Advocate's Studio

Did you know that your search results need not be limited to a page full of text identifying relevant sites an links? If you are a visual person, there are other options that might better serve your needs. Pandia Search Engine News lists five of their favorites here. Their top picks include SearchMe (highlighted in the Studio here); Viewzi; EyePlorer; Ujiko; and, NeXplore. SearchMes offer pictures of sites in their results page, rather than text descriptions, with a Cover Flow-like interface. You can roll over the image to get page title and link with a short description of the site. SearchMe also allows sharing on Twitter and Facebook. Finally, you can select and store pages in a stack, which also can be shared or embedded. My personal experience with SearchMe is all positive and the visual interface offers a much faster search experience, particularly for image searches or other queries with picture-friendly results.

I don’t have personal experience with the other options and recommend you hit the jump to Pandia to get their reviews. They provide different tools and options, each being better suited to different uses. Eyespot, for example, offers a circular result with information and responsive links primarily pulled from Wikipedia. Ujiko does something similar, but pulls its results from a broader source. Nexplore and Viewzi offer different views of results, including visual images.

Although it is not itself a search engine, Cooliris has a place here. I am a big Cooliris fan. Cooliris is a Firefox add-on that takes Google Search and responds with a Cover Flow-like result. Searchme and Cooliris are phenomenal for image searching – offering a much faster way to breeze through results with a flick of the mouse or track pad.

As in the real world, the right tool for the right job. These search engines offer different functionality with different strengths. Don’t limit yourself to that Google box: try out some of these other options and make your search results take you where you want to go
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Leave it to Firefox to come up with a way to have your cake and eat it too. Amidst the hue and cry over the last few weeks surrounding the announcement and deployment of Alpha’s computational knowledge-based search engine and whether it would topple Google from its thrown (a decidedly red-herring-esque question), Lifehacker reports on a new Firefox extension that embeds Wolfram Alpha results into your Google search results page. Author Kevin Purdy advises that the experimental Firefox extension is a bit glitchy and haphazard. Nonetheless, Purdy is correct that the extension is worth trying because “getting a second, nerdier opinion from Wolfram Alpha is just what you needed in some cases.”

Not to be outdown by the likes of Google and Wolfram Alpha, Microsoft appears to be unveiling its new search engine next week at the Wall Street Journal’s D: All Things D tech conference in Carlsbad, California, according to Resource Shelf.

The engine’s code name is Kumo, but it is really a rebranding of Microsoft Live Search conjoined with its new semantic ally, Powerset. And guess what? It is going to help us find more relevant results! The screenshots over at All Things Digital / Boomtown show a clean, spare look. PC World reports a three-column search results page with useful tools like related searches, a “single-session search history for quick backtracking”, and other related categories tied to your search inquiry. PC World uses an example of searching for a recording artist with results that include song lyrics, tickets, albums and the artist’s biography. Or searching for a product with results including images, reviews and product manuals.

Will Kumo stand or fall amidst the search stars? Not sure, but I can say this: more semantic competitors add up to us edging closer to a truly semantic on-line world! Kudos to Kumo!!!!

Just released into public beta on May 8, 2009, Scoopler is a search engine that aggregates and organizes content on various social media and sharing sites across the internet in real-time updates responsive to your search inquiry. Services include Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, Digg, Flickr, etc.  Scoopler accomplishes its purpose by indexing live updates. It ranks the popularity of links within the updates and shows trending memes. Scoopler also allows you to “reshare” or return a link back to Twitter or Facebook or the other services it supports.

With its real-time aspect and easy sharing feature, Scoopler seems another worthy tool to include in your investigative and information-sharing arsenal.

Hat tip to Pandia Search Engine News.

Fascinating post by Louis Gray, over louisgray.com, one of my favorite blogs about all things Web and social media-related. Apparently, Microsoft hosted a get-together Tuesday evening about semantic search engine Powerset and its incorporation into Microsoft’s Live Search. One of the topics discussed was how search engine reviewers perform their “craft” and how ineffective their process really is in gleaning an understanding of this complex endeavor. And the effect of this inefficient review might be to sink the better option.

This result seems particularly true as search engines become more complex in design and practice. To truly understand how effective a search engine might be, one needs to spend some time with the engine, put it through its paces and delve deep into the results. “Teaching” search engines to “think” like humans takes time, and recognizing when the engine “gets it right” should also take time.

As I have said before here, when search engine’s compete to grab out attention, we the researchers stand to win the grand prize. In Louis Gray’s words, for Microsoft, “building the better mousetrap” will only be half the battle in the war of the ‘engines. Can’t wait to see the “results.”

• Microsoft Bottoms Out in Search Race
• Microsoft to start testing ‘Kumo’ search service
• Microsoft to start testing ‘Kumo’ search service
• Microsoft’s search must begin in Redmond