Finding Custom Search Engines…03.27.09

Before considering creating your own custom search engine, it would be wise to make sure one hasn’t already been created. It will save a lot of time and effort.

You can find custom search engines at CustomSearchGuide described as:

“…Google provides excellent search results, but relies solely on algorithms to determine how to respond to your searches. Google’s Custom Search Engine program allows expert human editors to enhance these results. Our site is designed to help you find the highest quality CSEs quickly and efficiently…

A directory of Google Custom Search Engines (CSEs), created by site owners & Google… Use the custom searches here or copy them to your own web site (as permitted)…”

Highly Praised “Tweetzi” Search Engine for Twitter…03.19.09

This is part of a post about the Tweetzi search engine for Twitter from Tweetzi Twitter search from the Pandia Search Engine News today:

“With the enormous amounts of information and the appalling signal to noise ratio on Twitter, good search tools are always welcome. How else would we get at the gems? Tweetzi is a Twitter search engine, developed by Craig Hughes, that is great for monitoring trends and following breaking news.

Tweetzi is a deceptively simple search tool: A start page that is googlesqe in its simplicity and uncluttered search results displaying tweets in real time. But the simple design contains some advanced features.

Real time Twitter search…

Filter search results…

The search results page contains links to the top ten Twitter topics at the moment. If you are into celebrities or trendspotting, this can be useful.

Next to your search results, Tweetzi displays a list of your recent searches. If you want to repeat a search, it is only a click away…”

Twitter Microblog Search Engines…03.15.09

Pandia Search Central has a List of Twitter Microblog Search Engines:

“NEW! Twingly Microblog Search

Twitscoop
Monitter
Twitter Search
Twithaurithy
NEW! AskTwitR
NEW! Back Tweets
NEW! Flaptor Twitter Search
NEW! MicroPlaza
NEW! TweepSearch
NEW! Twibs Business Search
NEW! Twitterfall
NEW! We follow“

For a comprehensive list of internet search engines, see the Pandia Powershearch page.

© P&S Koch 1998-2009

Amazanian – New Amazon.com Search…03.15.09

Here is something new for Amazon.com users of which there are many:

“Amazanian provides a cleaner Amazon.com searching experience.

You can search, add products to your shopping list, compare, and then add those products directly to your Amazon.com shopping cart!

And the best part is … you can search for Amazon Prime items only without having to sort through pages and pages of products sold by third parties!…

 Amazanian is an alternative front-end website for the ever popular Amazon.com website which allows customers to search for Amazon.com products in a cleaner and more efficient manner.  Once you have selected your products, you can add them to your Amazon.com cart and checkout as usual.”

 

Copyright © 2008-2009 Amazanian, LLC

Video Search Engines: Yidio & Truevo…03.08.09

Thanks to Stephen E. Arnold for pointing out Yidio and Tureo video search engines on his Beyond Search blog in the post Yideo: Video Search quoted here:

“A happy quack to the reader who alerted me to Yidio, a video search system that indexes 200 million videos. The search system is powered by Truveo. Here’s what Yidio said about itself:

Yidio is owned and operated by 2ten Media LLC, based in San Diego, California which also owns Sportsnipe.com, a sports news aggregator that combines sports news from thousands of sources around the world.  It is 2ten Media’s mission to provide an Internet experience to users that is not only simple and efficient, but employs the highest technology available while adding value to every user.  We are constantly expanding our Internet properties, so be on the look out for good thing’s in the near future from 2ten Media.

Here’s what Truveo said about itself:

Today, Truveo is one of the largest video search engines on the Web. Truveo is the search engine that powers many of the Web’s most popular video destinations. Truveo currently powers video search for AOL, Microsoft Corporation, CNET’s Search.com, Brightcove, Qwest, Kosmix, CSTV, Infospace, Excite, and hundreds of other applications worldwide. Across the network of websites it powers, Truveo reaches an audience of over 40 million users every month. The Truveo video search engine is widely recognized as being the most comprehensive and up-to-date video search service on the Web.”

SEE ALSO PREVIOUS POST: 

2009 List of Video Search Engines 

“Top 5 Semantic Search Engines”…02.27.09

The following is an excerpt from the recent  Top 5 Semantic Search Engines post on the Pandia Search Engine News site:

‘Semantic” is a word with a magic ring to it in search engine circles. The way it’s hyped makes you suspect it is the second coming of search… 

What is semantic search?

A semantics searc engine attempts to make sense of search results based on context. It automatically identifies the concepts structuring the texts. For instance, if you search for ‘election’ a semantic search engine might retrieve documents containing the words “vote”, ‘campaigning’ and ‘ballot’, even if the word ‘election’ is not found in the source document.

An important part of this process is disambiguation, both of the queries and of the content on the web. What this means is that the search engine — through natural language processing — will know whether you are looking for a car or a big cat when you search for ‘jaguar’.

The five search engines below all use semantic analysis to sift through and present data. But, as you will see, they do not do this in the same way and present five different products.

When to use semantic search engines

Semantic search has the power to enhance traditional web search, but it will not replace it. A large portion of queries are navigational and semantic search is not a replacement for these. Research queries, on the other hand, will benefit from semantic search…

Hakia is a general purpose semantic search engine, as opposed to e.g. Powerset and Cognition (below), that search structured corpora (text) like Wikipedia…

SenseBot is a web search engine that summarizes search results into one concise digest on the topic of your query. The search engine attempts to understand what the result pages are about. For this purpose it uses text mining to analyze Web pages and identify their key semantic concepts…

Powerseet is at present not a regular web search engine. It works best on smaller, relatively structured corpora…

DeepDyve DeepDyve is a powerful, professional research tool available for free for the general public…

Cognition has a search business based on a semantic map, built over the past 24 years, which the company claims is the most comprehensive and complete map of the English language available today. It is used in support of business analytics, machine translation, document search, context search, and much more…”

© P&S Koch, 1998-2009.

A Primer on “Federated Search”…01.16.09

A post worth reading this week about a new primer on federated search is available from Sol Lederman [Federated search primer at AltSearchEngines] on the  AtlSearchEngines blog [http://www.altsearchengines.com/]:

“I’ve written a number of educational articles about federated search for this blog and for other venues but I had always skirted around the issue of explaining what exactly federated search is. Finally, I’ve written a primer for people who are comfortable with search engines but want to understand what federated search is all about.

AltSearchEngines published the primer in three parts: Part I, Part II, Part III...”

Copyright © 2007 – Federated Search

“Googling Security: How Much Does Google Know About You”–book review…12.05.08

This is an excerpt of a book review posted by Cory Doctorow  [http://www.boingboing.net/2008/12/05/googling-security-bo.html] on BoingBoing about an interesting new book which will be of interest to all of us “Googlers”"

“Greg Conti — a West Point instructor in computer science and information war – has taken a long, hard look at the amount of information Internet users explicitly and implicitly disclose to Google and the results, collected in his book Googling Security: How Much Does Google Know About You? are sobering.

Conti enumerates all of Google’s (often fantastic) services, describes how compelling they are, and then notes what information you disclose when you use them — even when you only use them inadvertently (say, when you send email to someone with a Gmail account, or when you load a bookmarked Gmap that’s been sent to a group of logged-in Google users, thus tying yourself to those users as part of the same group).

In slow, methodical steps, Conti builds his case: our complacency, Google’s capacity for building compelling services, and the inadequacy of our browsers and other tools in alerting us to potential information disclosure have created a situation where Google ends up in possession of an alarming amount of information about us, our beliefs, our movements, our finances, our health, our employment and our social circles…

I’ve given the subject of privacy and Internet use a lot of thought, but even so, Conti’s book opened my eyes to potential risks I’d never considered. I’d recommend this to anyone who’s worried about what’s happening to our ability to control the aggregation of our personal data.”

New Google Rival Search Engine CUIL Debuts Today…07.28.08

The Cuil (pronounced as “cool”) website says, “Cuil is an old Irish word for knowledge. For knowledge, ask Cuil.”

CNN reported today:

“…Anna Patterson’s last Internet search engine was so impressive that industry leader Google Inc. bought the technology in 2004 to upgrade its own system.

She believes her latest invention is even more valuable – only this time it’s not for sale.

Patterson instead intends to upstage Google, which she quit in 2006 to develop a more comprehensive and efficient way to scour the Internet.

The end result is Cuil, pronounced “cool.” Backed by $33 million in venture capital, the search engine plans to begin processing requests for the first time Monday.

Cuil had kept a low profile while Patterson, her husband, Tom Costello, and two other former Google engineers – Russell Power and Louis Monier – searched for better ways to search.

Now, it’s boasting time.

Web index: For starters, Cuil’s search index spans 120 billion Web pages.

Patterson believes that’s at least three times the size of Google’s index, although there is no way to know for certain. Google stopped publicly quantifying its index’s breadth nearly three years ago when the catalog spanned 8.2 billion Web pages…”

Reference Questions and Answers Custom Search Engine…07.15.08

Sarah Houghton-Jan posted yesterday about a “…custom search engine in Google [see below] that indexes library sites that post their reference questions, as well as the answers.  The idea is described in a post on the Free Government Information site.  They’re hoping that this project will encourage more libraries to create reference question blogs (each question & answer set gets a post).  Directional and local questions aren’t of much use to a global database, but “those juicy questions that take some time to answer using librarian ingenuity, skill and knowledge” are just what they want.  A good example is this Stanford site.  If your library offers such a thing, let them know (contact info on the CSE page)…”