Indian search engine

Search engine Topics:India

Contribution:No explicit declaration

Results hosted at:Own site

What's Interesting: The search engine provides an option to use adavnced search as well. But it seems a very ambitious search engine as India has mulitple dimensions to cover. The most likely way to go would be to get results from other smaller search engines using subscriber code in the XML code.
You can try the keyword "banglore" in the indian search engine and compare it with Google.

Try it:http://www.informationmadness.com/

Web companies search engine

Search engine Topics:Web companies that Daniel is tracking

Contribution:No explicit declaration

Results hosted at:Own site

What's Interesting: The search result refinements are Products/Companies and Buzz. You can compare the results for the keyword "google" from technoxintesis and compare it with Google.Daniel claims"It searches about 1200 Web companies and their reviews in the blogs I track. We have done this for our own research and plan to keep updating it."

Try it: tecno.xintesis.com

CSE-links

A directory of the various custom search engines. It presently classifies the CSE's 22 categories and my guess would be these numbers will grow. As many as 68 links are provided by CSE links.

You can suggest your own CSE for inclusion in their web site by becoming a editor. They provide a feature to preview your CSE page directly from thier web site. It is powered by Snap a free service that shows a preview of a web site without actually taking you to that site. It shows up as a mouse over effect in Cse-links. It is comparitivley better than the custom search guide as it includes a search box to search within the site. It seems to be run by Paul Codman / John Owen.

Try it:CSE Links - Directory of Google Coop Custom Search Engine Links Worldwide.

My name is video- video search engine

Search engine Topics:Videos

Contribution:No explicit declaration

Results hosted at:Own site

What's Interesting: If you are wondering whats the point of another video search engine, when google is doing a fine job--yes but it takes ages to load--if you have ever tried it on something other than broad band.

The video search which gives text based results is a good alternative. And the greatest advanteage or dissadvanteage of this CSE is that its search refinements are rather unique-instead of searching by catagories like in google it searches by website as well.

They have also used google API's to show some images!!It would be better if they provided an option for showing previews of search results for those who want to see a preview. Something along the lines of Snap.

Along the lines of Mad for toys this CSE also has "instant searches" option, which links key search results from the first page.(a very good example of klogging-look at the klog generator.)

The search refinements offered by it are Movie Trailers, Music Videos, YouTube, News, MySpace, Funny, TV Shows, Free TV stations, Concert Videos

You can try the query "Harry potter and the order of the phoenix" in Live Music search and compare it with Google.

Try it:http://www.mynameisvideo.com/

Live net music search engine

Search engine Topics:Live Music

Contribution:You can suggest a site by e-mailing them

Results hosted at:Own site

What's Interesting: A music search engine is a great idea- as it can cater to the specific custom needs of different listners. By restricting the search to limited numer of sites you can get really customised results. Live music search really does a good job of customising to specific needs.

The CSE claims to "Find live concert video, sessions, online radio and more" and the search result refinements include "BBC (online radio) Concert Videos Concerts (audio & video) Sessions Online Radio"

Along the lines of Mad for toys this CSE also has "instant search" option, which links key search results from the first page.(a very good example of klogging-look at the klog generator.)
You can try the query "Elbow" in Live Music search and compare it with Google.

Try it:http://www.livenetmusic.com/

Toy Search engine

Search engine Topics:Toys (United Kingdom)

Contribution:No explicit declaration

Results hosted at:Own site

What's Interesting: The very fact that it searches for toys is very interesting.It has got a attractive interface-it needs to have it-you are attracting kids to buy toys. Various Pictures are linked to search results. Thats really a good one...you are sure to click on those images.

That apart a list of various toys is provided at the bottom, which are linked to search results.
Yes for those of you who have been following the blog, it is a very good example of klogging. If you are new you may want to look at the klog generator. If you had thought it was a crazy idea, think again, klogging (or link logging) is catching up.Well i however think it is indeed a crazy idea.(I need to make some code changes in some of the klog tools.)

But i still have not come across anybody try out NHTML, it seems a rather very complicated idea to use and make people understand. If once known, it can become convenient to use though.

"Find amazing toys easily from specialist online shops with traditional, contemporary and collectible toys for kids, teens and adults"

Point to note it has safe search activated by default..highly neccessary when searching for kids toys..

You can try the query "model aircraft" in mad for toys and compare it with Google.

Try it:http://www.madfortoys.com/

Free christmas music search

Search engine Topics:Free christmas music (& the joy and cheer of the christmas spirit)

Contribution:You can suggest sites that are not in the list by mailing using the mail id given on the site.

Results hosted at:Google

What's Interesting: You can try the query"wish you a merry christmas" in Christmas song search and Google.As the creator claims, its nothing fancy...but search engines are built to search not to be fancy.And lets sing "we wish you a merry christmas and a happy new year"

Try it:http://freechristmasmusic.googlepages.com/

Google filter-let me know what you think of it

Google filter is a module or gadget for google homepage. It checks whether a given word has google results.For example you want to know if words like "xetakey", "fetakey" and "metakey" have search results. Instead of tying each query one after the other you can use this module to segregate the words into those with results and those without results.

A earlier version of this is Venpund which works only for internet explorer. Google filter works on almost all browsers but this module can mess up sometimes when google reults come hapazardly or something.But it generally is fine if you try it again. If you know whats it with the code, do let me know. Mostly the IG_fetchcontent has to be used directly without the for loop.It works on a fairly simple logic, if the size of the results page is greater than "7000" it considers the result to be present.

you can add it your google homepage




and tell me how it performs and what use it found in your case. The idea is to be able to use this gadget to see how various CSE's will perform when filtered for words and various other modifications. This should be possible as soon as an option to add the url of the CSE is provided in the gadget. But there is concern as this may produce fake adsense impressions on that cse. So it wuld be better if CSE's without adsense can be run for such tests. It must be noted that google has such an option in that if you search using http://www.google.com/search?q= mostly.

Webinars, webcasts, Podcasts and Web Events Search Engine

Search engine Topics: Webinars, webcasts, podcast, web events, live events, on-demand events, streaming events, tutorials/training

Contribution:May be you can request them here

Results hosted at: Own site

What's Interesting: Really unique interface, they have used custom buttons to switch from one CSE to another. (it was dropped from google in favour of speed itseems) They have done a good job of integrating the content and classifying them in the various fields. (Hopefully i can run google filter on this one and do a more decent analysis of the classification scheme.CSE's still dont support this.More about google filter in the next post.Its the fully operational version of Venpund)

This search engine has the various boolean operators like "OR", "+","-" and also the quote operator.

"FindWebEvents.com is actually comprised of 9 search engines, all specifically targeted toward helping users find any type of web event, web media and online demonstration."

It may help the people who did it to remember that everyone of us does not use 17 inch monitors. Many things get hidden. Especialy the Google ads..Its not good for buisness.

"You can try the query "seminars" at webevents search and compare it with google"-well i told this but it is as stupid as saying "seminar+seminar" in your google search.A better keyword could be "ajax"-seminar and the results would be at webevents search and compare it with google

Try it: http://www.findwebevents.com

Supersubra- SAP search engine

Search engine Topics:SAP related search

Contribution:No explicit declaration

Results hosted at:Google

What's Interesting: This CSE provides a list of links included in the CSE. That way you dont keep suggesting which site need to be included.Even those who are not contributing to the CSE can take a look at the list here. You can try the query "SAP tips" in the SAP Search engine and compare it with Google. And Supersubra means "super+clean" results.

Try it:http://supersubra.googlepages.com/sapsearch

Web development search engine

Search engine Topics:"This community based and web development related search engine will search the Internet for websites about PHP, SEO, CSS, web 2.0, web-design, programming, hosting, etc. The results are builded from selected web development sites and of course the standard results from Google. While this custom search engine is optimized for web development related searches, a regular search for common items is also possible."

Contribution:You can add sites using the "Suggest a web development resource" box.

Results hosted at:Own site

What's Interesting: The CSE provides search result refinements for scripts, resources, templates, programming, seo, php, open source and weblog. You can try the query "Ajax Examples" in the Web Development search and compare it with Google. They have selected a few queries manually for showing best results. It would be more exciting if they could also show most recent queries as well.

Try it:http://www.finalwebportal.com/

Island of Cyprus Search-Getcy

Search engine Topics:General, Government, Technology, News, Property information about island of cyprus

Contribution:You can suggest sites through the comments section or add sites using google markers. (3 contibutors)

Results hosted at:Own site

What's Interesting: Getcy is actually a collection of five other CSE's. Each of the topics General, Government, Technology, News, Property. But it was a dissapointment to see that a query is not carried from one CSE to other. If you type a query in the general CSE and then click on the News tab it will not directly take you to the results in the news tab. Rather you have to give the query again. This can be easily overcome.Hope they implement it soon.They are still in the process of refining their results though and adding more sites as well. You can try the query
"tourism" in Getcy and Google.

Try it:http://getcy.com/

A world without search engine!

Just imagine how horrible it would be if the internet did not have any search engines. It would like having all the books in the world, but having no light to read them..Well thank god for having bestowed upon us the mercy of search engines. However, as i was wondering what would have happened to this world if search engines were not to be?

May be we would have to have huge link directories. But how practical would this be... Just think a list of all the sites in the entire world. It would be tremendously huge and may be even not practically possible..It could have been possible in a world that was many times smaller than the present internet.(pre-search engine era)

"Impossible" is said to be a word from the dictionary of lossers. So i thought of making this impossible directory of all the sites in the world. Just imagine a site that is linked to all the sites on the internet.As a n experiment to that regard i created a site for linking up to all the sites in the internet..(this is not a joke believe me). It may come in handy if search engines became non-functional or something ..More than anything else it will surely be fun. If you want your site listed just comment below and i will add it to a suitable "directory"

Although directories seem to be the way to go... it will be evident clearly from all those directory sites and link sites that a site or topic cannot be classified into a single directory. So it would be more meaningful if these were organised in some sort of a tag format..I start the proces of creating this List to be called the "Site list" or something more fancier i can come up with.

Take a look at the list of all the sites in the world.

Google sets - a step towards context specific search

Google sets is a new lab gadget that predicts a list of words that would form a set with a given set of words. For example if you gave "red", "green" and "red" as your list. The tool will predict items such as "yellow", "white" etc... So basically it is able to recognise all these are colors.You can look at a practical implementation of the same in a search engine at Kuchita. If you give a search query, the search engine suggests related words.

However, it has a come a long way from google sets to give personalised search and google suggest. The personalised search seems to be a good one as context is different for different people.Google suggest is also the same but it suggests words at real time as you type in words.

It is a advanced pattern recognition algorithm--yes--but still context is still more specific, as the same person may have to find different things at different times.You can also take a look at
http://www.sdrow.org/ it has a interface very similar to google sets. But the algortihm seems to be different.

The program behind a bot is rather similar to this, except that it is more gramatically oriented... the order of words and their relationship with each other is of much concern.

Speeglebot-how good is the AI??

Speegel bot is a solution provided by the Speegle search results. Speegle search results offers voice version of the google results. It offers two male voices and one female voice options explicitly. It seems to be a little slow as it puts up the following message for every search query.

Please be patient... our server is quite heavily loaded at the moment and search
results may take a while to process.do NOT refresh several times to try and make
it work, please do not click stop and play repeatedly either.

For a speech based web application, it does really fine.

The SpeegleBot seems a better product though. The description makes a modest claim as follows

Talk to the SpeegleBot about anything you like but remeber to be polite.
holiday homes, leisure, travel, gadgets, motors and anything else under the
sun.

But as you would expect, the Anything under the sun is a little bit of an exageration. As soon as the Speeglebot is turned on it starts with the greeting "Hello, my name is Speeglebot, i am here to answer your questions..."

If you have seen one of those chat bots, this is very similar to that. If you say "Hello" it will say "Hi there" and when you say "Hi" it will say "Hello there". And still the surprise is yet to come...Try asking it "what is your name?" It will say "my name is speeglebot. Go on click an advert for me it will make me happy" That seems to be against google policy though.

Who created it?

Team speegle the Mactavish.

It can be a rather good way to pass your time. Though it was a dissapointment when It said the opposite of "good" is "Anti- good". So it basically has a preset databse of replies to each of the possible questions. However, it claims to have an IQ of over 250 in terms of humans.

In case it does not know the answer it suggests it may be something to do with "Haggis or may be string theory". As for as having fun is considered, it is the best thing. However, you get bored after trying out a few things. It is no better than a chat bot as far as "deductive reasoning" is concerned. But the question is how good is it as a search tool. Well it was a rather poor performer here as well. Try asking it about hotels in london.It asks "any specific location" but seems to go wild when you respond to that.

If you compare it with other Bots of the present generation, it seems quite intelligent. It is fast and intelligent. Hopefully it can be made a better search tool. It would still be better if it learns as it talks---needs lot of memory space i presume..It is difficult to be analytical while analysing such AI models. It would be better if the turning test were performed on it.The turning test is a test in which the robot and a human being are placed behind seperate screens and both are asked the same question. If the AI is able to answer as good as or better than the human it can be considered to have passed the test.

As the bot claims it seems to have an IQ of 250 in human terms. It is rather well written and best suited for children. It has a built in safety mechanism to prevent the use of innapropriate language. I wish Team speegle the Mactavish all the best and more success...And i will try to analyse all the bots with a better grading scheme.

Venpund-google defined checker

Venpund can be described as a tool, that can be used to check if a set of words shows up positive results in the google search engine. If you tried absurdities like "Gunjipudi" you would not get any results in a sane search engine like google. But you need to check each word one after the other.Venpund seems to solve that problem. You can list out multiple words one after the other in separate lines and click on the find words button.

As soon as you click on the button, it filters out all the words that produce results. Only words that dont have any results will be listed in the bottom text box.However, Venpund is only for internet explorer. Moreover, it may not work from the web site directly. You need to save it onto your desktop before using it. The general problem you would face, is "host not responding error". This can be overcome by saving it onto your desktop.

I am not sure whether a google API for the same is available or not. The Venpund works by checking the size of the results page. If the size of the results page is lesser than "1600"bytes the assumption that it has no results is drawn. This seems to work fine....However, a server side script for the same from google would be a better alternative as all the browsers can then use it.

If you are wondering whats the use of Venpund, it can be used to find new words or names for one thing. But basically it will serve as a defined() function for the google search engine. I wonder if its available as a command line function as well on google. However, i did not find any devices that did the same job as Venpund and so i have put it up.Do tell me if it needs to be improved.If a API exsists for the same, inform me about it as well. I am in need of one such API.

Carfilter-Search UK car reviews

Search engine Topics:Car reviews

Contribution:No explicit declaration

Results hosted at:Google

What's Interesting: You dont get any result refinements. See the difference in results for the query "Mercedes" with Carfilter Google. Hope more refinements are added. But it does a good job of restricitng the results to UK.

Try it:http://www.carfilter.co.uk

The Perfect Search Engine

"The perfect search engine," says Google co-founder Larry Page, "would understand exactly what you mean and give back exactly what you want." To understand what we mean, the search engine should understand context. I keep blabaring about "Context" all the time. Yes Context is the essence of the words meaning. Thus, a search engine that has no regard for context is never going to be perfect.

Although google search philosophy is very sound, but what i have experienced is somewhat different. As soon as you enter a search term and hit the return key, the top ten results are shown by google. The first criteria among these results seems to be that they are popular...Then the words we searched for are searched for. This seems to be a rather good logical thing to do..The reasoning goes as follows..

When does a person use a search engine??

When he comes across a piece of news or something that is the buzz word across the campus/city. So as soon as that query is presented to google, it will present the result that has a high probability of what you are searching for. But try searching for something that is 'stale news-over powered by new stuff that has same keywords'. Its here that we have problems.

The perfect search engine still seems a distant dream though..for now.I would like to tell that, when i metioned about 3d search engines and wise men---the idea is not to provide better graphics. Rather it should be to provide the best result. The user should be directed to "a page" that satisfies his query. He should not have any use for multiple pages. However, some search queires require information from multiple sources. In such a case more reulsts make sense.