Search 1.x » Review

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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Bing Search Improves on the Search Results Page

Felix — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 10:40:00 +0000

So Bing has a good name that you can now replace “To Google Something” with “To Bing Something!” and has been getting tonnes of positive media coverage, but from the searcher’s point of view, what is the big fuss and why should I care? Well the good new is that Microsoft has done their homework this time and Bing is definitely a better search engine than the old live search service.

By in large, it is a very similar Search experience to Google in terms of the display layout and results relevancy which is a good thing. However, Bing has some cool innovations that Google currently does not have and I think not only improves on the Google design but really helps the searcher and I give Microsoft and the Bing Search team for thinking beyond the Google offering.

Sure the Bing search screen has nice interactive background that changes everyday, but for me, it’s all about the search results page!

Microsoft research apparently identified that one of biggest frustration in search today is in clicking through to a page, only to find it is not the right one so helping searcher identifying the correct page to click through on the results page was identified as a main area of focus for the Bing team.

I am happy to say that the focus on delivering useful information on the results page itself has been a good one and I think has delivered real tangible benefits for the searchers.

Now on to the Bing search results layout…

Whilst the Bing search results page looks similar to any other results page, the secret is revealed when you mouse over a particular result entry.

When your mouse is anywhere on top of a result, a vertical rule shows up at its right edge to visually clue you that this preview is available. Hovering the cursor to the right edge of any Web result brings up a small window containing text from the linked page. It can even find relevant deep links within that page. It’s great for getting a peek at pages that are relevant, and for helping avoid clicking through to pages that aren’t.

Furthermore, if the site contains malware, the Bing engine will also reveal that in the preview text window and let you make up your mind as to whether to visit the site.

If you don’t pay attention, you might actually miss this little feature, but I think it is a small clever innovation that actually works really really well!

The other nice touch is the placement of your Search history right on the results page to speed things up. I for one find I often re-run some of my previous searches so this is definitely another handy feature to have on the results page.

A bit of a tip for you if you are from outside of the USA, you should click here to switch to the USA version of Bing as I find some features were disabled with the Australian local version so I am guessing this might be the case with other local versions.

The Bing Image search and research tools of Bing also have some really cool features that makes it superior than the current Google offerings. I am planning on covering them soon so be sure to come back to check them out!

If you have not already checked out Bing, then You should most certainly have a go at the new Bing search engine! as I suspect you will be pleasantly surprised with the Bing search experience.

Tell us what you think about your Bing experience!

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Take a Navigational Approach To Search

Felix — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 09:58:00 +0000

What’s navigational search you ask? It’s a search approach where you are not searching for a specific answer but more looking for good materials that relates to a particular topic. The search results is a start of a navigational experience where it leads you on a guided navigational experience that allow you to drill down to the relevant concept or topic area that you are interested in. Or in the words of the founders of Kosmas, the goal of its search engine is to “tell their users more about something,”

A good example is when you are researching about a particular travel destination. This is the case where you are not looking for a particular answer but are just looking for general material ABOUT a particular destination. You are looking for someone to help and guide you through the most important topics or concepts related to your travel destination.

In order to have a navigational search experience, someone needs to act as a guide, and that’s where Kosmas comes in.

Kosmas has been mentioned by the New York Times as a potential Google killer and have often been described as a semantic search engine, I like to think the unique search results it presents lends itself also to a navigational search approach.

The search experience on Kosmas is hard to explain other than describing it as sort of like a metadata search engine except it actually knows what you are asking about and customise the content sources it searches and present it to you in a useful manner in a magazine like layout.

For a start, it clusters your search query results and present you with related topics that you can drill into. But it then go on and provides you with a wealth of material that are somehow RIGHT for the search you are conducting. For my search of “iPhone case” above, it presented me with a number of related topics such as iPod and iPod Touch, it then presented me with images of iPhone cases, links to shops where I can buy them, and tweets of people talking about iPhone cases.

The interesting thing is, if you search for something different, the types of contents presented may be completely different. For example, if I search for “Sydney”. I am presented with the Wikipedia entry for Sydney and a map of Sydney!

Kosmas claims that the results for any search can contain information from over 15 sources and may include images, videos, reviews, and conversation. The neat thing is that the search engine works out what you are searching for semantically and searches through the best contents sources that relates to your search string.

It is remarkably accurate and comprehensive when you are searching for basic concepts such as an object or location, but when the number of keywords starts to go north of 3, the results becomes less useful, the argument would be that you really should be searching for basic concepts that you like to explore more and less narrow topic areas using Kosmas.

One thing is for sure, if you are planning a trip, or doing research on a new product, Kosmas is definitely a good place to start, and I will definitely be using it in the future.

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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 New Visual Search Experience

Felix — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 10:44:00 +0000

As video and image content on the web becomes more prevalent and compelling, search engines are finding new and innovative ways for users to search and browse through these rich contents and provide a more visual search experience. Google Image search is great but the interface is really built on top of the traditional text web search and hasn’t evolved along with the type of rich content available now and user’s expectation in terms of searching for visually rich contents.

There has been various visual search engines that caters for these needs, they are really a special type of aggregation search engine that focus on video and images contents using a number of search engines such as Google and Yahoo. These search engines are visually rich with very innovative user interface that are completely different from your traditional web search experience and you primarily browse and decide on where you want to drill into from the results set based on images or screen shots of the websites.

One of these visual search engines is SearchMe which display screen shots of the page and images in the results in an iTunes Cover Flow like layout that is familiar to iTunes users. This allows you to quickly decide which website to focus on based on the look of it by flicking through them.

CoolIris which is one my favourite alternative search engines is another visual search engine that is taking the idea of cover flow to the next level to provides a completely new and unique search experience.

As an example, when I search for “iPhone leather case” the look of the case is probably of the utmost importance to me as a searcher. additional, the ability to visually browse through all type of leather cases quickly and efficiently is also of benefit to me as a searcher. This is exactly what Cooliris allow you to do!

Cooliris not so much as provides a cover flow layout but more of a cover WALL layout that gives you the feeling of walking pass a continuous walls of images that stretches indefinitely after you do a search. You can use the same unique search interface to search through Flickr, and YouTube and find your results in a wall of images. The shopping search option is particular useful as it not only lists images of the product you are searching for but also include the price and a link to where you buy it. I must say it works very very well. This visually rich experience is achieved through a browser plugin for both IE and Firefox and the the result is indeed a very un-browser like experience.

The layout is not only beautiful but effective. I personally think it is one of the most effective design in terms of searching for and browsing through visually rich contents.

More importantly, what is it good for ? Searching for images and video from multiple sites is an obvious area where you can have a lot of fun. If you are searching for ideas or products and are primarily interest in how it looks, Cooliris can definitely make you life a lot easier and make the search experience more interesting.

As an added bonus, CoolIris also offer an iPhone app version of its search engine which amazingly delivers a similar visual experience using the comparatively much smaller iPhone screen!

Definitely worth checking out!Similar Posts:

How To Find Your Answer In Other People’s Discussions

Felix — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 05:58:00 +0000

People’s opinion and discussions often provide the best source of information. These discussions boards or forums are often attended and contributed by people who are both knowledgeable and passionate about a particular area. Best all, people have been having discussing on the web for a long time and chances are someone somewhere on the web has discussed or even answered the very questions you are asking now.

Whilst discussion board do not provide the ultimate truth on a particular topic, they are fantastic for:

Product/travel location reviews and recommendations
Troubleshooting or technical help with software/hardware products
Get opinion or idea within a hobby or interest area

And whilst it is possible to search through discussion boards and forums using Google (is anything impossible with Google ?) by narrowing and limiting your searches to various discussions boards and , there is a better and easier way !

Omgili is a fantastic search engine that specialise in indexing and searching through discussion boards or forums.

Omgili claims to scans millions of online discussions worldwide in over 100,000 boards, forums and other discussion based resources and can differentiate between discussion entities such as topic, title, replies and discussion date.

Based on my personal experience, it works reasonably well! Once you have done a search, you can see the number of post and replies within a discussion thread (so you can skip the ones with zero replies!) and then narrow your search within a particular forum.

The other way to leverage discussion board effectively is to find the forum or discussion board offered by the company that offered you the products or services. These days, most companies will have some sort of community forum or discussion board on their website to foster a community, build loyalty and get the users to help each others ! For example, if you have issues or question about your iPhone or Mac, the Apple discussion board might be a good place to start your search.

The worst case is that you do come across a community discussion board that covers your area of interested but no one has answered your very specific question, you can always register and put the question out there and join the discussion!

And remember, try to give back to the web community by contributing to these discussion boards so that someone else can benefit from it the way you did!

UPDATE: Google Group Search has just started to include forum discussions in its search results along side results from Google Groups. Just goes to show how important are peopleâ€™s discussions as a source of useful information!Similar Posts:

What Can Semantic Search Engines Do For YOU?

Felix — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 05:49:00 +0000

Semantic Search engine has been all the rage for the last 2-3 years. Everyone knows Google as the big daddy of keyword search engines and has heard of how Semantic Search Engine can potentially be the next big thing. Why? because it sounds sexy, because it sounds mysterious, and I think we are all interested in the next Google beater and what the next generation of search can offer.

Whilst various researches have shown that a third of searchers don’t find their search on their first attempt due to poor understanding of the features and relevant syntax of the search engine, semantic search engine claim to fix that problem by allow searchers to use natural language and not having to learn the various search syntax to zero in on what they are looking for, in another word, ask a question and get THE answer. Sounds promising, but does it work ?

So firstly, let’s have a look at the contenders? Hakia and Powerset are probably two of the most well known self claimed semantic search engines. Powerset is well known for fact that it was bought by Microsoft but it never got past searching Wikipedia articles only. Hakia on the other hand, is a true general semantic web search engine that has been around for a few years.

But is it any good ? More importantly what’s in it for everyday searchers like you and me ? To quote Hakia, here is what Semantic Search Engine can do for you:

“Semantic search technology enables accurate retrieval of information via concept/meaning match. It is very effective, and perhaps the only method, in application to credible and dynamic content. Because most of the credible and dynamic content are statistically flat (infertile) for popularity algorithms to work effectively beyond common queries. ”

To prove its point Hakia even puts various search phrase links on its homepage that do a head to head search comparison against Google. Here is one for a search for â€œlongest strike in the history of railroadsâ€

For the above example where the search phrase is a fairly specific question, there is no question that Hakia :

(1) Seems to understand the essence of the question

(2) Returned more relevant results, and

(3) The summary provided is also spot on in terms of the question asked

I like their approach in inviting users to do a head to head comparison with Google search results. It shows that their technology has merit against the best in the business and they have nothing to hide.

Some of the other search comparison that Hakia invites you to do and seems to return better results include:

- Does insurance cover brain surgery?

- Do DOE and EPA have conflicts?

- Is there any remedy to tuberculosis?

After a while, you get the idea that Hakia is designed and tuned to understand and deconstruct questions and then return the relevant answer with highly optimised summary.

And I must say, it does a pretty good job in answering natural language based questions.

I canâ€™t help it but tried the ultimate question of them all â€œWhat is the meaning of lifeâ€ and here is what I got:

I gathered this question (and many others!) has been asked a few times before and the engine has prepared an even extensive response of it! More prove that itâ€™s pretty serious in providing the best quality answer to various questions.

So what’s verdict ? if you know what you are doing, Google is sill superior and can certainly give you the answer to any question you have if you know how to turn your question into the right syntax and format that Google are optimised at processing.

For a straight search on a question you have, Hakia provides an interesting alternative that seems to work pretty well and might just give you some insights that you didn’t think of when you asked the question.

Honestly, you should at least try out the comparison searches and make up your own minds!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:

Best Video Search Engine for iPhone

Felix — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 23:57:00 +0000

iPhone has great web connectivity, beautiful big screen and a built in media and YouTube player so searching for and playing videos on the iPhone is bound to be a killer web app.

Thankfully someone realised this and came up with a very good product: Vtap. Vtap video search engine was built from the ground up for mobile phones and not only index and allow you to search videos from all over the web including YouTube, MySpace, Dailymotion and many others, it then encodes the video on the fly and stream the appropriate format to your phone instantaneously!

I checked it out on my new iPhone and it works brilliantly!

Vtap gets around the problem of no Flash support on the iPhone and plays the video either via the built in YouTube and quick player after encoding the video into iPhone compatible format. The interface is slick and you can also subscribe to certain video feeds similar to the video feeds on YouTube.

Not only is Vtap the best video search app I have seen on any portable devices, I am not also very excited about the bound less possibilities mobile search technology will bring in the future.

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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: