New Search Engine Yebol Seems to Deliver…07.28.09

Read “The new search engine Yebol is good at what it does” from Pandia Search Engine News for more about Yebol.  Below is a video demonstration.

“Twitter Search in Plain English”…07.06.09

“Twitter Search in Plain English”…06.17.09

Duck Duck Go – now separates shopping sites from information sites in search results…06.15.09

Pandia Search Engine News reports on a great feature from the useful Duck Duck Go search engine:

“If you search the web for information on almost any subject, your search results on Yahoo and Google will be littered with shopping info. Start-up search engine Duck Duck Go now separates shopping sites from information sites in your search results…

Duck Duck Go has uncluttered and appealing user interface, which is easy to grasp even with three search buttons. The search results are equally easy on the eye and easy to navigate.

You might also want to check out these articles:
New search engine Duck Duck Go has less spam and more content
How to block 44 million spam domains“

Wolfram Alpha UPDATED…06.09.09

Mashable! reported today Wolfram Alpha Releases Its First Major Update

“….the first major update to Wolfram Alpha is here, and the list of changes and improvements is quite long. Here it is in its entirety:

* Additional linguistic forms for many types of data and questions
* More comparisons of composite properties (e.g. ‘US military vs. UK’)
* Combined time series plots of different quantities (e.g. ‘germany gdp vs population’)
* More complete handling of government positions (e.g. ‘chancellor’, etc.)
* Updates to country borders for India, China, Slovenia, Croatia, and others
* Updates to naming for certain politically sensitive countries and regions
* Additional subcountry regions (e.g. ‘Wales’); many more to come
* Additional support for current and past fractional timezones (e.g. ‘Iran time’)
* City-by-city handling of U.S. states with multiple timezones
* Updates to certain European currencies (e.g. for ‘Cyprus’ and ‘Slovakia’)
* Some additional historical events; many more to come
* Additional probability computations for cards and coins (e.g. ’2 or 3 aces’)
* Additional output for partitions of integers (e.g. ‘partitions of 47′)
* Implicit handling of geometric figure properties (e.g. ‘ellipse with area 6 and major axis 2′)
* Additional support for Mathematica 3D graphics syntax
* Additional support for stock prices with explicit dates
* Support for planet-to-planet distances and ‘nearest planet’, etc.
* Extra information when comparing incompatible units (e.g. ‘ergs vs. newtons’)
* Improved linguistic handling for many foods (e.g. ‘love apple’)
* More mountains added, especially in Australia
* Support for many less-common given names (e.g. ‘zebulon’)
* More ‘self-aware’ questions answered (e.g. ‘how old are you’)
* More consistent handling of sidebar links to Wikipedia, etc…”

Microsoft’s Bing Search Finally Launched…06.01.09

An excerpt from TechCrunch post Apparently Bing Search is Something of a Big Hit about Microsoft’s Bing:

“Thursday may not have been Microsoft Bing Day, but today sure is. Microsoft quietly launched their new search engine without fanfare and sans parade.

Last week everyone got to see the demo video and a few of us were actually able to access Bing for our reviews. Most everyone, though, just had to wait to actually try the service.

Initial reader comments tended towards the negative on announcement day. Microsoft got heat for having nothing but a landing page up (and not even that for a while after the announcement). The ‘Bing stands for But It’s Not Google’ comment appeared a number of times, as did sarcastic comments like ‘Looks like Live search again. Good to see Microsoft trying new things.’There were also a few variations of ‘MS is a bloated sinking ship…bing is nothing but a desperate attempt by an obsolete company.’…

Today, though, they can actually try it. And the overwhelming number of user comments on our launch post Sunday evening are extremely positive…”

“Ambient Findability and the Future of Search”…05.28.09

Although this is not a new video, I would recommend a viewing.

“Peter Morville is president and founder of Semantic Studios, a leading information architecture, user experience, and findability consultancy.

He is widely recognized as a father of the information architecture field, and he serves as a passionate advocate for the critical roles that search and findability play in defining the user experience.

Peter’s latest book, Ambient Findability, explores search, wayfinding, marketing, information interaction, literacy, librarianship, authority, and culture at the crossroads of ubiquitous computing and the Internet.

Peter is also co-author (with Louis Rosenfeld) of the best-selling book, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web (over 100,000 copies), named “Best Internet Book of 1998″ by Amazon and ‘The Most Useful Book on Web Design on the Market’ by usability guru Jakob Nielsen…”

Microsoft to Launch BING Search Engine Today in a Big Way…05.26.09

Advertising Age reported today in Microsoft Aims Big Guns at Google , Asks Consumers to Rethink Search:

“Microsoft has used attack ads to go after Apple, and now it has Google in its sights.

The software giant is set to launch an $80 million to $100 million campaign for Bing, the search engine it hopes will help it grab a bigger slice of the online ad market. That’s a big campaign — big compared with consumer-product launches ($50 million is considered a sizable budget for a national rollout) and very big when you consider that Google spent about $25 million on all its advertising last year, according to TNS Media Intelligence, with about $11.6 million of that focused on recruiting. Microsoft, by comparison, spent $361 million. Certainly Google has never faced an ad assault of anything like this magnitude…”

SEE the Bing Video

VISIT Bing on Facebook

FOLLOW Bing on Twitter

Wolfram Alpha Search Update as It Zeros In on 100 Million Queries…05.24.09

This is an excerpt from the Mashable! post Wolfram Apha Approaches 100 Million Queries by Ben Parr:

“…I recently had the rare pleasure of chatting with the founder of Wolfram Research and the man behind the Wolfram Alpha engine and its algorithms. For 45 minutes we discussed the concept of Wolfram Alpha, the difficulties of parsing language, how social media helps filter information, and even the ability to analyze multimedia. Dr. Wolfram also revealed that Wolfram Alpha is set to exceed 100 million queries. Below is an analysis of the interview. If you’re interested in the full audio, we’ve provided it at the end, embedded via Yahoo Media Player…

It’s clear that Dr. Wolfram is fascinated with how users interact with the Wolfram Alpha system. Beyond discussing some ways users have used Wolfram Alpha in unanticipated ways (6 mins, 30 secs), Dr. Wolfram helped define why Wolfram Alpha is not a search engine:

‘At a practical level, it means that it doesn’t make a lot of sense to cache things because you keep on getting new and different things you’ve never seen before; it kind of reveals the fact that [Wolfram Alpha] really has to compute stuff.’ (8 mins, 40 secs)

Because Wolfram Alpha is designed to parse natural speech and natural language (full sentences and questions), Dr. Wolfram and his team have had to address and understand the difficulties of creating a web tool based on natural language. This becomes difficult when people are trained to use online input fields and search boxes in a specific way:

‘People see an input field and they think search engine and they think two or three or four words…the main point is that they’re saying let’s search for a concept, not let’s try and get a specific answer for a question that we actually have.’ (16 mins, 20 secs)

In the end though, it seems that people are quickly grasping better and more effective ways to interact with Wolfram Apha – in fact, quicker than Dr. Wolfram expected. People are finding diverse and unique ways to find the answers they seek via Wolfram Alpha…

There are several important lessons and takeaways that we can take from the Dr. Wolfram interview:

- First, that human language is deceptively complex and that analyzing it has been a challenge. In fact, Dr. Wolfram wondered if it was even possible many times during the process.

- Second, that there is a necessity to provide people practical access to this type of computational information. This may be part of why Dr. Wolfram and Wolfram Research built this engine, and even why they decided to live stream the launch.

- Finally, that social media is a vital tool for filtering information and opinions. It’s useful to the Wolfram team already for understanding what users want, and may be useful later on as actual data points for the Wolfram Alpha algorithms.

Wolfram Alpha is simply a project we’re all going to have to watch (and use) in the coming months. It’s not a search engine nor is it a social sharing tool like Twitter, but we still haven’t seen this much excitement for a new web product in a long while.

Because we just love multimedia, we have embedded the interview in its entirety here. You’re also welcome to download it, stick it on your iPod, and listen to it while you’re on the road, on the train, or just relaxing. Dr. Wolfram’s insights and analysis are rare gems that you should not miss.” 

Wolfram Alpha Mashable Interview (43 minutes, 48 seconds)

WolframAlpha Search Review…05.17.09

Here is part of a review of the just-released Wolfram Alpha search engine Websites, Internet, Software Tips And Reviews:

If you have been keeping in line with the latest news about Wolfram Alpha, the supposedly Google killer search engine which has been generating quite a lot of buzz around the web…

Apparently Wolfram Alpha is more of a data search engine rather than a queries-based search engine and is more of a wiki-based killer than a Google killer.It relies more on a data database with info and stats, graphs and all the analytical stuffs.  Anyway, unless you are the type who likes data and are doing some quick facts research, Wolfram Alpha might not be suitable for you, we recommend you still stick to Google. Here is a quick detailed run-down review from TechCrunch about Wolfram Alpha and below is a quick tibits of info on how exactly Wolfram Alpha works.

As of now, Wolfram|Alpha contains 10+ trillion of pieces of data, 50,000+ types of algorithms and models, and linguistic capabilities for 1000+ domains. Built with Mathematica—which is itself the result of more than 20 years of development at Wolfram Research—Wolfram|Alpha’s core code base now exceeds 5 million lines of symbolic Mathematica code. Running on supercomputer-class compute clusters, Wolfram|Alpha makes extensive use of the latest generation of web and parallel computing technologies, including webMathematica and gridMathematica…”

Wolfram Alpha Search Release Video Streamed Live Friday…05.14.09

Mashable! reported yesterday on Friday’s release event for the Wolfram Alpha search engine:

“What are you doing on Friday night? If you don’t have other plans, you can tune in to a live broadcast of the public launch of Wolfram Alpha, the much-hyped search engine that we reviewed last week. The company will be live broadcasting its launch starting at 8pm ET using video streaming service Justin.tv.

Although we’re not yet convinced that Wolfram Alpha is going to be the search company to finally challenge Google, this launch strategy is a smart one – if all goes well. With Justin.tv’s integration of Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace into the chat window that accompanies each video, the launch stands to gain a tremendous amount of buzz across social media sites…”

NEW! “Google Search Options” – Drill Down Search Results By Recency, Content Type, and More …05.13.09

“Google Squared” from TechCrunch…05.12.09

Google’s answer to Wolfram Alpha from TechCrunch post What Is Google Squared? It Is How Google Will Crush Wolfram Alpha:

Glearch – Global Search Engine…05.12.09

Peter Scott’s Library Blog pointed out today Glearch Global Search:

“Glearch stands for ‘Global + Search’ and is a search tool for global business professionals, researchers, travelers and any one who would like to perform searches by specific countries and languages. Glearch selects the top results from Google, Yahoo and MSN as well as the most popular search engines for the selected country and returns results..“

The Wolfram|Alpha “knowledge engine” Launch Imminent…05.04.09

Here is the site when it goes live:

NEW Search Engine “DuckDuckGO”…04.15.09

From the “about” section for the new and potentially useful search engine DuckDuckGo:

“Duck Duck Go is a new search engine with less garbage and better results. With less clicking forward and back between results, it is for anyone who wants to get information faster.   

We do a lot of things differently.

• Zero-click Info (red box), e.g. Techcrunch.
• Ambiguous keyword detection, e.g. apple.
• Official sites labeled, e.g. Demetri Martin.
• Simpler, less-cluttered links, e.g. Futurama.

(More features listed below.)

More Features:

• We omit those spam sitesyou find in other results.
• Category Pages group topics by concept, e.g.Communication disorders.
• Keyboard shortcuts: ↑ ↓, Enter (go), j k (arrow alts.), and / (search box).
• Detects phone, tracking,car #s; zip, book, productcodes; street and IPaddresses.
• Random passwords,calculations, and your IP.
• Last visited link highlighted (when you click back).
• Site icons next to results…”

“9 Semantic Search Engines That Will Change The World of Search”?…04.13.09

9 Semantic Search Engines That Will Change The World of Search on Search Engine Journal is an interesting read so I have excerpted it here:

“The ideal search engine would be able to match the search queries to the exact context and return results within that context. While Google, Yahoo and Live continue to hold sway in search, here are the engines that take a semantics (meaning) based approach, the end result being more relevant search results which are based on the semantics and meaning of the query, and not dependent upon preset keyword groupings or inbound link measurement algorithms, which make the more traditional search engines easier to game, thus including more spam oriented results.

Here is a wrap up of some of the top semantic search engines which we’ve covered previously…

1. Hakia…

2. Kosmix…

3. Exalead…

4. SenseBot…

5. Cognition Search…

6. Lexxe…

7. Swoogle…

8. Factbites…

9. Powerset…”

New Twitter Search Engine Uses Page Rank…04.06.09

Stan Schroeder today on Mashable! highlights the new Twitter search engine Tweefind which uses page rank in search results:

“Remember how Google conquered the world of search? They figured out a way to tell which web sites are more important than others, by judging how many links are pointing to them, and called it Google PageRank…

Rank is calculated through several parameters. Creator of Tweefind, luca Filigheddu, lists them:

# followers
# following
# of tweets
# of RT he/she receives
# of replies
# of distinct users who reply
# of distinct users who retweet
# of RT he/she makes
# of links the user shares

This approach raises some interesting questions. Are Twitter users with more followers, tweets, replies or retweets more relevant in the context of real time one-to-many conversations? Is there really a ‘rank’ on Twitter that can be calculated and be useful in real world usage? Could an approach similar to Google’s PR algorithm do for Twitter search what it did for Google?…”

I used Tweefind to find out about the earthquake today in central Italy with positive result.

FREE Webcast – “Google for Researchers”…04.03.09

The National Institutes of Health along with the Washington, D.C. chapter of SLA hosted a 90-min. video presentation on Google for Researchers March 17, 2009 which you can view. It is described as:

“Learn Google’s advanced searching techniques for researchers. This event is hosted by Galen Panger from Google. Galen Panger leads the Google for Non-Profits team in the company’s Washington, D.C. office, helping non-profits (and librarians!) put Google’s free tools and technologies to work for their causes. Prior to joining Google, Galen interned with the World Bank’s sustainable development unit in West Africa. He graduated from Stanford University with a bachelor’s in Public Policy in 2007.

Some of the topics to be covered:

• Anatomy of a Google search
• Advanced Google search tips and tools
• U.S. Government Search
• Scholar
• Book Search
• Blog Search
• News and News Archives
• Alerts
• Reader
• Trends
• Docs, Spreadsheets, Charts, Sites and Forms
• Maps
• Google Earth
• Mobile
• Google for Non-Profits
• Going Social…”

Permanent link: http://videocast.nih.gov/launch.asp?14968

Seach Engine Umibozu – Fights “Search Engine Tyranny”…03.29.09

SEO Shootout today has a post about intersting search engine Umibozu which says:

“…Umibozu’s approach to addressing search tyranny is to provide a mechanism for users to see all that the major search engines have available on a given subject and then let the users themselves refine the results, in effect to ‘vote’ on them. The Umibozu site has an excellent tour that explains how this works. Spend some time with it. It’s an opportunity to help humanize the web – and get more finely tuned search results…”

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)…”

Google’s “Wonder Wheel Experiment”…03.26.09

Google Blogoscoped has an interesting post titled Google’s Wonder Wheel Experiment, and More which is excerpted here, the part about the cool visualization:

“Google is running an experiment in their search results, apparently shown to a portion of their users…

One of the most interesting experiment features is the ‘wonder wheel.’ This will show a Flash-based interactive mini app which starts with your keyword in the center, and related terms around it. Clicking on a related term creates a new, connected circle with more related terms. And whenever you click on a term, to the very right, the web results change to reflect your current topic of focus…

All you need to do is go to google.com and paste the following into the address bar, and hit return – that will set a cookie telling Google you’re taking part in the prototype:

The options include some known experiments, plus things I didn’t see so far. There are restriction options to show only recent results, only videos, only forum entries, or only reviews. You can sort by relevance, or by date, and you can only show results from time ranges like the past 24 hours or the past week. You can opt to receive longer snippet text, and images. There’s also a timeline feature and search suggestions.

Here are some screenshots of the process (I’ve added a circle in the first screen showing the link that gets you started)…”

NEW – Twitter Job Search…03.18.09

This is an excerpt from Erick Schonfeld’s post Two New Ways To Find A Job: Auction Yourself Off At JobaPhile Or Do A TwitterJobSearch on TechCrunch:

“…A much better experience out of the gate is TwitterJobSearch, which just launched into beta today. Developed by UK-based job search engine Workhound, TwitterJobSearch pulls up Tweets that are only job-related and links to the underlying job posting. Most of these seem to link to other job sites such as CareerBuilder or more niche job sites which all seem to be using Twitter to post their latest openings. But withTwitterJobSearch, you search across all of them, and results are ranked by both relevance and by how recently they’ve been posted. A job search for “software engineer” returns 4,838 results, and you can reorder results by geography simply by adding the name of a city to the search.

TwitterJobSearch is competing against Twitter’s own search engine, which does a pretty good job coming up with relevant results. Try a job search for ‘software engineer’ and most of the results seem to be about job openings. TwitterJobSearch also seems to favor results from other members affiliated with job boards and job search engines. Twitter’s own results appear more varied, which I think is more likely to turn up that gem being Tweeted by the head of engineering at a startup. But it is also more likely to turn up false positives—results that have nothing to do with job openings….”

Video Search Engine OneRiot…03.13.09

The new video search engine OneRiot describes itself:

“OneRiot, the social search engine that finds the pulse of the web, is unveiling today the world’s first real-time web search for video. Traditional video search often returns out-of-date content because the videos are indexed based on ‘historical hits’ rather than what is hot right now. OneRiot has created the first real-time index of video on the web. Searching for videos on OneRiot returns relevant results that reflect what people are watching, sharing and Twittering about right now.

OneRiot’s search is not limited to certain sites and delivers video results from the entire web including YouTube, Google Video, Hulu, MSNBC, ESPN, MetaCafe, and many others. The search results change throughout the day based on what videos are being watched in real-time making them extremely fresh and relevant…”

New Microsoft KUMO Search Testing…03.03.09

Wired reports today in Microsoft Internally Testing New Search Service dubbed ‘Kumo‘:

“Microsoft is testing a new version of its online search service internally under the name of Kumo.com, a spokesman for the software company said on Monday.

The service is not yet available outside the company, but may eventually form part of Microsoft’s attempt to catch up with Internet search leaders Google Inc and Yahoo Inc.

The new service was unveiled in an internal memo sent by the head of research at the company’s online services division on Monday. It did not provide details about the new features…”

“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.

Searching the Deep Web with DeepPeep…02.25.09

This is interesting from SEO Shootout blog post today titled DeepPeep Another Approach to the ‘Deep Web’ :

“…DeepPeep is funded by the National Science Foundation at  the University of Utah. It’s aimed both at the casual and professional-level searcher who wants to query the Web in a free-form manner. Professor Juliana Freire’s team is attempting to spider and index every database on the public Web. 

 They currently track 13,000 forms over seven domains.  

Many database’s don’t have handy ‘www’ Web addresses. They are theoretically publicly available, but are designed to be reached by ‘detailed, formal and formulaic typed queries.’  Professor Freire explains that ‘the naïve way would be to query all the words in the dictionary but the smart way is to pose a small number of sample queries that we can then use to build up our understanding of the databases and choose which words to search.‘…”

“Government Documents Move to Improved Federal Digital System”…02.06.09

New FDsys:

Search Government Publications		Advanced Search Retrieve by Citation Help

GPO’s Federal Digital System (FDsys) provides public access to government information submitted by Congress and Federal agencies and preserved as technology changes. 

For more information on FDsys.

---

The migration of information from GPO Access into FDsys will be complete in mid-2009. The migration is occurring on a collection-by-collection basis. Collections currently available on FDsys are:

Compilation of Presidential Documents (1993 to Present) Congressional Bills (103rd Congress to Present) Congressional Documents (104th Congress to Present) Congressional Hearings (105th Congress to Present)

Congressional Record (1994 to Present) Congressional Reports (104th Congress to Present) Federal Register (1994 to Present) Public and Private Laws (104th Congress to Present)

---

If you are searching for information other than what is listed above, use GPO Access.

“Is YouTube the New Search?”…02.03.09

This is interesting thoughts from Allan Cho at the Allan’s Library blog from his Is Youtube The New Search? post:

“Information professionals everywhere take note: Google is uncomfortably sliding. Gone are the days that we ‘google’ for information. And now YouTube, conceived as a video hosting and sharing site, has become a bona fide search tool. Searches on it in the United States recently edged out those on Yahoo, which had long been the No. 2 search engine, behind Google. Interesting that Google owns YouTube, isn’t it? In November, Americans conducted nearly 2.8 billion searches on YouTube, about 200 million more than on Yahoo, according to comScore…”

Google Zeros in on the “Deep Web”…02.03.09

Here is an excerpt from a LibGig post entitled Google Targeting Structured Data On “Deep Web“ :

During a talk at the New England Database Day conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Google’s Alon Halevy admitted that the search giant has ‘not been doing a good job’ presenting the structured data found on the web to its users. By ‘structured data,’ Halevy was referring to the databases of the ‘deep web’ – those internet resources that sit behind forms and site-specific search boxes, unable to be indexed through passive means.

Halevy should know – he heads the “Deep Web” search initiative at Google. This hidden web is currently being indexed in part by Google’s automated systems that submit queries to various databases, retrieving the content found for indexing. In addition to that aspect of the Deep Web – dubbed ‘vertical searching’ – Halevy also referenced two other types of Deep Web Search: semantic search and product search…

The question that remains is whether or not Google’s current search engine technology is going to be adept at doing all the different types of Deep Web indexing or if they will need to come up with something new…

The challenges facing Google today are also being addressed by their nearest competitor in search, Yahoo. In December, Yahoo announced that they were taking their SearchMonkey technology in-house to automate the extraction of structured information from large classes of web sites. The results of that in-house extraction technique will allow Yahoo to augment their Yahoo Search results with key information returned alongside the URLs.”