According to the Google blog “Inside Google Book Search“, some changes have been made recently to Google Book Search, so I took this as my cue to go and visit to check these out. To say that I was disappointed is to put it mildly, and if you don’t have time to read my entire […]
Greg recently mentioned that Reuters have launched a new video/people search engine powered by Viewdle, and I’ve been playing around with it. While it has some drawbacks (currently it’s only possible to search through 612 hours of footage held by Reuters), it has a lot of features that I like. The results screen tells you […]
As pointed out on Bruceclay.com — Ask.com thinks you’re an idiot — Ask can sometimes be an irritating company. I like the new Ask3D interface, and they’re doing a lot of good things in the search arena. However, when it comes to how Ask is marketing itself, I’m completely baffled.
The Ask.com blog posts today about Ask’s new home page, which they are particularly proud of, and I think rightly so. They talk about their icons, suggest feature and skins, all of which are worth a quick peek.
Flickr has recently introduced content filters, allowing users more control over what images they view, and to ensure that they don’t get nasty surprises by accidently viewing some of the more adult images that are hosted. However, while this is a useful option, the option of turning it off has been removed in Germany, which […]
Sproose, a social search engine that allows users to rank results which I wrote about back in February, has updated, making it easier for users to rank the index of results.
Although Google currently has a wealth of books in their Google Book Search database, this isn’t enough either for them or us, so they’ve taken steps to improve the situation. If you now do a search, you’ll find references to millions of books that they haven’t yet digitized. You can then click on an “About […]
Pipl is a people search engine that tries to be a little different. Rather than just go off and hunt for email addresses, this tries to search through the deep/invisible/hidden web to return content that other search engines are going to miss. The interface is simple – type in first name, last name, city, state […]
My colleague Chris Sherman briefly looked at the PC World ‘Search Engine Shoot-out’ article the other day, and I also mentioned it in my own weblog. I read through the article briefly, but something about it kept nagging me, so I wanted to go back and look at it in rather more detail. The more […]
Properazzi is a multi search engine that scans property websites and provides access to over 1,800,000 properties for sale or rent in 45 European countries. Searchers can limit searches to particular towns or countries, by price, keyword and sale or rental. A Google powered map allows another method of locating a particular place or region. […]
QueryCat is a search engine that is designed to search frequently asked questions, and they claim to have the largest database of these, by using the Alexa web crawler. They have apparently indexed over 2 million questions and answers (though this information isn’t on the website) which is a fair number. I tried lots of […]
Via Google Librarian Central, Information Today has an informative overview called Google book search, libraries and their digital copies. It is written from the perspective of librarians Jill Grogg and Beth Ashmore. The entire article is worth reading, but I think it’s also worth highlighting a few of the important points regarding the project.
TimeSearch is an interestingly different search engine, since the focus is just on time, as one may expect from the name. It’s the brainchild of Bamber Gascoigne, (a well known British television presenter of historical programmes and academic quiz shows) and HistoryWorld. The search options are fairly limited – to geographic areas of the world, […]
Quintura recently relaunched with a new interface, which has been receiving a fair amount of comment. I originally wrote about the search engine back in November, and I was fairly lukewarm in my praise of it; while it was a nice idea, the interface held it back. Well, the relaunched version is now much better, […]
Pagebull is a visual search engine in the sense that it displays search results simply by visually displaying page thumbnails, highlighting the term(s) searched on. Some search options are available – limiting to particular country results (currently Any, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Russia, Spain, UK, USA) being the main one, though you can […]
Recently a couple of search engines have come to my attention that are designed to allow you to hum a few bars of a tune into them, and then they’ll tell you what the song is. These are Midomi and Humming Search from Nayio. That’s the promise; the reality was disappointing.
Sproose is another social search engine where you get to vote for your favourite websites/pages, and to that extent it’s very similar to previous social search engines that I’ve looked at recently. It’s got the double ‘o’ in the name which always helps, and uses terminology that sounds familiar, such as ‘Knowledge Rank technology’. However, […]
CrossEngine is the new (and in my opinion better) name for the Mr Sapo meta search engine. It is similar in functionality to TurboScout and Trovando in that it has a search box at the top of the screen with a list of search engines that you can use below that. Simply type in your […]
Google has created the Librarian Central Blog just in time for ALA Midwinter. The decision to create the weblog arose from their request for suggestions from librarians on how to improve the Google Librarian Newsletter, the two common ones being ‘make it a blog’ and ‘give us more current information’. The new weblog provides access […]
MetaGlossary provides users with access to over 2 million words, terms and so on. It works in a similar manner to the Google define: function, though I’ve found that it tends to be rather more comprehensive. Definitions for ‘search engine optimization’ resulted in 1 related phrase with Google and 15 with MetaGlossary. Google gave a […]
Zuula is a multi/meta search engine that I noticed the other day. It provides access to search engines in the areas of Web, News, Images, Blogs and Jobs. It takes results from various different engines in each category, but mainly uses Google, Yahoo, Ask, and MSN. It works in a similar fashion to engines such […]
Jimmy Wales was interviewed live on the BBC Simon Mayo programme this afternoon. It was an interesting conversation, mainly centred on the Wikipedia obviously, and geared towards an audience who wouldn’t be expected to know much about the subject. The interview started about 30 minutes into the programme and you should be able to catch […]
MySupermarket is one of those sites that you sometimes look at and immediately think ‘I’ll be coming back here on a regular basis’. The concept is very simple – you choose one of 4 UK supermarkets from Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda and Ocado and you shop for your groceries. All the groceries are shown in illustrated […]
I discussed Quintura in November – if you recall it’s a search engine that provides searchers with a tag cloud, which if they mouse over the tags it will display results. Well, today they launched Quintura for kids as a beta release. It works along the same lines as the adult version, with a search […]
Decipho officially launched on December 14th after having been available since October. It’s an interesting search engine because it takes the concept of social search another stage further, while at the same time offering very useful personalisation. There are lots of things that you can do with it, but I would recommend registering and then […]
Yoople is a collaborative search engine that I discovered over the weekend. Very simple idea – run your search and Yoople grabs results from Yahoo and displays the first 10 for you on the screen. You can then click and drag a result and place it in a different position in the top 10 if […]
Eurekster have quietly rolled out some interesting improvements on their swicki system. Swickis are search engines created by individuals and used by groups which learn from their users and deliver more focused and targeted results. There are currently over 40,000 swickis in operation on websites and weblogs, with over 13,000 unique publishers, delivering 21,000,000 searches […]
There’s an amusing item over at the Google Operating System (Unofficial news and tips about Google) weblog on What Google Can’t Do, and screenshots are included. The things that Google can’t do include translation, mail, blogs, news, ads and a few other things as well. It’s a very tongue in cheek piece, and it should […]
HuriSearch, which is a human rights search engine was officially launched on December 10th, Human Rights Day. The search engine is designed to provide searchers with data specific to the area of human rights, and has indexed over 3,000 websites and 2,300,000 pages concentrating in this area. Its crawler refreshes between every 24 hours and […]
Just in time for Christmas in the UK we have a useful little search resource created using the Google Search Builder over at Mad For Toys which searches over 250 UK online toy shops. It’s very timely and straightfoward to use, but they have also provided various canned searches (usually two word phrases) to pull […]