Last week we saw a of four different Israeli search engines covering an array of search specialties—Smart search with Semantinet, health search with iMedix, internet relay chat search with IRSeeK, and strength in numbers with Gogimon. Today we’ll look at another four specialty categories. I’d tell you about them in this paragraph, but that would ruin the surprise.

בשבוע שעבר, ראינו מבחר של מנועי חיפוס ישראליים מלוקטים העוסקים בכמה התמחויות—חיפוס חכם עם Semantinet, חיפוס בריאות עם iMedix, חיפוס IRC עם IRSeeK, וחיפוס בכמות עם Gogimon. היום נראה עוד ארבע סוגי התמחות. הייתי מגיד לכם עליהם בקטע הזה, אך אני לא רוצה לגלות את ההפתעה.

We’ll begin with…

Jogli – David Schwarz, Idan Harel

The problem: You want to download music, but you don’t want the crushing, paralyzing, terrifying, totally over-exaggerated guilt of downloading it illegally, and you certainly don’t want the crushing, paralyzing, etc. annoyance of paying a buck for it and worrying about licensing for transfer to an iPod.

With Jogli comes the third option. Listen to music, create playlists, and play entire albums for free, legally, without the download. Watch this:

Where does Jogli get its eclectic array of musical goodness? YouTube mostly, but their niche is that they organize it into playlists. Say you are to search for music on TouTube. What you’re getting, essentially, are music videos of varying qualities, some of which might be really crappy. One of the features of Jogli that deals with this problem is the membership network (which is free) that allows you to see other versions of the same songs that other members have. Result – get the best version, and create a real playlist. As a member, you can also save your playlist for later. You might, after all, feel like listening to them again. At least that’s what I do sometimes. Just extrapolating from personal experience.

Jogli also gives you the lyrics to most of its songs as they play, so you can sing along and impress your friends, even if you don’t know the words. For the more well-known bands, a list of their albums shows up on the top, enabling you to pick any song you want from any album.

Picitup – Alon and Dan Atzmon

Pictures anyone? But not just a simple picture search, Picitup has a lot of useful filtering features. The search begins with a textual query which registers a line of images, following which the user can pick the image he wants to find matching images for.

Where you go next depends on what you want to find. Your options are faces, landscape, products, or color. I guess, faces if you’re looking for a person, landscape if you’re looking for a scene, products of you’re making some sort of advertising campaign, and color if you’re making a collage. New features include picking a shape, a size, and a layout, as well as an image rank to rind the most popular ones on the net these days.

But this isn’t even the coolest part about Picitup, in my opinion, though it might be the most practical. (What good has practicality gotten anyone anyway?) Picitup’s face match service allows you to upload you photo and receive ten celebrity lookalikes.

I put them to the test. Personally, people think I look like Tobey MacGuire. A group of Ethiopian children once even started calling me “Spider” though they only spoke Amharic at the time, they knew the movie. And 2 drunk people confused me with him on the MTA in Manhattan and demanded an autograph. Does Picitup agree?

Yes!

Delver – Liad Agmon

Social search—the theory being that you put a focusing lens on your query by searching the internet through a social net that matches you and your specific interests. Delver, a new alpha from Israel that just came out only a few weeks ago, is trying to do that.

“Delver is designed to ‘delve’ into your online social graph to generate search results gathered from your friends, your network and your friends’ networks, to help you find information more relevant to you as an individual,” said Liad Agmon, CEO of Delver. “We prioritize results based on your network to make Web search more fun and meaningful, while enabling you to discover others in your extended network who share common interests.”

One of Delver’s goals is that a search for Surfing in Hawaii would reveal who in your social world has posted images and videos from their recent surfing trip – as opposed to getting an annoying list of advertisements from the traditional search engines. Plus, says Delver’s website, “who knows… you may just find out your best friend’s hot roommate recently surfed there, and now you’ve got the perfect conversation starter!” That could be interesting.

Before you do your first “delve,” Delver has you type your name in, and it then allows you to pick yourself out of the many on the planet who share your full name. Then you can plug your various profiles into it and it gets a picture of your network, your interests, and a good outline of your web presence, from the following sites:

Delver also gives users the ability to tap into the content and network of people whose opinion they value by adding them as ‘Search Buddies’. It prioritizes results from ‘Search Buddies’ and their network as if they were the users’ friends. Delver also provides a number of features for organizing and retaining the information found as a result of a search query. When results are yielded, user’s may choose the “keep it” option, which stores the selected links in the appropriate categories for compiling lists or easier reference later on.

Newsflashr – Gal Arav

You want to know what’s going on in the world, but there are so many news sites to choose from – so what do you do? Google News, Microsoft Live, Ask Big News, Google Blogs, Bloglines, Digg, BBC News, MSNBC, Newsvine, Yahoo News, Wordpress, Topix, Summize-Twitter, Techmeme, and Technorati all together doesn’t sound half bad. In fact, it doesn’t even sound a quarter bad.

So if you like this idea, go to Newsflashr,either type in a topic or click on the list of suggested topics below, and find out everything about that topic and its uncle. All news items are updated every 15 minutes, so chances are, you’re not really missing all that much. Given it may even take 15 minutes to read an article, you might not even be missing anything at all.

Music, pictures, social search and news. If anything new comes out of this country, you can be sure to read it here when it hits the fan. Or you can search for it on Newsflashr. But better look here first.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 17th, 2008 at 10:00 am and is filed under Global, Guest Authors. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.