What is a Search Engine? A 3 Part Series

July 27th, 2007 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Alts, News | No Comments »

Starting Monday, we will be tackling one of the most vexing questions in Search:

What  is  a  Search  Engine ?

Monday: Staring the discussion off will be Nitin Karandikar (The Software Abstractions Blog), and the Big Question: “What is a Search Engine?”

Tuesday: Kaila Colbin of VortexDNA looks at things from the opposite angle:  “What is Not a Search Engine?”  Not everything that looks like a search engine actually is!

Wednesday: I’ll complete the series by asking, “What is an Alternative Search Engine?” And then answering it with the “Top 100 Alternative Search Engines” August update!

Collect all three!

Starts on Monday, July 30; only on AltSearchEngines!

A molecular search engine! ChemxSeer

July 27th, 2007 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Alts, Innovations | No Comments »

Thanks to the Alpha Doggs from Network World for this one! It’s not molecular as in a tiny search engine, its a search engine that searches for molecules on the Internet – like CO2, for instance. ChemxSeer can even tell the difference between the “He” in helium or as a pronoun.

It may take a Ph.D in Chemistry to even understand what ChemxSeer is capable of, but here goes: Read the rest of this entry »

Financial Search Engines (Friday’s Fab Four)

July 27th, 2007 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Alts, In Beta | 1 Comment »

Here are four very interesting financial search engines:

Search Hedge Funds; InfoNGEN; Market Simplified; and PuzzR.

SearchHedgeFunds is a vertical financial search engine designed solely for the hedge fund industry. This alternative search engine is an interesting development in the world of advanced search engines and is the first of a number of products planned by Institutional Investor.



InfoNGEN (”engine”) is just like a Netvibes for financial news, with drag-and-drop modules and pull down articles. It’s the new home page from InfoNGEN. It now offers a standards based, gadget driven interface that lets you build your own layout, and have a combination of feeds, saved searches, and application components available to you at a glance.



Market Simplified lists 5 reasons why you should try their financial search engine:

1. World’s first totally user customizable Financial Homepage
2. Specialist Financial Search to give one click response to Financial queries
3. Safeguard your portfolio with a dynamic and perpetual alerts on a range of parameters
4. Carry your portfolio with you ; RSS feeds of your portfolio anytime
5. The stock markets in your hands with the MarketSimplified Mobile



Now, this looks like Finances-R-Us, but PuzzR wanted to colorize the news to allow people to have fun while being informed. With PuzzR, you have easy access to the information in a more intuitive way. Indexed by the most important topics, PuzzR redirects the information to you in a delightfully different way; now, being informed is child’s play.

Hakia: What’s the Scoop?

July 27th, 2007 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Updates | No Comments »

Hakia announced several new features this week. Let’s take a look at a few of them:

After I downloaded the new hakia toolbar, I typed in my search query as a question.

Note: hakia wants to know how it did; well, it found the following page and the new highlighter feature highlighted the relevant section, and placed the new hakia “scoop” icon there!

After I scooped that section of the page – not the whole page – I got the following message:

Now I can save the results, and continue searching, highlighting, and scooping!

<You can go to www.hakia.com and download your toolbar too; give it a try.>

Editor’s note: Hakia is a sponsor of AltSearchEngines.