Abphone Launches Mobile Game Search Service

June 3rd, 2008 by Guest Author
Posted in Guest Authors, News | No Comments »

Author: Peggy Anne Salz

I’m on my way out the door to Amsterdam to speak at Navigation Location Services 2008 – and wanted to share this scoop before I leave. Thanks again to Yann Mondon who made sure I had the release first and before it goes out on the wires tomorrow a.m.

In a nutshell, abphone, a mobile multimedia search engine for entertainment, has formally launched mobile game search (an offer Pierre Scokaert, abphone CEO, hinted at on several occasions in interviews with MSG). Likewise Nadir Garouche, a long-time pal and great source of breaking news (!), also write about this development on his blog yesterday. He was spot-on!

I’m excited because this is yet another confirmation of the pivotal role of vertical mobile search engines – gives me another company to profile in AltSearchEngines.

Read the entire scoop on Peggy’s blog HERE.

Wikia Announces Great New Search Features

June 3rd, 2008 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Alts, News, Reviews | No Comments »


Wikia, the company working to bring the full power of MediaWiki software to search, today provided a detailed update on its open source search project, which was launched to the public in alpha form in January.

Since then, the Wikia Search project, which is creating a new search platform founded on open-source search protocols and human collaboration, has seen some 20,000 registered users make nearly 60,000 edits to search results and write nearly 25,000 mini articles. Based on input from the community, the Wikia Search project rolled-out several new features today designed to make the search process more social and interactive.

Social Results

After executing a search query on any major search engine, the results page is typically static and the information displayed is largely chosen by an algorithm. Search Wikia affords users multiple opportunities to influence and customize search results, including:

–The ability to edit any result, title and summary. The edits are then instantly available to everyone

–The ability to add new results for any search query instantly

–The ability to delete and/or hide any result

–Every result item can be rated 1-5 stars, which will slowly influence the ranking position

–The ability to add suggested and/or related searches for any query

–The ability to add public comments to any result item

–The opportunity to see site previews and annotate text, images, links and forms directly into the results

–The ability to try any search on Google, Yahoo, or any other search engine with a single click

–The ability to customize the background on the header for a more themed result for any search

–The opportunity to view the change history showing all the social actions for any page

“Collectively, these new features put us a step closer to our goal of making the search process a much more participatory and democratic one,” said Jimmy Wales, co-founder and chairman, Wikia, Inc. “So, if someone runs a search and doesn’t find the result they’re looking for, we’re giving them the power to go in and fix it. It continues to be our belief that, over time, by adding the human element into search we’ll be able to produce more relevant, insightful results.”

Other new features include revamped social profile pages, which now include an “activity” feed showing search result changes, revamped messaging including the ability to “nudge” friends and overall style improvements. The project also has a new index, built from community input, that includes a whitelist directed master index and has the Grub community crawler input included.

TheFind.com – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Human search engine

Omgili

Nestoria

Picsearch

Alt Search Engines

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altsearchengines.com

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Forum – BarCampBerlin2 @ mixxt

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Gogimon Compares Big Search Boys – GO get it!

June 3rd, 2008 by Rafi Farber
Posted in Alts, Guest Authors, Reviews | 1 Comment »

This new alt works on the principle of strength in numbers. Gogimon takes it’s own search engine, adds Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo, and puts them all together in one downloadable application with a few surprises in it. It even has a “mind reader,” which tries to guess what web sites you’re really looking for.

But before you download it, here’s a quick video explaining what this thing can do.

How Gogimon works is this. You go to their site, download the application, and type in a search term in a little tool that pops up on your screen. You can see it on the right here. After you do that, you click “Go get it,” and that brings you to the application. Organizationally, the tabs on the top left show Gogimon, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft Live, where you can switch between them and see what they all have.

Now, back to the mind reader. It looks at what you’re searching for, and presents you with a list of related suggestions that you may want to look at at the bottom of the screen. Another interesting feature they think is pretty cool is the composite search ranker. Gogimon touts this as the “great equalizer.” In their words, let’s say you’re looking for ‘inexpensive eye glasses in Chicago’. The results usually seen in a traditional search will likely leave you with mostly irrelevant responses that don’t lead to ‘inexpensive eye glasses in Chicago’. Maybe that result exists, but it could be buried a few pages deep.

I actually did the Chicago search, and came up with links that were pretty useful. Some links were still irrelevant, but had I actually been looking for cheap glasses, I would have been in OK shape. I didn’t see all that much of a difference with the other tabs, though, which all came out with OK info.

Gogimon also has what is called a Continuously Directed RSS. This feature allows for a continuous search, so when relevant results come along, you get it immediately. It’s like a Google alert, but it’s actually a Gogimon alert.

There were, nonetheless, a few problems with the application. It set me automatically to “working offline” so none of the links actually worked unless I pasted them into my browser. It told me how to stop being offline, but I couldn’t find the button they were telling me to press. Hopefully these will be worked out soon. Even so, at this point the application is free, and they say they’re only offering 1,000 more downloads, so it may be worth it. They give free updates as they improve their software.