Search.io is a cool and innovative website which aims to simplify your searching needs by bringing a lot of sites in a single page.

It allows you search the popular sites which fall in a particular category. The categories include search engines for music, images, books, blogs, news, fonts, recipes, jobs, torrents, tutorials people and many more.

It has a simple user interface and is also very fast in delivering results. As you hover your mouse pointer on the selection box, it immediately pops up the list of categories to choose from.

As you type select a category and enter a search query, it shows the relevant websites in tabs on a single page. You can navigate between the tabs by clicking them or by keyboard shortcut- Alt + ‘ Tab Number ‘ . As you can see, I pulled up the ReadWriteWeb site under the Search Web 2.0 Sites category. You can also submit results to various social media sites from search.io.

Source: makeusof.com

Here is a timely review of alternative search engine Cluuz.  Sprylogics is the owner of the Cluuz search platform.  Developer of next generation semantic search technologies and intelligence-based risk mitigation software and services, Sprylogics, has unveiled a new challenge to the way that users find information online.

While tech heavyweights Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. spend billions trying to wrestle control of the web search industry from Google Inc., a growing collection of niche search engines are rethinking the way users find information – and they are catching the attention of the big three. By developing tools that scour web pages for the actual meanings of words, rather than merely providing a list of sites with matching keywords, these challengers hope to create services that help users find what they’re looking for faster. It doesn’t mean these upstarts are trying to beat Google at its own game.

That’s not the point, says Michael Frank, chief executive officer of Toronto’s Sprylogics International Inc., the makers of Cluuz.com, a semantic search engine attempting to get users to rethink the way they find information online. Mr. Frank surmises, ”What consumers want is to be able to find information faster, and they want clues to help them find their way to that information faster. What we’re doing is quite unique and nobody can do what we’re doing.”

According to Mr. Frank, search engines such as Cluuz use the science of semantics – the study of meaning in language – to produce more relevant searches.While the site works as a stand-alone search engine, it could also work if it were rolled into existing offerings at Google, Yahoo or Microsoft’s MSN.

In July, Yahoo announced it was opening up its search index data to developers as part of a project it dubbed Build your Own Search Service (BOSS). In a press release announcing the BOSS program, Cluuz was one of four services Yahoo cited as examples of innovative search tools built using the platform. Cluuz grew out of business intelligence software that Sprylogics designed to help companies mine and analyze data on their own internal servers.

The software was especially popular with financial regulators, such as the Investment Dealers Association, which uses Sprylogics’ technology to map the relationships and past dealings between companies and individuals it is investigating. To create a commercial search engine, Sprylogics simply took its enterprise search and analysis software and tweaked it to filter Yahoo’s search index data through the BOSS application. By delivering results that reflect what a user is actually looking for – rather than just locating keywords in certain pages – Cluuz and other semantic search properties believe they can also help deliver more relevant advertising to users than what Google currently offers. If, for example, someone were looking for information about installing blue headlights on their car, a traditional search for “blue headlights” would deliver pages that included those keywords.

A semantic search engine, however, would also bring up pages dealing with ‘illumination accessories’ or ‘after-market auto parts,’ said Tim Richardson, an e-commerce professor at Seneca College in Toronto and an expert in search technologies. It is that level of context that allows semantic search engines to present information in a way similar to how humans typically think. Semantic search is a hot area for both entrepreneurs and tech heavyweights.

In early July, Microsoft shelled out $100-million (U.S.) to purchase Powerset, a San Francisco-based company that produces a Wikipedia semantic search tool. Other semantic search providers such as Hakia.com – which has amassed more than $21-million in venture funding – are also growing their user bases while attracting interest from the big three.

Mr. Frank noted, ”We believe we’re one of the top three or four alternative search engines in the marketplace. You’re going to see more and more search engines become part of other applications, so we think that this application will be particularly well suited for when you’re looking for people or companies or entities of any nature.” With a market cap of about $5-million (Canadian), Mr. Frank knows that Google isn’t worried about Cluuz, but he does believe the standalone search engine his team has created can survive on its own or make a great addition to one of the top existing search sites.

Early semantic search trailblazers such as IAC/InterActiveCorp’s AskJeeves.com – renamed Ask.com in 2005 – have struggled to attract mainstream users since the mid-1990s, and have been met with a variety of other challenges, most notably cost. Developing software that can index the vast troves of information on the Internet, analyze it and then quickly present relevant search results is expensive and difficult. Last month, Cuil Inc. – a startup founded by ex-Google employees – unveiled a new search engine that claims to index three times as many web pages as Google.

But the site was met with an overwhelming criticism by users who found the results were often inaccurate and unhelpful. The key to success in semantic search is all about putting results in context. That becomes more difficult as the amount of information on the web increases, Mr. Richardson said, adding, ”The reason why people wanted to develop semantic web search engines is because it’s a more real way of finding stuff. Keeping in mind that the content is growing faster, search engines need to be more effective at reflecting the thinking of real people.”

Leslie Owens, an analyst with market research firm Forrester Research Group added, ”Some people think that the behaviour of how people express their information needs has been established by Google, so even though they don’t express it in natural language they do use just a couple of words. Can that behaviour be untrained if they could express things more completely in a full sentence or in a question? That’s to be determined. Google just has so much market share right now.”

Cluuz also shows the connections between various Web documents and sites based not on actual links between pages but on the information on the pages through a technology it calls semantic cluster graphs. It displays these results in a visual format that resembles a spider’s web.

Sprylogics International Inc. develops advanced search, analysis, and information display tools and services. These solutions enable users to search large amounts of unstructured data on the web, and in internal corporate databases, and convert it into actionable intelligence. The core technology driving Sprylogics’ solutions is embedded in the Cluuz Search Engine platform, which enables both consumers and corporate users to methodically search the Internet and internal corporate resources and find the information they are looking for. Cluuz search results are visually displayed through patent pending semantic graphs and result in improved decision making capabilities.

Source: Web Site Host Directory