Search 1.x » Google

Why Should You Bother With Alternative Search Engines

Felix — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 10:08:00 +0000

For most people, Google is the only search engine they know (OK maybe you have heard about Bing now!) when in fact there are a number of powerful and useful alternatives search engines out there. Blogs such as AltSearchEngines does a great job in promoting and teaching the merits of these alternative search engines. At Search 1.x, we believe that whilst a lot of these alternative search engines are complete waste of time, some of them definitely offers value to any serious searcher and you should definitely bother checking them out!

And if you are still lacking motivations and think that Google does it all for you, here are some ideas on why you should bother exploring them:

1. They Are The Specialists

As good as Google is at Web search sometimes a specialist search engine can get a particular job done better and faster. I guess its a bit like how we go to a specialist doctor for specialist treatment.

Specialist blog search engine such as Technorati has been around for a long time and has built a wonderful reputation and set of features that makes it one of the best blog search engines on the web.

One good recently launched example of a specialist search engine is WolframAlpha which claims to be a “computational knowledge engine” which ultimately means that it is a facts engine and allows users to search through a number of specialist databases of facts and figures. If you are interested in finding certain numerical facts or stats, it beats Google hands down and will help you get there faster. For example here is one WolframAlpha query that directly gives you the answer to “Date of Kennedy’s Death” on the results page. Great for trivia nights!

For more specialist search engines that what their special powers are, check out the Search 1.x Search Directory!

2. Real-time Search

This is arguably one of the Google’s biggest short comings in being able to search not last week’s websites, not even yesterday’s blog posts but the discussion and chatters happing now. In trying to answer the question of what’s going on right now, the sources of contents can be new stories, comments, conversations, pictures or videos. The subtle distinction of real-time search when compared with traditional web search being that the source of information is less important than the timely information itself.

Check out my previous blog about conversation searching using the twitter search feature!

More recently, CrowdEye and Collecta are a couple of great up and coming real-time search engines that combines real-time results from various “real-time” content sources including microblog sites such as twitter, popular blogs, and social websites such as facebook. CrowdEye is unique in that it analyses the links that are being tweeted by people and show you what are the hot or popular links. Collecta on the other hand has a bigger content sources that include not only twitter but blog posts, comments, and Flick.

3. Access To All The Results!

If you are an Information Junkie and Google fails to return any relevant results, have you ever wondered what Bing or Twitter search might bring ? Metadata search engines are specifically designed to answer this question by providing a unified results page that include search results from popular search engines in one single page.

Dogpile and Scour are two of the most popular meta search engines that gives you quick access to results from all the popular search engines.

There are however, other ways to get the same results, one such method is to use browser plugins such as the Unified Search Firefox plugin which appends search results from other search engine and sources as you do a Google Search without you having to go to dedicated metadata search engine.

3. Get To See the Future Of Search

Interested in seeing the future of search? Alternative search engines are often where the real innovation happens, so if you are a real life hacker or true technologist you ought to keep up with what’s happening it he world of alternative search engines.

Whilst there are numerous innovation in search happening as we speak, one area that is predicted to drive some real innovation in search is the area of semantic search and the poser child (or alternative search engine) in this space is Hakia

There you go, hopefully one of the above points is enough to get you to look beyond Google and go on, give it a go and let us know about your favourite alternative search engines!

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Leverage the Time Dimension For Search Relevancy

Felix — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 02:23:00 +0000

Here is a tip that I think people sometimes overlook but can pay huge dividend when used correctly! :+)

Google has done such a good job in providing great search results sometimes we take it for granted and become lazy in thinking about basic search strategy.

Google by default returns results sorted by relevancy based on its ranking algorism that includes the now famous “PageRank” algorism. Now whilst nobody really knows the secret source/formula Google use in its ranking algorism, it is understood that freshness or time dimension plays an important part. In addition, Google also give you the option to control the date range or how recent the page is in the advanced search options, use it to supplement your search query when you know timeliness of a result set plays a critical role in terms of relevancy.

By selecting the date range, you can restrict you search result to pages created or updated within the last 24 hours. week, month or year. This operator is invaluable for certain types of search as sometimes instead of dreaming up keywords to include or exclude, it’s much more effective to limit and control the time elements.

For example, as you searching for information about a newly released gadget that’s only been out on the market for a month. Restricting your search to pages created or update within the last month is going to dramatically help you filter out material not related to this particular release of the product without mucking around too much with product version and keywords.

By the way, if the time dimension or freshness of a source is very important to you when searching, chances are you should also leverage other sources of more timely search engines where time plays a more important factors. These include News search sites such as Google News, various Blog search engines and Twitter search for searching through more update to date web contents and near-realtime web conversations.

Once again, thinking beyond keywords when it comes to intelligently structuring you search query can make your life easier as well as make your search much more effective :+)

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Why You Need to Check Out Google Scholar Search

Felix — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 01:51:00 +0000

When it comes to authoritative source or fresh new thinking based on actual research, you just can’t beat academic research. Sometimes, you are looking for what the latest thinking or theories is on a particular topic or wants to know what academia thinks about a theory you want to apply in business. If you have been in those situations and have not checked out Google Scholar, then you are are missing out big time.

Google Scholar is an obscure search service that Google has been providing for a while that I was not familiar with until I was introduced to it by a professor. It indexes all well known and popular journal databases, publications and research publications (Harvard Business Review, etc), and allows you to search through the index using the same intuitive search interface as the general web search. From my personal experience and feedback from people who uses it extensively, the publications that it indexes is extensive and of high quality, and that’s important when it comes to scholar research.

In another word, Google has taken library catalogues searching to another level. Gone are the bad, old days when you need to go to the library and search through the physical catalogue of academic journals, gone also are the days when you need to log onto various academic database, learn the intricacy of their search syntax individually and collate the results together to compare them.

You can sort by relevancy or date in the Google Scholar search results , and Google uses a number of factors to calculate relevancy including how many times a particular paper was cited by other researchers.

There is a catch though. :+)

Whilst Google Scholar give you access to the index and allow you search for articles, getting access to the actual article is a different story. Whilst you will find a lot of publically accessible articles, most high quality papers have restricted access from the general public.

The good news is that most articles are in digital forms and are linked to directly from your Google Scholar search results, the bad news is that you will need to be affiliated or have membership to a library to gain access to them as most libraries have subscriptions to popular journal databases. As far I can see, there are two ways for you to get access to these restricted articles.

1. If you are doing any sort of undergraduate study or post graduate study, ring up the library and request access to their online library databases.

2. If you have a colleague or family member doing any sort of study (and there should always be someone studying around you !) ask him or her for access to their online library database

Once you obtained a valid library access account, you can even tell Google to automatically link to the article in the specific library that you have access to as shown here where Google Scholar is providing a link to the article from Macquarie University where I have access to their online database.

Once you set it up, it truly is an amazing piece of research tool.

There are a lot of hard core theory based content in Google Scholar, but if you search effectively, you ought to find exactly what you are looking for. Give it a go and as Google puts it, leverage the wealth of knowledge available through the research of others and “Stand on The Shoulder of Giants”!

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Your Voice Powered Search Options On The iPhone

Felix — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 12:55:00 +0000

If you have an iPhone, you are in luck as the battle is heating up in terms of search offerings on the iPhone. Google has updated it’s iPhone native Google search App numerous time with the most recent app being the most exciting one due to the inclusion of voice activated search.

1. Google Search

The Google Search experience on the iPhone using the Google app is similar yet, optimised for the iPhone. The results pages are the same except smaller, the sponsored link ads are there except smaller. However Google has done a couple of optimisation on the iPhone to make the search experience a bit pain less on the iPhone

Firstly, as you type your search keyword, possible results are listed continuously below as you add new keywords, other keywords are also guessed by Google and suggested to you as you type your search strings out. All of this enhancement is there to decrease the need to type as it is not a pleasant experience to type using your thumb on the iPhone, and I must say, it works pretty well.

The second enhancement is the much hyped voice search. The premise sounds simple enough, you bring your iPhone to your face, you tell it what you are searching for and it gives you the results without you having to type any thing: the holy grail of searching on the phone. My experience and from what I read on various review site led me to conclude that it does not work well at all. Speech recognition is a difficult computing problem, even with the might of modem computing hardware such as the iPhone, it is difficult to do well. Unless you speak with very simple one keyword search spoken VERY SLOWLY, your chance of a correct transcription is near zero, you end of having to type it anyway. More of a gimmick rather than a useful feature if you ask me.

2. Vlingo

In terms of current crop of alternatives, Vlingo stands out with its outstanding voice recognition technology. Vlingo has been providing a very popular search app on the Blackberry and their offering on the iPhone is rock solid even against the might of Google, frankly speaking I am surprised that vLingo has not made it to the top 50 free app list but you can download it from this link.

One good touch with Vlingo is that it is at least humble, in that if it believe it did not get a good recording, it will say so and ask you to say it again.it will also offer variation of what you might have said along with what it think you said.

Compared with the Google search app, it has more features, you have the option of searching Yahoo using the vLingo app, and most importantly, I believe the voice recognition is superior based on my usage.

The superior speech recognition accuracy is apparently due to the app’s ability to learn your speech patterns. From its pool of 5 million utterances so far, the system is also sampling other users, "so it improves for the entire community,"

You can search for web sites, location, business, and even make voice activate call by saying the person’s name you want to call. Just for good measure, Vlingo even threw in the ability to update your facebook or twitter profile by speaking to your iPhone.

The verdict? Since they are both free, why not have both. The possibility is endless in this area of voice powered search and in the meantime, the iPhone can be even more handy in the car with a car kit as you try to find the nearest pizza shop as you drive.

I expect there to be plenty of new comers to this space and very exciting innovation, as a searcher and a fan of the iPhone that can only mean good news and that I will be holding on to my iPhone a lot longer. If you are an iPhone user, you ought to give mobile search a try!

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The Must Have Firefox Plugin To Customise Google Search

Felix — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 13:51:00 +0000

As good as Google is, have you ever wanted to try the same search on a different search engine after a your Google search disappointed you ? Did you give up on that idea because you didn’t want the hassle of typing in a new URL to go to a different search engine, type in the same keywords and do the same search again? I know I have :+P

Google has made us extremely dependant on it and very very lazy when it comes to search, mostly because the result Google returns on good most of the times!

For Firefox users, there is an extremely simple and power plugin to solve that problem and allow you to easily unleash the power of other search engines when Google did not answer your prayer.

The CustomiseGoogle Plugin is a Firefox plugin that gives you tonnes of feature to customise your Google search experience, some of the really handy features include:

Remove Google Ads
Rewrite links to point straight to the images in Google Images
Add position counter and many others !!!

But the real killer features for searchers is the way it adds links to the top of Google search results that allows you search the same keyword on other search engines with a simple click of a button! Here are the links just to show you how easily accessible they are!

I must confess I would not have tried a lot of my Google searches on other search engines if it were not for the simplicity of this approach and I have benefited greatly for it!

You will also benefit by having these short cuts to other search engines and be a more productive and efficient searcher

The plugin creates different links depending whether you did a Google web search, blog search or image search and point you to the other leading search engines depending on what you are searching for.

You might ask, which alternative search engines should I try then ? I have blogged the merits of various alternative search engines in Search1.x, including how Technorati is a much superior blog search engine for blogs search, and why you should try live search. Better still, you should check out the Search 1.x Search Engine Directory for a comprehensive list of great specialist search engines broken down by their specialisation.

At the end of the day, it is your own experience that counts, but at least the only thing stands between you and potentially better search results is just a click of a button now!Similar Posts:

Essential Search Skills For Bloggers – Part 1

Felix — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 00:40:00 +0000

As a blogger, search is an essential skills. Being good at search allows you to come up with better blog ideas, research your topics quicker, write your blog in less time and promote your blog more effectively. Essentially, making your blog more successful whilst making your life easier, something every blogger strives for!

Here are some search skills that you might find useful as a blogger regardless or whether you are a novice blogger starting out or an experienced blogger because I have learnt and found them to be invaluable in making me a better blogger and my life easier!

PART 1: SEARCH FOR BETTER BLOG IDEAS

We all want people to read our blog and find out blog via search engines, hence it is important to write what people are interested in.There are various tools and that allow us to see the search volume and patterns of keywords so you can tune your message either to popular rising keywords or long tail keywords searches. Itâ€™s important to choose the most appropriate keywords for your content, so that your content answers the relevant questions that searchers are asking for, it’s all about the right keywords!

First up is Google Trend which is a basic tool that has been around for a while and it allows you to see some basic comparison stats between the keywords you are thinking of targeting. For example, say I am trying to work out whether to target the term “Search“or “Search Engine” and do a comparison search on Google trend.

The resulting page will show you a comparison trending of the two keywords which in this case is telling me that people search for the term “Search” a lot more than “Search Engine” It also shows you the major news that effected the pattern of the trend in the past (sometimes you might want to know and write about!) as well as where the search originated from in case you want to geo-target your readers.

Google improved on Google Trend and created Google insight for Search which is a much more powerful tool to do keyword research. You can compare the trending of a particular keyword search for location and time ranges as well as put various filters on it (categories, etc.) Now if you search for the term “search engine tips” here is what you will get.

As well as the trending information, you also get other goodies such as Top Related Searches and Rising Related Searches ! By the look of this results, I really should be targeting “Searching Tips” and “Google Tips” if I want some serious search engine traffic.

What if you want to find out what search engine traffic your competitors are getting so that you can try to get in on the action ? Google Trend for Website does just that for you. Say I am interested in what keyword traffick SearchEngine Watch is getting.

Not only does it give you other similar websites (Also Visited) to SearchEngineWatch.com (potential competitors), it also gives you some of the most popular keyword searches that took people to the website. Once again this particular search shows that I really need to prefix the keyword “Google” before all the keywords I plan on targeting !

There you have it, some basic keyword/topic search skills essential for Bloggers as you start to think about your next blog topic. Be sure to come back and check out other parts of this series on Essential Search Skills for Bloggers !Similar Posts:

Google Helps You Search For The Spoken Words

Felix — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 05:51:00 +0000

If you are like me, you probably have some interest in the 2008 US presidential election. In order to help you make your mind up in terms of who is the better candidate, you might have also been wondering about the position of the two presidential candidates on various issues. Well wonder no more, thanks to Google’s new audio indexing technology (Gaudi), you can search through exactly what the the candidates have said about various issues !

Google has tried to embed (and since taken off) this technology in various parts of YouTube, but I found the best place to test it out to be right from the Google Gaudi Labs Page.

For example, say you are interested in what Obama has said about “NASA”:

Google will find you all the clips where NASA was spoken by Obama (displayed on the left), you can then play the clips on the right hand side. If you click on the play button on the right hand side, Google will even take you directly to the section where NASA was spoken! It doesn”t get easier than this in terms of searching for what the candidates have said about a particular issue. At the moment you can also search through all the videos in the YouTube political channel to finds what any other politicians have said about certain issues, just click on “All Politicians”

Does it work ? Well the transcription is not perfect and the search sometimes find wrongly transcribed word, but it is certainly usable. I suspect the slight hit and miss nature of this technology is what’s holding Google back from general public consumption.

I blogged about Blinkx attempt in trying to index the spoken words, who certainly has a lead in this space of deep indexing of videos. Google is now well and truly venturing into this area, be it slowly and carefully as to not disappoint and damage its rock solid reputation in Search. There is no question that deep indexing of videos and transcription of spoke words has tremendous potential in unleashing the value of more unstructured contents.

BTW, you can also add this technology as a Google gadget at your iGoogle Page.

Check it out and let us know what you think !Similar Posts:

Simplest Way to Refine Your Search And Improve Search Result

Felix — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 13:18:00 +0000

One of the easiest way to improve search results is by either excluding certain keywords (i.e. the “-” operator in Google) to filter out certain pages or to add certain keywords to zone into a particular area. Now there is a even simpler way to do this without learning the specific syntax!

Xippee is a plugin that make it much easier for you to refine your search using words from the results page.

The advantage is that sometimes you don’t really know what you need to filter out until you do a search, using the Xippee plugin, you can easily exclude certain keywords from the results page by just clicking on it right from the results page !

For example, let’s say I am interested in finding out how to extend the battery life of my iPhone and search for “iPhone Battery” in Google.

Now, there seems to be quite a lot of information about iPhone “Battery Replacement” which I have no interest what so ever and would consider them noise. I can either try to work out the correct syntax to exclude the keyword “Replacement” or I can use Xippee to select the word “Replacement” and deselect it right from the results page.

The end results is that Xippee updates the search query with the correct syntax to exclude the word “Replacement” from the search and returns a new sets of results that excludes any thing about iPhone battery replacement!

Xippee works as a plugin in Internet Explorer 7, Firefox, Opera and Safari and it automatically adjust the syntax as you use it with Google, Yahoo or Live Search.

For those of you who are just not operator inclined or does not like the thought of having to type more than your search keywords into the search box, this make it much easier to get better search results.

Sure the new Google suggest feature tries to guess what you are searching for and suggest other keywords to go with the one you typed in the search box. But the ability to select a word right from the results page and exclude it in the results is cool. It is simple, easy and effective, I would not be surprised if other search vendors start to include the functionality in their browser search bar.Similar Posts:

Why You Should Try Live Search

Felix — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 05:56:00 +0000

Extending from my previous post on why you should try Yahoo Search, I want to share with you some of the latest innovation from Live Search. Thanks to Amit from the Digital Inspiration who pointed me to these tips! The latest round of innovation from Live Search include various things including previewing of videos and clipping and saving of image search results but for me, the below innovation around the core search functionality really differentiate Live Search from Google and I think a lot of users will find useful.

1. Find pages that contain links to documents, MP3 files, videos and zips

Using the Google “filetype” operator, you always could find specific non-html documents with the keywords you are interested in. For example here is a search for “iPhone filetype:pdf” and Google returns links to the actual PDF documents related to iPhone that it found

But what if I am interested in a web pages that CONTAIN LINKS to various types of documents, kind of a content aggregation page where links to useful resources in specific file format are compiled. Specifically what if I want to find web pages about iPhone on the AT&T website that contains PDF documents ? Whilst you can’t really do this easily using Google search, you can do this quite easily with Live Search using the query “site:att.com iphone contains:pdf” which finds me this page with lots of PDF files about the iPhone !

You can use the “contains” operator to find documents, mp3 files, videos and zips. I am sure it will come in handy for me sometime in the future :+)

2. Limit you searches to sites that contain RSS

Looking for sites that contain RSS feeds so that you can keep up with whatever you were searching for ? The “hasfeeds:” operator allow you to find websites that matches your keyword search and also has an RSS feed on the page. Here my attempt to find sites about “iPhone Jailbreak” and I can subscribe to.

3. Get Live Search Results via RSS feeds

For those of us who now depend on RSS feeds to help us consume the vast amount of information, having your search results as RSS feeds has a number of advantages. Whilst you can always get search results via email using the Google Alert services but strangely Google still hasn’t gotten around to adding the search results RSS subscription functionality. You can however use a third party service feedmysearch to achieve the same thing.

With Live Search, there is an undocumented way to turn search results into feeds directly from Live Search.

Once you have completed your search (”iphone jailbreak” for example)

http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=iphone+jailbreak&go=&form=QBRE

You just need to append “&format=rss” to the end of the url. so the above query can be turned into an rss feed by using this url

http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=iphone+jailbreak&go=&form=QBRE&format=rss

You can then subscribe to it using your favourite RSS readers. Undocumented, yes, but works like a charm !

Whilst these new features might not warrant a complete switch to Live Search from Google, they give you more options when it comes to general web search and can add to your toolbox of Search kit and make you more productive.Similar Posts:

3 Reasons Why Search Toolbar Makes You A Better Searcher

Felix — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 07:07:00 +0000

When it comes to increasing general web search productivity, nothing beats installing a search toolbar on your favourite browser. All the Search providers have them freely available for both Internet Explorer and Firefox. You can find the Google Toolbar here, Windows Live Toolbar here and the Yahoo Toolbar here.

I used Google Toolbar on Firefox personally, but they all have very similar functionailities, here is what a Google tool bar look like.

Whilst most browser these days already have a built-in search box on top, for me, search toolbar is still a must for me and they make me a better and more efficient searcher. Whilst toolbar these days provide tones of features including translation and spell check, the three main reasons of why they make me a better searcher are:

(1) Instant Access to All Search Services: Whether you want to search for web sites, news, images or even location, you can do it all with a click of a mouse button from the toolbar !

(2) PageRank: Google toolbar displays the PageRank of the page you are visiting and gives you a general guide as to the importance of the page (according to Google). The longer the Green bar, the more attention I pay to a particular page.

(3) Keyword Tracking Functionality: To me, this is the killer functionality provided by the Google toolbar. Once you have arrived at a results page from a keyword search. Google toolbar allows you to (1) Highlight all the keywords used for the search (in different colors!) (2) Click on the keywords used for the search and highlight them individually for you.

When I arrive at a site from a Google search now, no longer will I need to go to Edit->Find from the menu, type in the keyword I want to find on the page and press enter, I can do keywords search using ONE CLICK ! Major time saver and productivity gain.

Search toolbar is the first thing I install these days when I upgrade my browser as I almost feel lost without them. Go on, give it a go if you are not already using them, I promise you will not go back to a browser without one once you use them.Similar Posts: