The Great Debates on AltSearchEngines

November 13th, 2007 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Debates | 4 Comments »



Tuesdays on AltSearchEngines we host our Great Debates where two or more search engines discuss issues that they have in common.  This week we are still lining some up, so I thought that I would provide you with links to some of our past debates in case you missed them.  Just click on the first word for the whole debate.


Continuous Search and  and

Search Results: Answers.com and  SenseBot.

MetaSearch:  IntelwaysGoshMe, and Srchr.


Visualization: KoolTorch and searchCrystal

MP3 Search: MP3Realm and SkreemR.

Media Search: PodNova and Blinkx and EveryZing




Game Search: Wazap! and GameSkoot  

Social Search: Searchles and Wikia

Video Search: Dabble, and ClipBlast!

Health Search: GoPubMed and SearchMedica


People Search: Wink and yoName

Job Search: Recruit.net and SimplyHired.

Peer-to-Peer Search: ATLAS and FAROO 

Ticket Search: tickex and NinjaTickets

Would you like to schedule a debate?
Just email me at:
Charles@ReadWriteWeb.com

Job hunting made easy with WorkHound (U.K.)

November 13th, 2007 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Reviews | 1 Comment »

Workhound is a U.K. alternative Job Search engine.  
It provides a one stop shop for job seekers looking for that all important career move.


Workhound’s Mission Statement:
“We are building the platform and search protocols that will make the world’s employment data easily searchable to create actionable job search queries. Our goal is simply to be the first resource individuals go to when searching for employment information anywhere in the world.”

Getting Started with Workhound:
You can quick-search from the Workhound home page, as follows:

Step 1. Type words into the box marked ‘keywords’ that describe the kind of job you are looking for, such as a job title, skill or company name.
Step 2. Type into the box marked ‘Location’ the city, town or post code where you want to find a job.
Step 3. Click the ‘Search’ button or hit Enter on your keyboard.  Jobs will be returned that match your keywords within 25 miles of the location you specify

Exact Phrases
To find jobs containing an exact phrase, put double quotation marks around the words.
For example, enter: “IT Manager”

Capitalization
The search isn’t case sensitive. It makes no difference whether you enter upper or lower case letters – e.g. “sales executive” will give you the same results as “Sales Executive”.

Narrowing Your Search
If your search returns a large number of jobs, there are several things you can do. Look at the text links in the left hand column within the ‘Refine by’ panel. Click on those that fit what you are looking for, which will return a subset of your original search results.

To exclude jobs containing certain keywords. Just type “-” before any terms you don’t want.  To include jobs containing certain keywords. Just type “+” before any terms that must be included.

Advanced Search
If you wish to perfrom a more complex search query, try the advanced search with any combination of the following options:
- search with all of these words
- search with the exact phrase
- search with at least one of these words
- search with none of these words
- search within job title
- search within company name
- search location

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Search Engine of the Day: SenseBot

November 13th, 2007 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in In Beta, Reviews | 1 Comment »

SenseBot represents a new type of Search Engine that delivers a summary in response to your search query instead of a collection of links to Web pages. SenseBot takes top results returned by one of the major Web search engines and summarizes them. 

Why should you use SenseBot? Here’s an example:

Imagine that you are not familiar with the concept of the dot-com bubble, and got curious about it. You type “dot-com bubble” into your favorite search engine and get back a dozen links with some context around them. Alas, glancing over the context does not really give you a good idea of what the dot-com bubble was, or form an opinion on it. So you start clicking on the links, and soon realize that some of the pages presume that you are familiar with the subject; others are too shallow; or biased; or just aggregate links to other resources instead of answering your question. By the time you finally understand what the dot-com bubble was, you’ve clicked on too many links and sifted through too much redundant information. Wouldn’t you rather click on one link and receive a concise summary, a digest on the phenomenon of the dot-com bubble, compiled from the top most relevant pages on the subject?

Enter SenseBot, which does exactly that – builds a summary of the top pages returned by the search engine. After looking at the summary, you would be able to get a good idea about the dot-com bubble (hopefully enough to maintain a conversation about it), understand the dot-com model and notice a few key stages in it, and also see which of the sources about it are worthy should you decide to dig deeper. Note that SenseBot will drop the sources that are not heavy on the content related to your topic – no matter how high they were ranked by major search engines.

What are your next steps, SenseBot?

“We are currently in Beta, analyzing different types of searches and working on further improvement of the quality of the summaries. We are also exploring some vertical search areas. We believe that the summaries can get even more relevant and readable if SenseBot is integrated with a vertical search engine targeting a particular subject field, or a Web directory where users navigate to a specific area, thus narrowing down the subject of their query. We also anticipate that the advent of Semantic Web will allow SenseBot to get a more accurate identification of the type of Web pages, thus decreasing the amount of “noise” in the content, and improving the quality of generated summaries.”

“We are open to partnerships in these areas.”

Any Vertical search engines interested?