Search Engine News

What's New In Search?

Everybody knows that Google is tops in the search engine world. But is that because of its ability to generate relevant search results, or because the word "google" was cool enough to become a verb? Irregardlessly, there ARE some other choices when it comes to search.

Yahoo!

The Yahoo search engine currently handles about 28.5 percent of all searches, compared to Google's 47.4 percent market share. I guess that makes Yahoo a 481-pound gorilla by comparison. Its popularity is due largely to the fact that it offers users the option of using its venerable human-edited directory or using its crawler-based search results.

Live Search

Gates and Co. have come up with a pretty good search contender with Live.com (which started life as MSN Search). Live provides search for web pages, news or images, classifieds, as well as interactive maps and access to the Encarta encyclopedia. My testing shows that the relevancy of search results is excellent, but I wonder who Microsoft had to kill in order to get the "live.com" domain name...

Meta Search Engines

The dictionary says that "meta" means "beyond, transcending, more comprehensive". So it makes sense that a metasearch engine queries a bunch of popular search engines, combines and collates all the results, then presents it to you. It's a handy tool if you don't want to search for the same information on several different search engines. Here are some of the better metasearch tools:

• KartOO is a metasearch engine with a visual display. KartOO launches your query to a set of search engines, compiles the results and shows them in a series of interactive maps. In these maps, websites are represented by larger or smaller sized pages, depending on relevance. When you move the pointer over these pages, the related keywords are illuminated and a brief description of the site appears on the left side of the screen. You can refine your search by clicking entries in a subject tree.
• Clusty wants to help you solve the information overload problem that occurs when you get thousands of results from a web search. By categorizing search results, they can become more meaningful and actionable. Clusty (formerly known as Vivisimo) uses "clustering" to organize search results into titled folders to build a clearer picture for searchers. There are several of these "information relationship" type of search engines available, and I think they are most useful when you're doing research on a broad topic, as opposed to looking for a specific site.
• DogPile was one of the first metasearch tools, and derives its name from a sports term used to describe celebrating players piling on top of one another. Not to be confused with other types of "piles" associated with dogs... DogPile is unique because it pulls results from ALL the major engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN/Live and others) but there can be a lot of sponsored results in the results, depending on the search term.

Special-Purpose Search Tools

You may be happy with your favorite search engine, but are you sure you're getting the best results? Try some of these specialized
search tools and you might find they do a better job for some or all of your queries.

• Exalead is a search engine from France that sports a variety of powerful search options that you won't find at the big name sites. Proximity searching lets you search for words within 16 words of each other, and not necessarily in the order you specify. For example, searching for "crispen (NEAR) rankin" will return "Free email newsletter by Bob Rankin and Patrick Crispen" as the first result. You can also search with word truncation, so "offic*" will find officer, official, officious, etc. Can't spell for beans? Try the phonetic spelling option. And geeks rejoice! Exalead does regular expression searching, which is an extremely potent (and extremely confusing) pattern matching doohickey. For example, /IBM[0-9]{4}/ matches IBM3090 or IBM8514.
• ChaCha combines hand-picked results from human guides with the best computer-generated search results. If you can't find what you need with the automated results, ChaCha will connect you with a live person who will try to find the information for you via an online chat session.
• If you want to find information on your own PC, or the PC of one of your employees, then you will want to use a desktop search tool like Google's Desktop Search or Windows Desktop Search. These tools can be used to find web browser histories, to find email files and to locate online documents and files that have been downloaded onto your hard drive.
• Google's Image Search will help you find a photo or drawing of almost anything. Great for your kid's school project!
• Yahoo's Video Search will find videos that match your keywords.
• Technorati Blog Search will search thousands of blogs for postings that contain the search words you enter.

Got a favorite search tool? Post your comments below...