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Where to search
24/01/2005 09:24 - (SA)
Jay Dougherty
Washington - When it comes to search engines, Google and Yahoo may grab all the headlines and attract the most users. But they're far from the only search engines around.
Competition is popping up from all sides, providing new ways of sifting through the vast amount of information available on the internet.
The approaches of some of these search engines may suit you better than those taken by the big two. And a new year is a great time to try searching with something different.
Metasearch sites - those that take your search term and simultaneously query a handful of popular search engines - continue to evolve - and they represent an intriguing option to single-engine searching.
Vivisimo (http://vivisimo.com) is a metasearch tool that is categorically different. Enter a search into Vivisimo, and the site will not only retrieve results from multiple search engines but also automatically organise the results into categories.
Perform a search for "Mark Twain," for example, and Vivisimo displays the results and tells you how many pages fall under the clickable categories of "Books," "Quotations," "Photos," and "Essays." Enter "super bowl," and you'll wind up with categories such as "tickets," "nfl," and "betting." Vivisimo offers a great way to leverage the associative nature of the Web to find information of interest.
Kartoo (http://www.kartoo.com) is a metasearch tool for those with a visual bent. Instead of presenting search results in a standard list, Kartoo displays returned links as a "map" of interconnected documents.
As you scroll the mouse cursor over the documents, a panel on the left side of the screen provides a summary of the site. Move your cursor away from the retrieved list of documents, and you'll see the "topics" about your search term that the engine found. Kartoo is available in multiple languages.
Old favourite Dogpile (http://www.dogpile.com) has been around a few years now, but it has added a host of features, including the ability to pull news, videos, audio, and images from multiple search engines, as well as standard web pages. Looking spartan like Google, Dogpile also now allows you to customise how your search results are displayed.
If you've got kids, you know all too well the problems that the internet poses. There's lots of material out there that you don't want your kids to stumble across. Google and Yahoo let you filter content, but objectionable pages still get through.
Billing itself as the "kid safe search engine," OneKey (http://www.onekey.com) partnered with Google to create what it claims is the largest online database of "kid safe" sites. OneKey uses a combination of human-filtered sites as well as Google's filtering information to determine which sites are available for searching.
Yahoo! gears its well-known Yahooligans! (http://yahooligans.yahoo.com) for kids from ages 7 to 12. As much a kid-friendly self-contained environment as a search engine, Yahooligans! offers plenty of fun features - such as games, trivia quizzes, polls, and fun facts - as well as traditional search.
An "online safety" tutorial is geared toward both children and parents. "One in five children will receive a sexual solicitation over the internet," the site says. Yahooligans! tells parents how to talk to kids of specific age groups about the dangers of the internet while offering friendly videos designed to help kids stay safe online.
In the category of general search engines, there's the new Teoma (http://www.teoma.com), which helps you with one of the primary difficulties that web searchers have: narrowing a search term to find precisely the information needed.
In addition to its standard results, Teoma contains a column of suggestions for refinement. A search for "Ernest Hemingway," for instance, will result in the usual unmanageable number of links. But Teoma will also suggest that you refine the search by offering clickable links such as "Ernest Hemingway books" and "Ernest Hemingway biography," among others. The relevancy of Teoma's results generally win praise from frequent users.
Perhaps one of the most novel search engines to emerge recently is Hewlett-Packard's SpeechBot (http://speechbot.research.compaq.com), which fetches audio and video content online rather than text.
The audio and video feeds come from commercial as well as public resources. To play the results, you'll need standard multimedia browser plug-ins - or simply Windows Media Player, included in recent versions of Windows or downloadable for free online.
Speechbot has the almost uncanny ability to locate specific information within lengthy speech files. A search for "William Shakespeare," for example, will return audio clips in which Shakespeare is mentioned, not just those devoted to Shakespeare.
Despite the pre-eminence of the largest search engines, the search engine industry in general continues to flourish, and innovation is apparent at every turn. And that's good news for everyone who uses the internet. - Sapa-dpa
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