of Info.com PR Newswire (Feb 28) Info.com, the metasearch engine, added "new audio and video search capabilities, enhanced picture search, and eBay searching ..." Audio and video are from Singingfish and Muze. Info.com also uses Yahoo Audio and Yahoo Video.
Info.com has the same web metasearch capabilities as Dogpile and other Infospace search tools, but it clearly puts sponsored results to the right side of the page.
+ News comes from Topix.net of 7000 sources.
+ Pictures: Yahoo Images, Ditto
+ White and Yellow pages - Verizon - mainly US. White pages have the appearance of working for Canada but don't do it well.
+ Comparison shopping: Shopping.com
February 24, 2005
TurboScout All-In-One
TurboScout is a new All-In-One search site that has 90 search engines across 7 categories.
Categories include Web, Images, Reference, News, Products, Blogs, and Audio and Video.
The Web category has a mix of search engine (Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, Gigablast), directory (Looksmart, ODP), and other metasearchers (ixquick, Mamma). TurboScout will search the first engine on its list and display results. You can select other engines, one by one. Could be handy.
The developer, William Chee, a 21 year-old undergraduate from Singapore, says, "I've created TurboScout to help me save time by accessing all search engines without retyping. I hope you'll find it useful too."
January 19, 2005
Dogpile Bits
Dogpile may have a better idea of when your question is best answered by the yellow pages thanks to its application of IntelliFind(TM) technology. According to the press release - "With this launch, IntelliFind now supports the integration of yellow pages content on Web search results pages when relevant to a user's query. The feature is currently in beta. Whenever IntelliFind identifies that the likely intent behind a query is to find information on a local business, Dogpile now returns yellow pages listings in a box at the top of the results set. With this new functionality." But this only works for a particular business. I get yellow page results when looking for QFC Seattle but not for florists Seattle.
It also claims to be better at matching on website. If you enter white house it brings back an exact match on The White House -- www.whitehouse.gov.
Dogpile Search Engine Builds On Its IntelliFind Technology With New Features Business Wire (Jan 18)
January 13, 2005
Mr Sapo's All-in-One
What name will they think of next? MrSapo.com is an all-in-one kind of search service. Choose your category of search - Basic (ie Web), Images, Audio/Video, Academic, News, Weblogs; enter your keywords; and then select an engine from the list. See the results from that engine and then click on another. It's quite simple. Mr Sapo has an extensive list of engines, though they are not all engines I would recommend and there is no guidance given for using them.
Also see Useful Meta-Interface Search Engine: MrSapo ResearchBuzz (Jan 12)
December 21, 2004
Gigablast - Custom Topic Search
Gigablast, the independent search engine, offers custom topic search - build your own search engine of 200 sites. It's being offered for use at web sites but could be used for research purposes.
Gigablast Unveils Custom Topic Search Tool Press Release via CBS Marketwatch (Dec 20)
November 12, 2004
DonBusca Metasearch
New Meta Search Engine Launched at DonBusca.com URLWire.com (Nov 12) New metasearch engine from the Netherlands - searches Web, Blogs, News, and Software - DonBusca.com.
Web search uses AOL, Netscape, Alltheweb, Hotbot, Looksmart, MSN, Wisenut and three pay-per-click engines. Has some thumbnails and some clustering.
News - 7 news sources including BBC, NYT, CNN, Yahoo.
Software - this metasearch is interesting - Tucows, Download, Freeware, Webattack - could save some time.
Options for all results include cached version, Internet archive, site info and also FurlIt for saving the page, and MyYahoo It for Yahooers to save to MyWeb.
Has an odd image on the front page of a scroll, brown from age, with the profile of a haggard moustached man from the wild west - maybe a man who has panned for gold.
November 11, 2004
Dogpile's Intellifind
Dogpile Launches Enhanced Metasearch Platform with New IntelliFind Technology Business Wire (Nov 10) " Sophisticated Query Analysis Predicts Likely Intent Behind Every Search to Deliver Results from the Most Relevant Engines and Content Sources" -- Infospace claims to have added some query analysis intelligence to Dogpile, the popular metasearch engine. -- "IntelliFind(TM) technology utilizes sophisticated query intelligence to assess the likely intent behind every entered query, enabling Dogpile to return more relevant results from a wider array of content sources." It's going to limit the search to sources "most likely to contain the best-matched content."
Perhaps Dogpile will be analysing searches day by day to identify the popular questions, maybe the better matching algorithms will be tied to paid listings. It's a very commercial metasearch engine and the first 10 to 20 results can easily be sponsored (and only faintly labelled as such).
Dogpile says it will be adding content -- "specialized information on specific product categories, yellow pages content, movies, entertainment and more."
Not mentioned in the press release is whether these changes will affect the Infospace family of metasearchers - metacrawler, webcrawler. Likely yes - as well as other derivative metasearch engines such as Info.com. Note - Info.com is the only one of this set that puts paid listings in a separate column - easy to see and well marked.
November 05, 2004
Desktop Metasearch
FirstStop WebSearch Releases Free Open Interface FirstStop WebSearch Version 4.1 enables access to information resources on the Internet, intranets, and extranet. FirstStop has three versions: Standard, free for non-commercial use; Deluxe with more search engines, search capabilities, and connection with MS Office products; and Visual with thumbnails of pages.
October 19, 2004
Info.com is not new
New Metasearch Engine: Info.com Search Engine Watch Blog (Oct 19)
New metasearch engine info.com claims to be better, faster, more relevant. But let's see --
+ shows related searches (same as those at Dogpile)
+ searches Google, Ask Jeeves, Yahoo, Altavista, Teoma, Fast etc -- hold on - no one has called Alltheweb Fast for a year or so. Also why have Yahoo as well as Altavista, Alltheweb, and Inktomi?
+ has a Refine your Search - the page is exactly the same as Dogpile's Advanced Search.
This isn't new, it's just a repackaging of the Infospace tools.
September 30, 2004
Clusty for Clusters
Search Upstart Launches New Site AP via CBS Marketwatch (Sep 29) Vivisimo is introducing a new search engine that clusters results called Clusty. Clusty, still in beta, provides web search, news, images, shopping, and an encyclopedia (Wikepedia). You can cluster by topics (looks similar to Vivisimo's folders), sources, and url. Advanced Search has some controls including selection of search engine -- Gigablast, MSN, Lycos, Overture, Looksmart, Wisenut, and Open Directory for the web. There will be blogs too. News of the day is automatically clustered giving a quick view of the top themes. Clutsy is better organized and more appealing visually than Vivisimo is. But why not capitalize on the many years of promoting Vivisimo by revamping it and keeping the name? Clutsy is hardly an eponymous name. If this were the Apprentice, someone would be fired.
See Reducing Information Overkill By Chris Sherman & Gary Price, SearchDay (Sep 30) -- strong endorsement of this new search engine -- "Clusty's use of clustering and its presentation of diverse resources helps all searchers see more results quickly, at the same time sufacing related concepts that would be difficult if not impossible to quickly identify without the use of this type of technology."
September 14, 2004
iZito for metasearch
There are a few neat controls at iZito.com - new metasearch engine. It searches Google, Altavista, Yahoo, Alltheweb, MSN, Teoma, WiseNut, and Kobala. You can add a hit to your favourites list, or, more usefully, park it in a to do list. But there is no advanced search. Site does best in Internet Explorer with Flash for various visual effects. Sponsored results are not well marked.
SearchEngineJournal said Beta Search Engine iZito Supports Human Search Behavior (Sept 14)
August 13, 2004
Infouno for UK
Brit search engine debuts beta by Tamlin Magee - introduces Infouno, " the first dedicated metasearch service to hail from the UK. " It has the standard features -- similar keywords, hide summary, group results, quick look for preview, and more like this. It has the usual limitations too - paid listings, no syntax, and 3 versions of Yahoo (Yahoo, Altavista, and MSN). Infouno also uses UK section of the Open Directory.
August 05, 2004
Metasearch with snapshots
IceRocket is a new metasearch engine that shows thumbnail shots of the page. Display also includes info from Alexa about the site, link to Internet Archives, a quick view (show page inside active page). The Advanced Search allows filtering by domain and blocking adult sites. Search engine keeps track of your search history. There are options for News, Images, Products and Find a Friend.
- Web: Yahoo, Altavista, Alltheweb, Lycos, MSN, Teoma, Wisenut
- Images: Webshots, Picsearch, Ditto, Yahoo
- News: individual newspapers
- Products: Froogle, Yahoo Shopping
As metasearch engines go it's fairly feature rich, but the metasearch is mainly of different versions of the Yahoo database.
New search tool gets billionaire's backing By John Borland, CNET News.com (Aug 4)
August 03, 2004
Informiti
Informiti is a new metasearch engine lets one differentiate receive "pure" search results (ie - no paid listings), paid listings only, or both. It picks up Teoma, MSN, Yahoo, Wisenut, Dmoz, Google, FindWhat and AdSense. What? No Overture?
July 21, 2004
Vivisimo Quality
Vivisimo's clustering technology that it showcases at the metasearch engine site www.vivisimo.com is wonderful but how good are the underlying search engines? Rita Vine at Sitelines finds them "sub standard" - and I must agree. The Web engines include the Yahoo-based MSN and Lycos, the commercial Looksmart (though Looksmart does have good content), the less-than-fresh Wisenut, the paid-placement Overture, and the troubled Open Directory. There will be paid listings in the results. However, the folders will still give one a big picture of a subject area and not all will be dross.
Some Cautionary Notes on Vivisimo Sitelines (July 14)
May 07, 2004
Academic Index
Academic Index searches only reference-quality resources selected by librarians. Resource Discovery Network, the Internet Scout Project, Virtual Learning Sources are three of the included sites. Collection has 137,000 pages. Academic Index was created and is maintained by Dr Michael Bell, former chair, Texas Association of School Librarians.
March 22, 2004
And then there were three
Hotbot has dropped Alltheweb from its roster of four. Left are Hotbot (ie Inktome), Google, Ask Jeeves. What might that mean? Is this a sign that Yahoo will close Alltheweb?
February 26, 2004
ZapMeta is good
ZapMeta Meta-Search Offers Nice Set of Web Features ResearchBuzz (Feb 25) - good advice on using this metasearch engine. It has 9 search engines - you can choose which to use - and it collates results. Has several features for viewing results and many filtering options for Advanced Search. Amazingly, it does seem to handle boolean - eg. "scenic drives" AND (quebec OR maine) - but always be careful - not all search engines can process a boolean query. It says it can handle NEAR too but only in simple queries, such as - darwin NEAR beagle. See the Search Tips page.
Also see Chris Sherman's review - ZapMeta: A Promising New Meta Search Engine SearchDay (Feb 26) -- "A new meta search engine offers speedy, relevant results, and some cool visualization features that actually make it easy to check out sponsored listings without leaving your result page. "
Sherman noted that this is the creation of a team of college students (college not named). One worry is that Zapmeta only has an agreement with Gigablast for running searches. Search engines are fussy about this and do block access.
February 23, 2004
Queryster
Chris Sherman gives Queryster a favourable review. Queryster is somewhat like an all-in-one engine that makes it easy to navigate from engine to engine to view results. A Fun Multi-Search Tool. SearchDay (Feb 23) - notes that Queryster can be customized to search your favourite 10 engines.
February 11, 2004
Queryster All-In-One
Queryster is a new search tool that gives quick access to individual search engines through a "map" of search engine logos. Click on the logo for the engine you wish to search and enter the search terms. You can customize the "map" to have the search engines you want from a list of 25. Under Tools, Queryster has options for people search, business search and many other tools. This makes it a better-than-average All-In-One tool.
February 06, 2004
Mamma Gets Better
Mamma.com Launches Advanced Functionalities: Metasearch Engine Provides Powerful New Tools for Users to Search the Web Faster and More Efficiently Business Wire (Feb 5)
Mamma, the meta search engine, now supports some syntax for queries (quotation marks for phrases, + to include, - to exclude) and has redesigned the Power Search page to make it possible to select sources for web searching. Mamma's sources include Google, Teoma, Lycos, MSN, and Entireweb. Pay-per-click sources are clearly marked and can be excluded. Through Power Search one can set preferences for number of results on a page, highlighting of terms, type of description.
January 19, 2004
Meceoo metasearch
Meceoo is a new metasearch engine from France. It means "Mais c'est où ?" - but where is it? It only picks up three engines - Altavista, Alltheweb and Inktomi. It has two features of interest. Users can exclude sites from a search by creating an exclusion list. (Many will put Amazon on that list.) It is also possible to create an inclusion list to preselect sites to include.
Mentioned at Pandia Search Meceoo, a new kind of metasearch engine (Jan 19, 2004)
December 04, 2003
Metasearch looking better
Meta Search Engines are Back By Greg Jarboe. SearchDay (Dec 4) - about the changes at the Infospace stable of metasearchers, Vivisimo, and Mamma.
November 24, 2003
Kartoo - new version
KartOO: New Version and Targeted Personalisation of Results For Cartographic Interface Search Engine PRNewswire via News Alert (Nov 24)
Kartoo has personalization.
"The Kapitalyser: when activated, this system memorises the search words, the sites visited and the requests which were successful. This personalises the results for subsequent searches according to the profile of the user's interests. "
User can access the history, and remove or add to a favourites manager. Kartoo Watch will report on new sites or changing in existing for a particular search.
November 03, 2003
PlanetSearch
PlanetSearch is a new meta-search engine that seems to depend on CurryGuide. It has a very plain interface with a button labelled UnGoogle. It appears to use Alltheweb, HOtbot, MSN, Lycos, and Yahoo and to have a translate function. Can hide source, hide summary, or ungroup results. But on the whole, it's nothing special. There are better meta-search engines.
October 24, 2003
Infospace MetaSearch Family
Metacrawler announced its new look in MetaCrawler Search Engine Launches Improved Interface and New Features (Oct 20). In fact it looks almost identical to Infospace's other two metasearch engines - Dogpile and Webcrawler.
They all search Google, About, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, Overture, Find What, Looksmart, Altavista, and "many more" that aren't named.
Results are by relevance or by search engine. Results do not include the name of the search engine or the position in the results of that search engine.
Results are limited to a maximum of 10 per engine.
Vivisimo's technology is used to cluster results - a very valuable feature.
Page can be customized through preferences for adult filter, language, and display.
There is an advanced search page that appears to support boolean. The operators for AND and OR appear to work. ANDNOT does not. Search engines have different requirements for recognizing boolean constructions. It is unlikely that Infospace could correctly match those requirements for all engines. Treat this feature with great care.
October 19, 2003
iHound Version 3.0
iHound is a metasearch engine that does web search as well as several specific topics - news, business, technology, images, and shopping (of course). There are 24 subcategories and over 300 search engines. About page says that this is version 3.0.
Of the 16 search engines for web search, 3 are pay-per-click. Results are presented as a tab for each engine. Results are not collated and deduped.
It promised a new feature called SpeedLinks for faster searching that would be delivered in August 2003. Looks like they missed their target date.
http://terastormsoftware.com/ihound/default.asp
September 30, 2003
DART - Desktop Research
A Personal Search Engine for the Web and Your Computer by Chris Sherman, SearchDay (Sept 30)
Dynago DART (Dynago analysis research tool) is a desktop product that will search the web, download the pages, and analyze the content. Analysis includes summarization and visualization and the ability to do offline keyword search. DART Documentation has a demo and faq.
Requires Windows 98 or above and preferrably a 500 MHZ processor and 2 GB hard drive.
There is a standard edition at $47 and a professional (has higher limits for number and size of pages) at $67. Trial version available.
September 05, 2003
Dogpile Barks
Dogpile, a very popular metasearch engine from Infospace, has a set of new tricks. Most importantly, it uses Vivisimo's clustering technology to group results into folders. You can view results by relevance (collated and deduped) or by search engine. Dogpile has been stuck for years listing results by search engine. Relevance listing is a very welcome change. Sponsored results are labelled as "sponsored by". Unfortunately, results by relevance do not show the names of the source engines. Dogpile searches Google, About, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, Altavista, Overture, Looksmart, and Teoma. There is an Advanced Search page with filters on date, domain, language, adult material etc, but NO option to pick search engines. These changes lift Dogpile to the top of the metasearch engine heap.
See also Dogpile Sports a Fetching New Look by Chris Sherman. Searchday (Sep 4)
September 01, 2003
Vivisimo
Vivisimo, the metasearch engine that groups search results into folders or clusters, has made a few changes.
- Results open in new window by default.
- Sponsored links are clearly labelled and put in bands of grey.
- "Show in clusters" link will highlight the name of the cluster the result belongs to. Can then explore that cluster / folder only.
- Find in clusters helps in searching just the search results.
- Terms are highlighted in yellow.
Gary Price commented on changes and indicated that more are on the way in Web Search - Vivisimo (Aug 22).
Dictionaries
Peter Jacso, who writes a column for Information Today on Picks and Pans, has put together a meta-search engine for his favourite dictionaries.
Jacso also has a polysearch engine for biographies and for documents related to energy, science and technology.
See them all at http://www2.hawaii.edu/~Jacso/extra/poly-page.html
August 05, 2003
Wacked
Wacked (http://yes.wacked.us/) - indeed! It's a new metasearch engine that lets you pick 4 search tools from lists of directories, search engines, and metasearch. Except - ixquick is a metasearch engine and it was listed as a directory. Lists are interesting for including obscure and unknown engines -- Crashinto? Scrub the Web? Globito? Results from each engine show as a vertical band on a web page - very difficult to read. (Mentioned in Search Engine Watch newsletter (Aug 5).)