Is The Web Still a Windfall For Non-Profit Alts?

September 10th, 2007 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Verticals | 9 Comments »

Each week on Read/WriteWeb they choose a different feature.  This week they will be exploring how non-profit organizations use the Web and the tools available for them. 

Over here at AltSearchEngines, we examine a particular Vertical Search every Monday, so this week we will revisit our Alternative Charity Search Engines to contribute to the conversation. This is not an exhaustive list, but I’ve selected 10 that I think are worth a look.  If you like one that isn’t listed here, please introduce us to it by leaving a detailed comment.

My Criteria

The five factors that I used in evaluating these search engines are:

Factor #1: Is the site global, or specific to only one country?

Factor #2: How many Charities does it help? Can you choose your own?

Factor #3: How much does it give to those Charities? What % of revenue?

Factor #4: How explicitly do they reveal how to check their figures?

Factor #5: How good are their search results? (All the majors are equal.)

So without further ado, here are my findings:

What Charities benefit? Changes monthly (by audience poll)

How much do they give? “Every single advertising penny.”

Example: Last month $505 for “Angel Flight Central”

Who powers the results?

Overall rating? * * *


What Charities benefit? “Pick from 1,000s”

How much do they give? “the major portion” of their ad revenue

Who powers the results? “Various Sources”

Overall rating? * *

What Charities benefit? You can choose from dozens.

How much do they give? “50% of search revenues”

Who powers the results?

Overall rating? * * * *

What Charities benefit? Greenpeace, World Wildlife Fund (WWF), and Oxfam.

How much do they give? “100% (of) Profits”

Example: $103 raised in August

Who powers the results?

Overall rating? ****

(Australia)

What Charities benefit? Oxfam; Oaktree foundation; WaterAid; Grameen foundation

How much do they give? “100%. Every cent.”

Who powers the results?

Overall Rating? * * *

(U.K.)

What Charities benefit? 17 Charities that rotate daily.

How much do they give? “50% of advertising revenue”

Who powers the results?

Overall Rating? * * *

What Charities benefit? Various Charitable Cancer Foundations

How much do they give? “70% of all (advertising) revenue”

Who powers the results?

Overall Rating? * *

What Charities benefit? Choose from 43,000!

How much do they give? “50% of Revenues”

Example: ASPCA earned $5,870!

Who powers the results?

Overall Rating? * * * *

(U. K.)

What Charities benefit? (A mere) 170,000 U. K. Charities

How much do they give? “50% of gross revenue”

Example: over £283,823 for charity.

Who powers the results?

Overall Rating? * * * *


 Dooniz has teamed up with Google. That permits them to redistribute a part of the money made on the Internet to charitable foundations. Internet users can make a difference by searching Google using Dooniz.

What Charities benefit? A list of major foundations.

How much do they give? 75% of commissions

Who powers the results?  (unless you choose another).

Overall Rating? * * *

Conclusion

None of the search engines on the list rated a perfect 5 star rating in my book, but several were “very good;” namely GoodTree, GoodSearch, CharityCafe, and EveryClick (U.K. only). With just one exception (SearchGive), they all use a Major search engine to power their results, so you should get good search results.

If you fancy one particular charity, then you ought to be able to find it in this group if you check each one. And if you feel like changing the world one penny at a time, I can’t see the harm in switching to a Charity search engine; go for it!

Search Engine of the Day Arabic/English Onkosh

September 10th, 2007 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Updates | 2 Comments »


A while back on AltSearchEngines, we covered an Arabic search engine call Onkosh.  Today we’re pleased to update that report because Onkosh is now available as an Arabic/English search engine!


  There is the Arabic homepage…                                    and the English homepage.

           

I have asked Hany Abdelkawi of Onkosh to help explain their special features:

“Thank you very very much. I have just a couple of comments to differentiate between what is “Bel-3araby,” and the virtual keyboard. “Bel-3araby” is a patent pending feature. It is an Arabic name, and means “In Arabic.” It is a transliteration (not translation) feature. So how do you pronounce for example my name? Hany … using bel3araby this will show you the Arabic word equivalent .. (in this case “هاني”). Give it a try, and type an Arabic word, you may try simple words like ’salaam,’ or ‘allah’ and see the result showing in Arabic (and when you search, the Arabic word will be searched for). This also allows you to use alpha-numerical characters. The Arabic alphabet is 28 characters (written), and there are a few other characters that cannot be written — called diacritics (basically special form of the vowels). Since the Roman alphabet is only 26 characters, they caused the Arab users to adapt using special numerals to substitute the gab for the missing characters.. examples: ‘7′, ‘6′, ‘3′, ‘2′ and others.”

“Here, let me emphasize where our invention is. Basically we do not offer one-on-one mapping of characters, otherwise this wouldn’t deserve being a patent, and would typically give erroneous results. In Bel-3araby, there are lots of heuristic rules, and statistical models used beside integrating Arabic grammar for identifying the possible derivates of the Arabic words, in addition to what kind of the most-probable forms of Latin string/sequence of characters to represent a certain Arabic word. As a last step there might be, in certain situations, some check to ensure that the ‘proposed’ result would be an Arabic word — that is why when you type “Charles” for example, you would not get the Arabic word for it, since this is not an Arabic word.  (Sounds complex,  but when it comes to our guest column, I will try to simplify that.)”

“The second comment is about the keyboard. It is basically a virtual keyboard, because we discovered that it is necessary for miscellaneous reasons. Most people would master typing in English, and usually it is hard for them to type in Arabic. We thought it would be great to have the Arabic keyboard clear in a condensed size on the screen .. so typing an Arabic query is just a few clicks away. The second main reason, is that now can we internationalize Onkosh… We have lots of potential users living around the globe… they may be interested in our engine, yet typing would be such an ‘obstacle’ since they won’t have an Arabic keyboard on their physical machine – like you I guess!”

Summary

Onkosh is a search portal for the Arabic web. It searches for anything in Arabic on the world wide web, as well as anything Arabic-related in English or French on the web.

Onkosh understands the Arabic language and utilizes advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to ensure that you receive the best results for your search query.

The tabs relate to Web Search, Image Search, Blog Search, News Search, Forum Search, File Search and Directory.

Onkosh has a very exciting road-map ahead, so we have invited them to give us a full introduction once the dust settles on their new launch.  Feel free to check it out now, and we’ll hear more from them soon.

Congratulations on this milestone, Onkosh, and thanks for the explanation Hany!

Search Engines & The Illusion of Privacy

September 10th, 2007 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in News | No Comments »

For those who don’t recognize this image, this is the ubiquitous “Cone of Silence” from the TV series “Get Smart.” Whatever was said in the Cone stayed in the Cone! The privacy of your conversation was absolutely guaranteed.

Let’s see, I’ll be 60 years old…

The story from the Associated Press (AP) that greeted me this morning looked like it was just an update on one of the Homeland Security Department’s policies. It said, in part, that instead of keeping risk assessments on you and me for 40 years, they will only keep them for 15 years. What a break! Oh, and by-the-by, you’re not allowed to see your risk assessment, or even why they have one on you.

You are what you eat!

But what really got my attention was that they will try to deduce whether or not we are terrorists by the names of our traveling companions, the number of hotel beds requested, and -wait for it- airline meal choices! That made me wonder, does Homeland Security know what groceries I buy (with my credit card, to make it a little easier for them)? Do they know what cereal I had for breakfast? What do terrorists eat when they travel? I sure don’t want to order that…

Alternative Search Engines

What does any of this have to do with the alternative search engines? That’s what I was wondering. On Mondays at AltSearchEngines we usually feature a different Vertical search category. But after reading this news, search engines that I once thought of as helpful and innocuous, now seemed to be under a black cloud of suspicion.

People Search

Of course People search is often singled out as the bad guy. What do they know about me? Why is Facebook releasing my profile? If I misspell “kiddie horns” when I search for my nephew’s birthday party favors, am I going to be tagged as a pervert? Personal data and issues of privacy will always be at the top of everyone’s concern. The alternative People search engines and the social networking sites will always have that special burden of reassuring their users that it’s safe to use their site. (Or at the very least that the benefits outweigh the risks.)

Likewise the Job search engines. Before today I would have only wondered which one is most likely to find a good position. But in a parallel paranoid universe, what if “something” happened and my boss found that I have been searching for a new job while I was on the clock! After all, didn’t Monster.com have a theft of confidential information?

Health Search? Could a prospective employer surreptitiously buy a list that revealed that I have a preexisting condition and then find another reason not to hire me?

Travel search? Yep, he’s a terrorist. Probably off to training camp.

Search engines that track blogs, discussions, buzz, and other readily available Internet chatter; if I make a joke about renting out my basement to “that guy on the video,” will they “accidentally” fire bomb my house?

Video search? Buy Season Three of “24″ ? Not any more; no way.

Image search. More bad news. Another article, again, in this morning’s paper, said that if they catch a child pornography suspect with a picture of a child on a red blanket, they perform a search for all photos with red blankets. My beach towel is red! I could be looking at 10-15 years of hard time – and lose my beach towel.

Conclusion

We live in a world where every email, every outdoor camera, every Internet search on every search engine, every hotel we book or meal that we order might be captured by someone and used against us. The “Age of Innocence” has run head-on into the “Illusion of Privacy,” and the result is the “Plague of Paranoia” that is sweeping our world like an electronic epidemic.

Now, what would a terrorist order for lunch?

Here’s a bonus, check out this really creative UI for a local restaurant search!