International Search Engines: Great Britain, England, the United Kingdom, the U.K., whatever!

August 25th, 2007 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Global | No Comments »

Every Saturday on AltSearchEngines we continue our trip around the world.

We’ve been to Iceland, Russia, South Africa, New Zealand, India, and Yemen, to name a few, and today we are skipping “across the pond” to visit our British brothers and sisters in the U.K. 

Are you bilingual?  Can you read Japanese, Polish, Swahili, or some other language? Enjoy searching for search engines?  We need country specific volunteers to aid us on our journey.  Just shoot me an email:  Charles@ReadWriteWeb.com.  Thanks!


These Top 10 UK Alternative Search Engines are derived from a much longer list graciously provided by Mojeek.co.uk, a “Top 100″ search engine.  For better or worse, the final cut was my selection, not theirs.


1.    Mojeek is an independent crawler based search engine offering its own unique results, all of which have been gathered and indexed by crawling the web.  One of the main aims at Mojeek is to implement and allow full customization on a personal, search-by-search basis. To do this, Mojeek’s ranking and weightings have been designed, and are fully configurable, at the time of each search.

2.   mirago offers: Regional Search - Enables users to perform searches for pages within X miles of a location and sort their results by distance or relevance. Mobile Search - Search the web or compare prices via mobile devices. Trusted Feeds - Deep indexing of websites where conventional indexing is not possible.

3.     WhooshUK.  I searched for “Monty Python” and WhooshUK found:

4.    info.co.uk is a search platform that pulls together results from the leading search engines and pay-per-click directories. Info.co.uk is also partnered with other search providers to include comparison shopping and product reviews.

5.     knuru is a research engine. Using short descriptive sentences, you can find deeply relevant business information from top-tier academic and institutional sources that you might not otherwise have access to.

6.   WebWobot lets you search the World Wide Web or just the UK.   WebWobot also has some interesting discussions at their search engine-related forums.

7.    Trexy is an add-on to your browser that lays digital breadcrumbs along your search path, allowing you to find the information again as well as blazing a trail for others to follow. Connected to over 4,000 general and vertical search engines, Trexy gives users three options: search their own trails, search others’ trails, or create a new trail.

8.    Majestic-12 is working towards creation of a World Wide Web search engine based on concepts of distributing workload. Watch out Big G!

9.     JumpToJobs.co.uk is a job search site that lets you determine how much you spend in order to generate traffic to your website and jobs through pay-per-click.

10.    everyclick is a search engine that lets you search the web and benefit the <U.K.> charity of your choice. So far, they have raised £277,210 for charities.

Search Engine of the Day: Trooker

August 25th, 2007 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Alts, Newcomers | 2 Comments »

This past week we have been looking at Video search engines.  We had the Top 10 Alternative Video search engines, a great Video Search debate, and yesterday we took a close look at Japanese video search engine Fooooo.

But fortunately for me, our readers are willing to suggest other search engines that we have not discovered.  In fact, readers’ comments are one of the main ways that we “find” new search engines.  We check out every single one.

Anyway, yesterday I got a comment form the good people at Trooker, a new video search engine, and I’ve been having a lot of fun with it today.  Granted, Trooker is just searching a handful of video sites, but they make that very clear. 

Their emphasis is on sharing videos, or sets of videos, with others. In my case, I tend to “like what I like,” and don’t really think to share my videos with my friends. But if you do, that’s great, Trooker is all set up for you to do that. 

What I enjoyed about Trooker is Serendipity, or in Search language: Discovery. 

Search usually takes one of two forms.  I know what I want, I just need to find it – usually quickly.  This is sometimes called Navigational searching.  The second path is (as Donald Rumsfeld might say) I don’t know what I don’t know; I want to explore the Web.

So, how do you discover?  One way is to use the right Alternative Search Engine, one with a two dimensional cluster or map.  See our recent co-winners KartOO and Quintura as examples.  It’s like taking a walk in the woods.  You just go left, left, right, left -literally, on the screen- just to see whatever is around the next link.  There are also the recommendation search engines, like LivePlasma, that work in a similar fashion.  You name one song or artist or movie that you like, and it recommends others like it.

There’s also a search engine called “BananaSLUG.”  (That URL wasn’t taken, can you believe it?) You type in your query, and it adds a random word!  There are other randomizing engines, I’m sure.

With Trooker I found a fantastic video called “Green Fairy” with a beautiful song behind images of the GF.  (Caution: the singer does use the “F” word!)

Then I searched ‘wolves’ and found this video of a bizarre guy who went and lived with a pack of wolves.  Sorry, I skipped that one!  Our last hybrids spent most of their time on the living room sofa!

Finally, I tried ‘Aragorn’ (Kaila’s nickname for me) and found about 200 mash-ups of LOTR video with every imaginable soundtrack: “I’m here without you baby.” “Eye of the Tiger” and many more.  (Editor’s note: Someone used “Dream, dream, dream.”  That person needs help.)

Oh yes, what does “Trooker” mean? 

“It is a play on trick. When you send someone a video we call that trooking someone.”

Regards,
Alex Z.
Trooker