Search Engine of the Day: Keotag

August 31st, 2007 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Alts | 2 Comments »

 A personal note from Keotag’s CEO Eric Jally


Keotag has several useful features, with the main feature being the ability to search by tags on several search engines.  An excellent tool for Buzz Monitoring, the goal of Keotag is not to get the maximum number of results but rather to get the latest, most recent results.

On every page of results, you can subscribe to the RSS feed of the site or download an OPML file summarizing all RSS feeds that Keotag returns.  Keotag also allows you to generate tags for delicio.us, Technorati, IceRocket, and Keotag, and also has the ability to generate links for social bookmarking sites such as Blinklist, Digg, and Furl, etc.

The users of Keotag will be able to publish their own pages, a feature that will be enhanced in the near future.

Search Engine Stealth Report: new #10 – gloofi

August 31st, 2007 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Updates | No Comments »

This morning I listed The Top 10 Stealth Alternative Search Enginesthat we have on our Radar screen.  But since MyLiveSearch has launched, I decided to get a new #10, and here it is: gloofi

What is gloofi?  Gloofi claims to be the first Web 3.0 Search Engine currently in existence. Gloofi contains human and Semantic search capability, tag/keyword translation, personalized search, and user generated content. With all the new functionalities, and powerful capabilities of gloofi, you may never again want to use the old search engines, they say.The user is the bread and butter of any website

A web site comes alive only from the activity of the user community. But, how many web sites do you know of which provide a tangible reward from its use? gloofi would like to change that.  Gloofi has a unique point system which rewards users for entering content into the database, approving content, reviewing content, helping other gloofi users, and taking an active part in expanding gloofi globally. 

Sound interesting?  Just visit gloofi and request an Alpha login.

Stealth Report: The New Top 10

August 31st, 2007 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Updates | 6 Comments »

Occasionally on AltSearchEngines, we like to share with you the up-and-coming alternative search engines that are in pre-launch stealth mode or in private alpha or beta testing.  Here are the Top 10 that we have our eye on right now:


 Whozat? focuses on people and offers wider coverage of information sources: search engines, social and professional networks.  It is interactive: it allows users to give feedback  on every element in the results, and immediately customizes them accordingly.  It applies semantic search, focusing on meaning, not words. It ranks results according to relevance to your query, allowing information about ordinary people to be found on the web.  It includes computer vision technology, automatically generates tags that allow a searcher to indicate which person, or which aspect of a person, she is interested in.

On the site you can request an invitation to the Whozat? Beta.

FEEDS|2.0 What is Feeds 2.0?

Feeds 2.0 is a Web 2.0 personalized RSS aggregator. It incorporates a learning engine so that it does much more than show posts as they come in. Instead, it prioritizes incoming information according to the user’s interests!
How does it differ from other RSS Aggregators?
Traditional RSS readers just don’t work efficiently since in a flood of information it can be hard to find important and interesting news. For example, feeds that post frequently, tend to dominate posts. Sources that post less frequently might be buried much deeper. Feeds 2.0 ranks the feeds according to the user’s preferences and brings interesting articles in the first couple of pages.

You can sign up for an invitation to their private beta on their site.

Glam Search  

Glam Search, a proprietary search tool aimed at delivering top quality and highly relevant content from Glam Media’s 350+ lifestyle, celebrity and fashion sites, as well as its flagship site, Glam.com. Glam Search utilizes intelligent search, filtering and indexing technology to bring users comprehensive, relevant and timely results in a format not available from general search engines.  Publishers can add a customizable Glam Search Widget to their site or channel and configure results accordingly. In addition to classic search and indexing technologies, Glam Search uses a proprietary “curated rank” algorithm, which assigns a weighting to a page based on relevance, timeliness and an editorial analysis of the content source.

Nothing to do here, Glam Search is “Coming Soon.”

SurfCanyon  is developing next-generation semantic personalization technology for Internet search. Everyone is different. Everyone’s information needs are different. Search results should be customized for each individual. There are billions of web pages indexed by the major search engines. The average search query is between 2 and 3 keywords. Search engines need more than just keywords to help users reach all of that data.
 While users know what their information needs are, they are not always capable of finding the appropriate keywords to express such needs. Behaviors, however, reveal a great deal about intent. Search engines should harness this information.
 The average search session contains between 4 and 5 queries. Query reformulation is an obvious indication that users are not satisfied with the first set of results. Search engines should assist users in this process.

The site is currently in private Beta testing. Contact them to request a login.

mylivesearch  has been under development for 8 years, but it is only now that improvements in the power of computers and broadband speeds have allowed it to come of age. It is driven by intelligence rather than a finite bank of computers. MyLiveSearch’s objective is to give you a truly powerful search engine that enables you to see the web live, as it truly is, to search in your own terms and to be able to find richer information on exactly what you want much faster than with any existing tool.

World Wide Launch was Wednesday,  August 29th!  Go check it out.

nsyght  Nsyght is a new kind of social search application that does more than just suggest new sites or pages. They help leverage your existing social networks and bookmarks to create a custom search engine, just for you.

So how is this different from Mahalo, or Digg?
We all recognize the same problem, the algorithm is not enough to establish relevancy. It is our core belief that in order to present the most relevant and custom results, you still need that human factor. In our case, that human factor is you.

Do I need to install any plugins or applications?
At this stage of development, no. But it would be helpful if you have a current del.icio.us and/or Facebook account.  

Pre-launch invitations are free for the asking! 

ohigo  is planning a full release in Q4 of 2007. Past users of Ohigo may still login. If you are currently cataloging music on Ohigo, you may continue to do so.

To learn more you can email them at support@ohigo.com




Powerset’s Powerlabs:Want to try Powerset before the official release?

Sign up for Powerlabs and you’ll get a sneak peek at their technology.



Greyboxx was founded to bring optimal relevancy to “local search”. In English, that means users are going to get what they’re looking for. By leveraging intelligent algorithms that discern the quality and reputation of local businesses with minimal user interaction, they index and score local businesses without imposing review-writing chores on end-users.

Grayboxx is currently in stealth mode. 

Migoa 

It’s never been so simple to find a home, a car or a job! Migoa makes it possible by eliminating wasted hours searching on the web. Their goal is to make your life easier.

If you want to be the first to try Migoa, register to be a beta tester.

Want to see more Stealth Search Engines?  Just see our last report.

Bob Warfield on Search Engines, Part 3

August 30th, 2007 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Guest Authors | 3 Comments »





Thursdays on AltSearchEngines we welcome a Guest Author to our blog. Last week we heard from Bob Warfield of the SmoothSpan Blog with his recently published two-part series entitled, Why Don’t Search Startups Share Data? (aka Open Source Style Web Crawling) Part 1 and Part 2.  This has stretched into a third part, entitled “Social Graph Search Engines”

Here’s Part 3:

I’ve inadvertently stumbled onto a topic that’s getting tremendous attention, so I wanted to sum up my thoughts here before moving on.

Let’s start with Robert Scoble’s post, Why Mahalo, TechMeme, and Facebook are going to kick Google’s butt in four years.  Scoble’s proposition, which he communicates well in three videos, is that by using the Social Graph, we can dramatically reduce SEO Spam in search results.  The source of the Spam is that Google’s current PageRank algorithm is just too easy to game.  You simply need the right keywords together with as many sites linking to the page with the keywords as possible.   That combination does not guarantee a human will see anything of value on the resulting page.  With a Social Graph Search, you will weigh in human judgement about the quality of the page.  You do this by considering factors such as:

-  Did someone from your Trust Fabric (i.e. your social network) write the page?

-  Was it written or linked to by people who you know share similar interests because of the social graph?

And so on.  It’s a good idea, and I had already modified my own search habits to take advantage of a less grandiose form of this by choosing to search blogs before doing a general Internet-wide Google. Read the rest of this entry »

View from the Corner Office: SeeqPod

August 29th, 2007 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in CEO Views | No Comments »

Every Wednesday on AltSearchEngines, we make a virtual visit to the executive offices of an alternative search engine. 

Today we pay a visit to the headquarters of SeeqPod, to catch up with Kasian Franks, co-founder and CEO.

Better Search Through Biomimetics

I ask myself this question frequently: Why is it that more effort has not been put into getting machines to process information similar to the way humans do? The human brain is the best pattern matcher and search engine in existence. Its a wonder more search engine technologists are not mimicking the process of human cognition, which by the way does not operate based on a series of linguistic words and rules and does not start out dependent on a language.

The only way advancements in search technology can be made is by studying the way you and I conduct a search for something. If we look at what is involved in this process it is clearly not based on matching keywords and a handful of context. When humans search for something they leverage mass amounts of temporal, spatial and associative data to find things that are most likely what they are looking for.

There are two more things that need to be optimized related to search: the over-weighted focus on speed and number of results. Do we really need 252,233,875 results for the term “clothing” returned in .09 seconds? I and others I know would rather have 20-30 results returned in a reasonable amount of time and the results being similar to those as if I asked a human to collect the most relevant ones for me.

A biomimetic approach to the science and practical application of search is necessary. We do this in other areas such as robotics and in materials science, why not in the area of search engine technology?  Some of the near term goals in the industry of Search should be to A) operate in a language-independent way, B) determine how objects are related, leveraging the same context a human brain might generate C) determine how strong the relationships are between the objects, and D) the type of context they relate themselves, in emulation of biomimetic object-association strategies, has proven to be very effective in relationship discovery and mining, leading to new findings in numerous industries including life sciences, finance, search, and contextual advertising.  

Not to mention, music! This can be observed by going to www.seeqpod.com.

Have you missed a “Corner Office View?” 

Here are the offices we’ve been to so far:

Bessed

Knuru

ClipBlast!

EveryZing

Lexxe

Omgili

Kosmix

Exalead

Congoo

Picsearch