Everyday Technology

A (somewhat) Brief Look at Search

This is a (somewhat) brief overview of search and the look into the types of resources available to find everything you want on the internet. This article covers the main search engines, specialized types of search, blog (buzz) search, and combined (metacrawler) search.

Cnet released a few weeks ago a thorough ranking on search engines, reviewing what types of search features are available on each popular engine, and how well they perform in various categories. In honor of this I wanted to put forth some links and notes on some different places to search when what you are looking for isn't so simply available. Research utilizing one engine simply isn't as thorough as it once was, so let this be a starting point for greater things. This is by no means a complete list, but it gives you the opportunity to explore some different methods of search and is a well-rounded starting point.

The Big Three:
1. Google
2. Yahoo!
3. MSN

These account for the majority of searches, and share many of the basic features (features also found in smaller engines)- plain search, image search, and news search among the most starndard.

The Specialties:
4. Ask Jeeves
Ask Jeeves gained steam as an engine designed to respond to inquisitive statements. It will give you ansers to to queries posed in question form, such as "what is the origin of baseball?", and has tried hard to continue the tradition by building a very assisted search engine. When possible, the engine will return results with additional words to try, suggested words to remove, and related search terms. It will also give you a specific site that (attempts) to answer your question, if you formed one, and provide one touch access to related information that you might be seeking on a daily basis. For example, if you look up "baseball", there will be one touch access to "scores" and "schedules", as well as a drop-down menu for every mlb team's Ask Jeeves homepage.

5. a9 Search
a9 is a search program built under the Amazon umbrella, and because of that maintains a slew of features designed to bring online shopping to the next level. You have the ability to load on one page several columns that basically run seperate searches for your search term in a different applications. Among the most unique are Amazon Books, IMDB Movies, and a9 Yellow Pages. Amazon books lets you search into any books the company sells for actual pages, and can actually be used to read a whole book entirely on the web. The Yellow Pages feature, though, is really impressive. The majority of the streets in major cities have been photographed, and when you find your location you see a frontal picture of the store. Once there, you can actually scroll through images of the entire street, viewing store by store what is in the area near the initial location you were looking at.

6. AOL Search
AOL Search is more of an assisted search program. As you type in search items, it makes suggestions as to what you want. After you make you search it gives you suggested spots based on popular or official sites, such as Sports Illustrated. Also on top is a "snapshot" of your term. If you look up a singer, for example, it gives you links to their photos, videos, and music. Additionally, there are also categories in a bar on the left where your search term shows up, so that you can specify what you'd like. AOL's search pretty much continues the trend of their main service, which is to make the web smaller and more accessible for the user.

7. Ice Rocket
Ice Rocket is not a relatively well known search engine, but it has one feature it's trying to sell through as its money resource - the blog search. It's specifically seperated out the ability to search through blogs for current news in the blogosphere. Ontop of its basic Blog search, it also has a tool that graphs the quanitity of postings about subjects you specify over a period of time. Both of these tools allow you to track the buzz on a specific subject. Finally, for those bored who want to find a subject to look up, it has a live scrolling page of all the searches happening in real time on Ice Rocket.

More Blog Search Tools
Searching blogs, as addressed in the section about "Ice Rocket", is significant not only for the information that can be found in them, but because it gives you the opportunity to gain real-time knowledge of what the world is talking about. With everyone becoming a journalist, research is not simply about the facts, but about the perception. Blog search tools can bring that knowledge to yours hands. Here are three tools designed specifically to search blogs:

8. Technoranti
9. Blogpulse
10. BlogLines

Combined Search Engine Tools
Aside from using specific search engines, there are several pages that have been built with the purpose of agregating engines. Some aggregate the results to give you the highest ranked sites by average (called Metacrawlers), and some give you results side by side to compare engine rankings. Here are a few tools that can be used for these purposes:

11. Dogpile
Dogpile combines the search results of Google, Yahoo, and Ask Jeeves. Your search produces results as an aggregate of the three; However, after the initial search, you have the option to ad columns on the results page with specific results for any and all of those engines. This way you can compare result rank and see a variety of results at once.

12. DoubleTrust
DoubleTrust compares results between Google and Yahoo and gives you a long chart of results. First it displays the results that come up in both engines, then it gives you seperate breakdowns of the "orphan" results that show up in google or yahoo. It also gives you the opportunity to specify which engine you trust more, and gives more priority to those results.

13. Twingine
This was formerly called "Yagoohoo!gle. The page basically allows you to do a search, and then splits your screen in two to display Google and Yahoo side by side with your search results. In addition, when you click on links it only takes you to the page on the half of the screen you are using at that moment. This isn't much in the way of offering something very unique, but its an easy way to explore different searches together.

14. Xtra-Google
This page is one of the most complete search engine pages I've ever come across. While its initial purpose is to lay out all of the types of search and utilities that Google has to offer, it also pulls together a myriad of tools to do almost any search across countless engines. In pretty much every case it gives you a slew of options and combines the results of many to funnel popular results of any type of search directly to you. This is the ultimate "metacrawler", and there are a variety of methods of search to explore.

Again, this is not meant to be an all-encompasing look at the world of search engines. There are many, many more engines, metacrawlers, and tools that give you different ways to search. In particular, I have not included any engines that give you a snapshot of the page results directly with your search. This is a good starting point, though, and gives a strong overview of what the world of search has to offer.
-kbs

posted by kbs @ 12:20 AM