I have grown tired of writing about search engines, mainly because they are all about the same with little excitement or differentiation. With that said, I will be taking a break and looking for other things to write about. See you soon…
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.
Are they serious? I mean really. How much effort did it take to put a bunch of logos to all of the search engines and some 2.0 sites on a single page. Does this serve any value? Check out Shokolada, and let me know.
Want to know when and where earthquakes happen? Ask.com now has its own mash-up that shows worldwide earthquake data. They provide date, location, magnitude and depth. Quite interesting if you plan on traveling to earthquake prone locations anytime soon. California had two in the past two days. Looks like Puerto Rico has been busy as well during the last week.
Google now offers traffic maps for several large cities in the states. They are several months behind Yahoo! and Microsoft, but catching up quickly. It is the typical red, yellow, green lines that are seen in other traffic maps, but it doesn’t offer alternatives to the “red” areas or really any other dynamic features. Mainly it is just another notch in the successful Google Map belt.
I have reviewed several new search engines over the past few months, and now would like your help in ranking them based on practicality. I have created a single question survey, that will give you the opportunity to rank nine different search engines from most to least practical. One being the most, and nine being the least. I will post the results within the next couple of weeks. Thank you for filling out the survey.
Take the Search Engine 2.0 Survey
I will not ask for e-mail or any other contact information.
As we have all figured out by now, search engines allow us to find things on the Internet. Some are helpful, and most are a waste of time. Over the next several days I am going to review several new search sites that could be offering the next big thing, or just another fly-by-night search engine that is looking to be purchased by Google.
KeoTag, not sure who they want to be but they seem to be targeting people who like tagging. Isn’t that just searching? I mean, a tag is a keyword or words, and you type the tag into a search engine. Are we not just searching?
I guess what they are doing is a little different, they have actually indexed the stuff that people have tagged on social sites, blogs and news sites like Digg, Reddit, Technorati, Infovine… Which is cool, but can’t we just search for it by using keywords? Are not tags, just keywords for stuff you are looking for?
So you search for a tag, and then all of these little icons for their respective sites show-up. Click on the one that you like the best, and you will see the search, I mean tag results for that site.
KeoTag also allows visitors to generate their own tags, and to create social bookmark links. Woo-hoo!!
You decide looking for a Google buy-out or serious contender to be the next big thing in search…
Random House has a list of the Top 100 modern novels. I have read several on the list, so I will make it a goal of mine to complete the list by the time I am 40. Ambitious, eh? Not really, I’m only 32, but you have to have goals. Go the site, and let me know if you would like to join me in this adventure. It should be fun…
Here is the list:
Here is a quick and easy way to send files up to 512MB. Upload a file to their servers, tell MailBigFile where it needs to go, they send a link, the recipient downloads the file. Seems easy. Looks like they will set-up a branded site for your company, if you send a lot of large files to your clients up to 2GB. There are a lot of these services out there, but this one has a cool name that tells you they do.
Stumble it!
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