Closing a bunch of tabs on my Firefox here, so I thought I’d share some interesting search related resources I’ve come across in the last few weeks:

Brijit is a tool that aggregates content and abstracts it to 100 words or less. It has a pretty comprehensive scope, and covers some sources that you might not otherwise think to keep track of, including certain subscription-only sources. They are primarily of consumer-interest (think things like Wired, GQ, even Playboy!), but does also contain some more business-oriented or ’serious’ sources, such as BusinessWeek, The Economist, The New York Times, and so on. Though many of these sources do have rss feeds of their own, it might be useful to instead get this aggregated short form content. They also produce feeds by subject, rather than by publication, which is also a pretty awesome feature, though I’m not sure of the comprehensiveness of this service. Though I’ve subbed in to a couple of feeds on this, I haven’t yet been really scanning them for content in a serious way, but as a starting point it looks like a pretty useful resource that might cover some content that you may otherwise not have access to.

Voluminous is a catalogue of free e-books, with apparently over 20,000 books listed. It’s not free, but is a paid-service (though there is a free trial) – it’s also only available for Mac, not PC. Why do all the interesting book-apps come to mac first? /grumble/ It’s kind of interesting, but as it’s searching books that are in the public domain anyway, I’m not entirely sure that I’d be keen to pay for it, as you should be able to search for them for free somewhere. The screen-caps look nice though – think iTunes for books – and I suppose if you were really, really into ebooks it might be worth the purchase.

Searchme is a new search engine that visually breaks down searches into conceptual categories to help you find what you’re looking for. It’s dynamic, so the categories pop up and change as you type, which is pretty neat. Searching for, say, ‘rain’ (what? No – of course I’m not frustrated with the weather!), brings up categories such as weather, music, poetry, (the dreariness must make people more creative!), software, etc. If you add ‘boot’ to the search, you get categories for clothes and sales added. The search results themselves are visual, so you can see the page before you click on it – this doesn’t really enamor me, I like lists, but I suppose if you’re a really visual searcher, or knew what you were looking for, it might help. I don’t think this is a desperately practical search engine, but it’s quite pretty, and rather interesting, so I thought it was worth a mention.

GoogleHacks is seriously old news by now, but for some reason it’d completely passed me by. It’s a pretty neat tool that lets you perform quite complicated and powerful Google searches. Now, whilst you technically can do these searches manually, it’s nice to be able to have a tool that makes it that much easier. It’s mostly focused towards finding new media, and lets you search for various file types.

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I read a post yesterday about how in Japan, rather than putting a whole URL on an advert, they tend to use a search box with key words in it, so that if you search for those terms, the product will come up. There is some interesting discussion in the comments about how this relates to Japanese culture in particular, with increased use of internet-through-mobiles, and the problems of turning Japanese characters into URLs, and things like that. But the thing that struck me most is how it really is a sign of the ways in which people use the internet are changing, and how ubiquitous search has become.

Since I’ve started using del.icio.us I’ve tended to shy away from bookmarking sites on my computer, particularly at home. I have a relatively large list of bookmarks at work, as they’re quite specific, but at home I don’t have a single site bookmarked. But this does mean that I use search a lot. And not for complicated things. Often, it’s for desperately simple things, to the point where I’m guilty of searching for ‘maps’ or ‘calendar’ so that I can get to the Google variants of both. And yes, I know that they’re linked just from the top of the Google homepage, but in Firefox it’s quicker for me to search for them – I don’t even have to open up a new tab. Searching is a whole lot quicker than opening up a new tab/window and typing in the tedious ‘doubleyoudoublyoudoublyoudot’ of a URL, and that’s when you actually remember the whole thing. I’ve taken to using search as a giant, distributed search engine – so long as I can more or less remember what I’m looking for, chances are I’ll be able to find it.

I think I like the move towards search-oriented, rather than url-oriented advertising. Who knows, it might even help people develop better searching habits? If they can’t find what they want on the first try, they might be moved to searching a better way. What are your thoughts?

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I’m always interested when new search engines are released. Not because I use them (it’s the boring choice, I know, but Google really does tend to meet my search needs better than the alternatives), but it is nice to see the ways people are trying to manipulate the area. There are some really interesting and inventive search engines being produced now - the focus seems to be more on highlighting the difference and niche aspects of different search engines, rather than trying to produce a GoogleClone.

Chipwrapper is a Google custom search engine encompassing the major UK broadsheets. It isn’t new I understand, but as I hadn’t seen it before, I thought I’d pass it on anyway. It searches across The Daily Express, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, Financial Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The Sun, The Telegraph and The Times, and is actually pretty successful at finding articles that the newspapers own search engines fail at turning up. I’ve not spent a lot of time investigating custom search engines, but this is a pretty cool use for them, and I’ve found that I’ve used it a fair bit since I found it.

FuzzFind is a combined search engine that searches across Google, Yahoo, MSN Live and del.icio.us. You can then choose the weighting you want to give a particular search engine, which is actually pretty neat. By heavily weighting del.icio.us in particular, you get access to links that otherwise probably wouldn’t have come up. It shows you what ranking a particular response has in each search engine, as well as how many times the url has been bookmarked on del.icio.us, which could be quite useful.

Wikia is the search engine brainchild of Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales. It is self-statedly imperfect at the moment - results appear erratic and almost unsorted. The idea behind it being that user-moderated results will ultimately be more useful than those generated purely by algorithm. It isn’t brilliant yet though. The first hit when you search for ‘apple’ is the QuickTime download page, which, whilst close, isn’t quite right. More uncommon queries don’t get you anywhere just yet - the first hit for ‘European Court of Justice’ is to an article about the Protection of Fundamental Rights in the European Community, which is probably not what you’re actually after. It’s an ambitious concept though, and I’m curious to see how it turns out. I expect, given the collaborative nature of it, that commonly searched for terms will probably end up being fine, but that more complicated searches will never really work on it. It reminds me quite a bit of Maholo, which never particularly interested me either, but Wikia functions more as a wiki than a portal.

I’m curious to know if anyone else really uses other search engines on a day to day basis. Tools like this are great, and it’s really handy to know that they’re there, but I tend not to use anything other than Google. Does anyone have any suggestions for search engines that they absolutely couldn’t do without?

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Fluther and wis.dm are two new startups that are attempting to tap into the collective wisdom of crowds, asking the user base of the site to answer questions posed to the group.

Fluther is quite cute (it’s squid themed - how can you not like it?) and nicely designed (though I would rather the ‘ask a question’ box wasn’t quite so prominent, as it means I can barely see the questions posed on the front page). The questions asked here seem mostly serious - the sort of things you would ask, as the website puts it, if you had ‘five Uncle Franks to answer your car questions, eight Aunt Marthas to ask about astronomy and six Grandma Gerties to advise you on your garden dilemmas’. I would argue that this shares a lot of the same mental space as MetaFilter - most of the questions are things that you would see posed there, which arguably begs the question of why you wouldn’t just post to metafilter, with a much larger userbase?

wis.dm (as seen at Here we are. What now?) is a slightly different take on a question and answer site, requiring that questions be phrased as yes/no in an attempt to generate discussion. I can see this one being a little more popular, though a lot less useful. It’s very compelling to click on the little ajax-y buttons to answer questions, but far too much effort to click through and actually comment on something. I do wish the ratio of responses was shown on the front page though - I want to be able to see how the votes are swinging at a glance without having to click through. The questions on here are mostly vapid (’Are you sitting in a swivel chair now?’) and I admit that I don’t really see the point - I can’t help but think that it’s another site that’s attempting to be a social hub, when people are pretty much social-site-d out at the moment.

I do, however, think it’s interesting that there are so many places on the internet where people go to get their questions answered. It seems like the sort of service that public libraries would want to be providing - indeed I’m sure there are one’s around that do, I admit that my knowlege of the progressive services that public libraries offer is limited. I think it’d be great though - a site where library users can pose a question to the librarians and users of their local library and have it answered in this sort of way - combining the resources of the library with the wisdom of the crowd, and creating a community feeling at the same time. Does anything like that exist at the moment, or am I being a bit optimistic?

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And in more slightly creepy news, Google officially launched their Web History tool earlier this week. And whilst there is a certain cool factor in being able to see your web history no matter which computer you are on, I don’t know if I’m really entirely comfortable with it. Particularly when I can access my search history all the way back to 2005. I don’t recall signing up for that. (maybe I did? I’m not entirely sure how it works, and I am a terminal early adopter of things - so many accounts which I’ve signed up for and forgotten - that maybe I did say they could store all my search history without me knowing). And it certainly isn’t everything, cause I’ve definitely done more than the 600 or so searches it says I have in the last two years.

However, in light of the Google move on DoubleClick, and the subsequent complaint from US privacy groups, it might not be so unreasonable to worry about why Google might want to be tracking our search data. Thankfully, it’s easy to turn off, if you don’t want Google knowing too much about your buying habits, or you late night furtive searches, but it is something to bear in mind…

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