Mary Ellen Bates led this session.
Beyond the big 3.5
- Great advanced search tools (including words starting with, phonetic spelling, approximate spelling, adjacent words goes up to 15 words apart, logical expression, regular expression for internal truncation and other uses)
- Excellent tool for complex searching
- Customizable front page; add shortcuts to other finding tools
- Smaller index than Google or Yahoo
- Meta-search engine (can give number of results by source and by site)
- Clusters on the fly
- Few advanced features
- Can add topic clouds to your site from Clusty Cloud Creator (cloud.clusty.com)
Search engine beta sites:
- Google: SearchMash.com
- Yahoo: au.alpha.yahoo.com
- MSN: Ms. Dewey
- Microsoft search front-end: Tafiti (note by me: It doesn’t support Safari 3 beta yet)
- Aggregates search engines and finding tools by category (general, images, video, news, social, files, reference, academic, business, tech, shop)
- Allows for execution of same search in multiple search engines
- Like Intelways, aggregates search engines and finding tools by category
- Creates RSS feeds for search results
- Mouse over search result for a preview
- Searches Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask
- Checks for malware, phishing, offensive content in real time (green/yellow/red)
- Powered by corporate web security company
- Images from Google, Yahoo or Live
- Presents slideshow of images based on searching 3 search engines, can view images one at a time
- Can identify similar sounds based on wave pattern
- Categorization by file format. # of channels (mono/stereo), resolution, sample rate
- E-mail this sound link
Custom search engines
- Filter search, limit to certain domains or sites, or tweak the relevance ranking
- Can put institution’s imprimatur on search results
Yahoo Search Builder
- Limit by domain, append key search terms, exclude sites or terms
- Shows tag cloud of search terms
- Very customizable (can include logo)
- builder.search.yahoo.com
Google Co-op
- Can limit by domain
- Can specific domains to be highly ranked
- Requires at least one keyword (can use a noise word, like and)
- Examples: Economics Search Engine, ALA-RUSA Best Free Reference Web Sites
- www.google.com/coop/cse
Swicki
- Collaborative approach to filtering
- You supply initial key words
- Learns from clickthroughs on search result pages and modifies relevance rankings
- eurekster.com
Rollyo
- Maximum of 25 web sites
- Best for getting list of authoritative sites
- Can see others’ search rolls, such as KM-related topics at snurl.com/16×8o
- rollyo.com
Gigablast
- Fairly rudimentary
- Specify domains to search (effective limit of 200 domains, search slows down after 50-75)
- www.gigablast.com/cts.html
Questions:
- Is there a directory of customized search engines?
Technorati Tags: il2007
October 31, 2007 at 5:57 pm |
The blog http://www.AltSearchEngines.com exists soley to cover custom/niche/alternative search engines. We were just written up in Newsweek.com.
The blog is not a directory, but has several categories and lists which are easily accessible, plus a site search box.
I invite you to come over and take a scroll!
November 3, 2007 at 4:00 pm |
Thanks for posting this presentation summary. It’s great to see attention being given to the many search engines out there beyond “the top 3.5″.
In terms of search engines with original indexes, it’s probably worth adding the much-overlooked Alexa search engine from Amazon. Also, Gigablast has a decent original index, and Accoona is worth consulting for really difficult searches.
You can get quick access to these and many other search engines at Zuula, our web search tool that gives tabbed access to web search, image search, news search, blog search, and even job search results in from a wide range of search engines. The site is fast. All search results are formatted in a consistent, standardized way. And sponsored results are clearly separated from organic results.