MATEOSQUARED’S iSEARCH

Information Architects Japan has come up with their second version of Web site trends. It is a really cool “map” of the current Internet environment.

The 200 most successful websites on the web, ordered by category, proximity, success, popularity and perspective.

They have several versions that can be viewed, but the best one is their clickable online version that will show screen shots of the Web sites when you mouseover them. It is really cool to see how everything is related, and that it truly is a Web. Nothing stands alone, not even Google. There inclusion of Japanese and Chinese sites is also a great idea. I think we forget that the U.S. does not own the Internet. As you will see there are some very cool, profitable non-American Web sites out there.
They say they have used the map to help clients get a perspective of where they sit within the current environment. Good idea.

Sidekiq is another search engine aggregator that I came across this evening. They have collected almost every single possible category, and put it within a frame. It isn’t really a technically advanced site, but it is a good idea. To be honest, I have never seen this many possible search options on one site. They offer 28 different search categories. It is crazy.

I tried a search for the new presidential candidate, Ron Paul. The site automatically defaults to Google search, so I received the typical “relevant” Google results. I wanted more, so I clicked Blogs and Newsgroups and got 12 different blog search engines to expand my search. Then I wanted to see some video on Ron Paul, and had 19 search engines just for video search. It is great. It is like Ron Paul overload, a beautiful thing. This could be overload for any topic, but if you are able to manage your search habit, it will be OK and nobody will get hurt.
Its not pretty, but it is functional. I like it.

Quintura has brought tag clouds to the search engine space. At first glance Quintura looks like an other 2nd tier engine, trying to sneak up on Google, but as I used the site it seemed to have a useful purpose. Quintura uses tag clouds to help visitors define what they are looking for. Once a visitor enters a query, Quintura will show typical search results on the right-hand side of the browser, but they then show a related tag cloud on the left. The tag cloud is used to help people refine their search by identifying and clicking on keywords that they may not have necessarily thought of. What I like about the cloud is that when trying to refine my search, all I had to do was mouse-over a keyword, and the results on the right side of the page would change. This made refining much easier. Searchers will also get more keywords, based on the keyword that is activated within the tag cloud. They can also remove keywords from the cloud if the words are not relevant. Overall the results were above average, and the tag made searching a lot faster.

In a world of Ajax and the Social Web, I expected Quintura to have a lot of useless social features such as a profile page, and other random things that distract people from searching. Fortunately, Quintura focused on the search, and not the extras. It is a nice change. With that said, people can still save their results the old-fashioned way to their favorites, and also send them to a friend via their default e-mail client. Crazy but it works.

Here is a site for people who were hoping that their every day activities could turn into cash for charities. A site called GoodSearch, which is powered by Yahoo!, pays your favorite charity every time you use their site to search for something. It can be any topic, and does not have to be related to that charity for the organization to make money. 50% of GoodSearch’s revenue goes toward the charities that are associated with the site.

On the homepage you will have the option to pick the charity that you want your “search” money to go to. If your charity is not listed, you can add the charity of your choice. A cool feature is that you can see how much your charity has earned through GoodSearch and keep track of the charity as well through a type of profile page for each charity.

If you like Yahoo! search results, you might as well use this. The search interface is just like Yahoo!’s and the results are as well. They also have a tool bar similar to Yahoo!’s that can be downloaded. They seem legitimate, and have claimed to raise $1,525 for the Save Darfur project, as well as several other known charities. Not bad for a new site, that is paying out about $.01 a click.

These guys claim to be a personal search agent for people who are overwhelmed by search results, and would like to better organize their results. This hasn’t been claimed before…

All Th.at is better than other search sites, that combine several search engines to provide more relevant results with less clicks. Besides indexing search engines, AllTha.at allows visitors to enter other sites as well, that are not search related.

The process of search can be time consuming, laborious and frankly overwhelming depending on how many results you need to sift through. Search engines are very good at what they do but often return way too many results. Recently, there have been lots of sites popping up using new algorithms that are trying to search “better” by focusing on verticals such as travel, jobs, cars, etc. We are trying to create a tool that allows you to use all of them… thus “Allth.at”.

By allowing users to search across multiple engines and favorite URL’s at the same time (and further save those searches) we strive to not only help you find what you are looking for, but to cut down the amount of “surf time” that it takes to do so.

So I did a search on my one of my favorite topics, Barack Obama, and AllTha.at searched Google, Yahoo!, eBay and Amazon by default. Those results were OK, but I wanted more, so I added Digg and MSN. Even better results. But I really wanted something more, so I added the Barack Obama 08 Web site. About average. There are still a few bugs, but overall the performance was really good.

Finally, AllTh.at (hard to type) provides RSS feeds and e-mail alerts once people become registered and save their search results. Others are offering this feature, but this company seems to have the edge with its multi-site search option.

When I initially went to Hakia I thought it was another lame search site, but then I looked around a little more and found that it works differently than most other search sites. The site launched in February 2007, and is focused more on the meaning of words versus its popularity. You can read how they index information on their technology page.

The basic promise is to bring search results by meaning match - similar to the human brain’s cognitive skills - rather than by the mere occurrence (or popularity) of search terms. hakia’s new technology is a radical departure from the conventional indexing approach, because indexing has severe limitations to handle full-scale semantic search.

It seems to give very relevant results, but the cool thing is the way the results are broken down. Instead of just a page of results they break them down into categories, which makes it easier to follow and identify what you are looking for.

For example, I typed in Barack Obama for President* and received typical search results, but at the top of the page, the Hakia head (not a talking head) gives a little more help about what I was searching for and directs me to the Barack Obama Gallery. The gallery is a categorized listing of everything Obama, very cool. As I continued my search, the Hakia head continued to give me facts about Barack such as:

How did you come up with that? Here is my choice: Barack Obama was born in Hawaii in 1961 to an American mother and a Kenyan father. See this page.

I would say that this could be another site that is ready to be picked by Google, but I think it is one that can stand on its own.

*This is not an endorsement for Barack Obama. At this time, I am not endorsing Mr. Obama or any other candidate for the 2008 Presidential election. Someday, maybe, but not today.

Swamii is like Google alerts, but gives people more control over what they are looking for, as well as more options. It looks like another, “hey buy me Google” product, but they seem to have put a lot of effort into it. I set up several “interests”, and the results were decent. The more focused on Internet related topics, the better the results.

It’s like a search engine that keeps on giving. You enter your common searches (we call them ‘interests’) and then every time you visit, Swamii show’s you all the new stuff we’ve found since the last time.

They do offer an option to give them an e-mail address, and they will send the results to your mailbox. It would be cool if they offered and RSS feed of the interests as well.

Swamii allows people to search for news, blogs, P2P, video, TV, shopping, jobs and videos; while Google gives people news, blog, web and groups. I guess Web means everything on the Web, but Swamii seems to be more comprehensive.

I did one on UFC for a friend of mine, and he said the results were useless. I did one on Web 2.0, and they were really good. Like I mentioned above, the closer the topic is related to the Web, the better.

Pipl has taken ego surfing to the next level. I thought Google had cool results when I typed in mine or a friends name, but Pipl takes it to a whole different level. Pipl is a people only search engine that scours the “deep-web” for very specific and personal information about people.

Also known as “invisible web”, the term “deep web” refers to a vast repository of underlying content, such as documents in online databases that general-purpose web crawlers cannot reach. The deep web content is estimated at 500 times that of the surface web, yet has remained mostly untapped due to the limitations of traditional search engines.

It doesn’t just pick up random blog comments and high school accomplishments, their spiders crawl through government databases, and several other personal databases. Want to know the tax record for someone’s house? Want to see what others are saying about you on MySpace? Go to Pipl.

Some of the databases Piple spiders are:

• Securities and Exchange Commission
• ICQ
• Hoovers
• US Patent Office
• MySpace

Much like any other good search engine, they have a toolbar people can download, so they can either ego surf or search for other people any time they want.

A disclaimer: Every Web site I visit, I go with an open mind and a positive attitude. Some sites make it very hard to stay positive. I know people put a lot of work into their sites, but I think others are just slapping stuff together and hoping Google or Yahoo! will snatch them up.

Ask Vox, in my opinion is one of those sites. The site seems to be a mix between a bad meta-search engine and a really bad Yahoo! Answers. I like Yahoo! Answers, I like question and answer sites that are well moderated. I also like a unique search engine, with cool features. See some of my past posts. I don’t get Ask Vox, I don’t see what purpose it serves. Are there not already enough useless novelty search sites out there? And what is with the talking head? That technology has been around for years, and does serve a purpose with online demonstrations, but not for a site like this. It just follows the mouse around and repeats what is on the screen. Oooh… someone call Google.

Check out some the questions:

• Are you gay?
• What is your name?
• Why?
• No?

What is this Q&A for kids in junior high? How about some moderation?

After looking over TWERQ, not sure what it means, I wonder why the major search engines have not implemented technology like this. It seems rather easy, and would take a handful of developers a short amount of time to come up with it.

TWERQ is a very small search engine, that has a lot of cool features that could easily absorbed into Yahoo! and the others. The consider their product “the evolution of Web search.” I would not go that far mainly because what they are doing should have been done a long time ago. It is not necessarily cutting edge ideas, but instead every day type concepts that could have been helping people with search for the past ten years.

A few examples:

• Tabbed Web Search - Tabbed searching allows you to seamlessly open and close multiple result tabs for each of your searches.
• Bulk Search
  Open multiple tabs using a ++ to separate each search term.
  Example: cars++trucks++motorcycles
• Last Term Repeater
  Repeat the last term throughout multiple tabs using a (\\)
  Example:cars++trucks++motorcycles\\for sale

People can also register with TWERQ, and make it more customizable to their liking. They can also create and save search profiles, RSS feeds and popular searches. This features allow registered users to login anywhere and access their TWERQ search results and feeds.
They do not index their own content, but instead use Google’s, Yahoo!’s and MSN’s indexes which makes sense for a company this size. Not too many people can have server farms the size of Vermont powering Web results.

I think TWERQ is worth a try, I just kind of wish that Google or someone would buy them and use their technology.