SGER: A Music Search Engine Based on Aesthetic Similarity

November 8th, 2007 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in News | 1 Comment »

This SGER project aims to develop a prototype music search engine based on identifying aesthetic similarities. This engine will utilize power-law metrics to extract statistical proportions of music-theoretic and other attributes of music pieces (e.g., Pitch, Duration, Pitch Distance, Duration Distance, Melodic Intervals, Harmonic Intervals, Melodic Bigrams, etc.).

The engine searches for pieces that are aesthetically similar to the input piece using a mean squared error (MSE) approach. Preliminary testing has been done using the Classical Music Archives corpus (14,695 MIDI pieces), combined with 500+ MIDI pieces from other styles (e.g. Jazz, Rock, Country, etc.). Similar metrics have already been validated on aesthetic attributes of textual materials. Text results (author attribution, style identification, and pleasantness prediction) indicated an high level of accuracy. Assessment and validation experiments will be conducted to compare to computational findings indicating aesthetic similarity of retrieved pieces. These experiments will be conducted by Prof. Dwight Krehbiel (subaward, Bethel College), a specialist in cognitive neuroscience and psychology of music, who has extensive experience in measuring emotional and physiological responses to music.

Sample Result:

Source Piece: Jazz, Miles Davis: Blue in Green
Search Results (ordered by MSE):

Any questions?

A brand new discovery – Discovery Engine

November 8th, 2007 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Newcomers, Reviews | 1 Comment »

“Discovery Engine is creating a next-generation search engine.  Since the late ‘90s, there have been dramatic increases in bandwidth, computer speed, storage, the scale of the web, and desktop monitors. But in that same time, the paradigm of search has not changed.  (Their) focus is on creating a new interaction model that makes it easier to find information. This leads to a number of challenges related to language understanding, user interface design and computer systems engineering.”  Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media.

“Google, what’s it good for?”

November 8th, 2007 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Guest Authors | No Comments »


Every Thursday on AltSearchEngines, we welcome contributions (like yours) from Guest Authors.  Today’s article comes from Alex Kirtland.


The Compete Blog has had a couple of fascinating posts over the past few days looking at how people search on Google, as well as the other major search engines. (How do I get to www.google.com? and So who’s doing all this searching anyway?)

Which of course prompted me to think about how I use Google. And, in a broader sense, is Google still good after all these years?

As way to analyze this question – on a very personal level, of course – I came up with the four basic reasons that I do search these days.

1. Take me to X’s website

As the Compete blog aptly notices (and confirms with research), the Google search bar is now a navigational bar. I won’t go so far as to type in an actual web address – as it appears a lot of people do – but if I don’t know the exact web address, but I know exactly who I’m looking for, Google is an excellent way to get there.

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2. Find this for me on Wikipedia

Perhaps this is the result of some sort of crowd related madness, but the more people link to pages on Wikipedia, the higher it appears on Google, the more likely people are to find something on Wikipedia, and then link to it. Particularly those nutty bloggers.

As a result, I use the Google search bar as my (almost) exclusive entry way into Wikipedia. Usually, no matter what I’m searching for, a Wikipedia result is within the top five hits. Some examples:

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Perhaps there’s a new information duopoly on the rise: GooglePedia (or the more groovy sounding, Wikoogle).

3. Ego searching

You still do it, you know you do. But Google, perhaps distracted by other things, is not longer my favored search engine of self love.

While there are many people search engines out there, my favorite is pipl. While Spock, is fun, pipl gets great quotes about me …

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… although it does confuse me a bit with this other guy (definitely not me), Alex Kirtland, from Ohio.

4. Um, and, oh yeah, find something for me on the Internet

And finally, the reason search was invented in the first place: to find information where you are unsure of its location.

This seems to be one area where people think Google is weak (or, as some people have noted, how can 208,000 search results be a good search?). The best alternative I’ve found so far has been AfterVote.

What I like (nay, love) about AfterVote is that I can compare page rank results from the major search engines, and sort by them too. This is a terribly easy way to see how the different search engines understood what I was looking for.

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And, oh yeah, I can enter my own vote (if I decide I have the time, and am not rushing off to my new found information) for what page best satisfied my need.

As always, thanks for listening!  -Alex Kirtland

People Search Engine Wink Rocks!

November 8th, 2007 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in News, Reviews | 2 Comments »

Alternative People Search engine Wink released advanced profile controls today, giving people complete control over the contents of the search result for their name. Wink’s enhanced profiles bring together information from numerous popular communities, and allow Wink members to fill in or correct their own profiles. Wink’s profile controls also allow people to contact friends they find online, and choose how they want to be contacted by friends who find them.

“At Wink we are constantly seeking ways to make it easier and more intuitive to find and connect with old friends, classmates, colleagues and business contacts wherever they are online,” said Michael Tanne, CEO of Wink. “Today we have reinforced our commitment to the people found with our search engine by providing them with complete control over the content in their profile, and letting them express how they prefer to be contacted by others.”

Control Over Search Profiles
Some People Search engines list only information that is posted on the Web regardless of accuracy, and some give authority to community tags or anonymous editors in an attempt to incrementally improve search results.  Wink allows users to claim and control their search profile on the Wink People Search engine and gives the owner of each profile complete authority to edit, correct or remove any content — photos, tags, labels, descriptions, links or feeds — in their profile. This helps them prevent false or defamatory information from persisting, and lets them present themselves as they’d like to be seen.

Rich Search Profiles
Wink has a new look!  You’ll notice that the Wink profiles are much richer.  There is also better navigation and inline editing.  Wink’s updated search profiles allow the display of richer information, including biography, interests, work, school and other information.  Additionally each profile can have multiple photos, so users can upload additional photos or delete old ones they don’t like. 
(I’m pretty happy with mine.  That’s me with my wolf-hybrids Kira and Shadow.)

Friend’s Feeds
Wink users can view a feed of their friends’ postings to any RSS-enabled site such as Twitter, Flickr, Jaiku, and Amazon Wish Lists, wherever they are across the Web. By choosing to “follow” their friends and other people they find interesting, people can view all the postings in one feed.

“Contact Me” feature
At Wink they are constantly seeking ways to make it easier and more intuitive to find and connect with old friends, classmates, colleagues and business contacts wherever they are online.  They’ve added a way for you to choose how you would like to be contacted by someone who is looking for you. You can choose from IM, Skype, email, or leaving a message at Wink. You can also contact others using their preferred method. If they haven’t claimed their profile yet, you can still leave a message. They’ll see there’s a message waiting when they join Wink. So look for the Contact Me information on all the profiles on Wink – this makes it easy for you to contact people you find on Wink.

Wink has nearly tripled the number of people it searches since it launched in November of 2006. To find people online, Wink has worked with many of the leading social networks and online communities, including MySpace, Hi5, LinkedIn, Friendster, Bebo, Live Spaces, Xanga, Twitter and more.

Wink is also announcing today that it has formed a partnership with ZoomInfo to include the 38 million ZoomInfo profiles assembled from information from across the Internet in the Wink search results.
To satisfy followers of celebrity news and the “internet famous,” Wink has included results about people found on popular Web sources such as Wikipedia and IMDB. Whether people are searching for celebrities, old friends, new friends, business contacts or anyone else, Wink can help find them online by their name, location, interests, tags, school, work, and other criteria.

About Wink
Wink is a People Search engine that makes it easier to find and connect with people across the Web by providing search of over 250 Million profiles across social networks and on-line communities. Wink users can claim their on-line profiles to manage their on-line presence. Wink’s patent-pending PeopleRank technology provides the most relevant people search results.

So check out Wink’s new features, search for your friends, and invite them to join you on Wink! 

Textbook search engine BIGWORDS

November 8th, 2007 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Reviews | No Comments »


BIGWORDS is a price comparison engine for textbooks, books, DVDs, games, music and school supplies.



They don’t sell anything!
BIGWORDS doesn’t sell a thing. They scour all of the best stores, compare prices, and show you where to buy your books to save the most money. Their service is totally free.

They find the best deals!
BIGWORDS takes all of your items, runs every combination of those items at every store, automatically calculates coupons, promotions, and shipping, and shows you the best possible combination of stores to save you the most money.

Why is BIGWORDS better than other price comparison sites and textbook sellers?

  1. 1. multi-item price comparison

    Whereas other price comparison sites shows you the prices one item at a time, BIGWORDS looks for the best total price for all of your items. This allows BIGWORDS to show you special deals like free shipping for multiple item orders, or coupons that kick in when you spend more than a certain amount.

2. coupons, promotions, and shipping calculated automatically

They take all of your items, run every combination of all your items at all the stores, and figure out the cheapest way to get all your stuff. If there’s a $5 off $50 coupon, and you have two $30 books, they’ll show you that buying them both together gets you the $5 off.

3. current pricing

Just about all of the competition relies on daily pricing feeds from the textbook sellers, but prices change constantly as items come in and out of inventory. BIGWORDS gathers prices when you search for them.

4. they search only the best textbook merchants

They constantly monitor their merchants and only recommend the best textbook sources.

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