TOTONKO is an online magazine that filters everything from art, architecture, industrial and interior design from around the world. Being a important platform for designers to show the world their work.
TOTONKO the design search engine
August 22nd, 2009 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Verticals | No Comments »
The Top 3 Scholarship Search Engines
August 22nd, 2009 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Verticals | No Comments »
You can save yourself some time and just go to one of the big-three — all of which are free, have current and annually updated information, and utilize advanced personal profiles:
The time-saving services offered by ScholarshipExperts.com can be attributed to the talents and dedication of our Data Research Team as well as to the technical expertise with which our site and our database were created.
ScholarshipExperts.com believes that the accuracy of the records housed in our award database is the cornerstone upon which our service is built, and so we have carefully created a successful data management and research process. Our team of Data Researchers works year-round to maintain accurate award information. This team works closely with scholarship providers to ensure that students using our site receive current and accurate scholarship information–and the scholarships in our database have been submitted or verified by the actual award providers.
Also, using a team of experienced developers and scholarship professionals, the ScholarshipExperts.com site and database have been carefully crafted, resulting in sophisticated search tools and data management systems that make ScholarshipExperts.com a useful matching service and resource for finding scholarships. ScholarshipExperts.com is proud to deliver fast and tailored scholarship search results and up-to-date information to help students and parents find additional ways to pay for college!
For nearly 15 years, FastWeb has been the leading scholarship search provider for every student, whether you’re in high school or a mother of two returning to school. One in eight high school seniors use FastWeb, and the site comes recommended by over 16,000 high schools and 3,600 colleges. FastWeb has attracted more than 34 million users and our numbers grow daily.
If that doesn’t prove our worth, then maybe our database will.
As a scholarship matching service, FastWeb matches users to scholarships based on their qualifications, meaning students have a better chance of winning. The best part? Our scholarship database contains 1.3 million scholarships worth over $3 billion. So the odds are in your favor.
FastWeb not only finds students scholarships but we also provide a plethora of information and guidance as students find their college or first job. We provide current news on financial aid, scholarships, college, jobs and internships, and student life. Essentially, our site is tailored to your needs regardless of where you are within the college or graduate search process.
FastWeb serves a national community of students, parents, scholarship providers, and educators by committing to provide every student with the tools necessary to fund their higher education goals.
Since our founding in 1998, Scholarships.com has had one goal: to help students find the money they need to get a college education. Over the last several years, we’ve become the largest free and independent college scholarship search and financial aid information resource on the Internet, and have been recognized by high schools and colleges and universities nationwide. Our mission is to assist students and their families in finding college scholarships and to help them explore a variety of valuable financial aid opportunities.
As a leading scholarship search service and financial aid information resource, Scholarships.com plays a primary role in helping students make the decisions that shape their lives. On Scholarships.com, students are connected with tools to aid in researching and finding college financial aid, as well as choosing a college. Our regularly updated proprietary database allows students to search 2.7 million college scholarships and grants worth over $19 billion and quickly arrive at a list of awards for which they qualify. And it’s all free.
Source: Financial Aid Finder here.
Noflail search and Cooperative Responses to Queries
August 22nd, 2009 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Noflail Search, available at Noflail.com, is a search engine that provides cooperative responses to queries that produce zero results. Such queries are rare on the Web at large, but more frequent when search is restricted to a particular Web site, something that is easy to do in Noflail Search.
This Pomcor white paper provides a brief overview of cooperative answering as background information for the cooperative answering feature of Noflail Search. Click here for the white paper.
Noflail™ Search is a search front-end designed to reduce the effort it takes to solve a difficult search problem, a problem that requires issuing many queries and diving deep into their result sets. Traditional search engines are designed for casual search, where the user gives up if the answer can’t be found in the first page of results of one or two queries. They let the user flail if the problem is difficult and the user does not want to give up. Noflail Search, on the other hand, helps with difficult search problems in two ways:
- It makes it practical for the user to execute a breadth-first strategy by browsing multiple result sets at once, something hard to do in a traditional search engine.
- It provides cooperative responses to queries that have zero results. Cooperative responses are particularly useful for searches restricted to a particular site.
Noflail Search lets the user bookmark and/or share results and queries by exporting them to Delicious, Diigo or Facebook (more export targets will be added in the future). Results can be exported before or after they have been visited.
Noflail Search is provided by Pomcor. It is built on the Flex® platform, and runs on the Flash® Player plug-in for your browser. It obtains search results from the Microsoft® Bing™ API. More information about Noflail Search can be found in the search technology page of the Pomcor Web site, including white papers and a PowerPoint® presentation.
Source: Pomcor.com
See the Similarity Search Engine Smart Wiki Search
August 22nd, 2009 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Newcomers | No Comments »
Smart Wiki Search is a similarity search engine. It resolves your query to one or more Wikipedia pages, and finds other Wikipedia pages that discuss the same or similar concepts. In a way, it finds pages that are closest to the ones you entered in the “concept space”. The red links in the results show the pages that you entered, while the blue ones are found by close association with the same concepts.
If you enter more than one concept (page name), it will try to find pages where all of these concepts overlap. For example, enter “Mountain, snow” and it will show you links that relate to both concepts – pages like “Glacier”, “Avalanche”, “Ski resort” and so on.
Or enter “Food” and you will be presented with a list of Wikipedia pages discussing common foodstuffs. Add “Jewish”, and it will find pages where the concept of “Food” overlaps with the concept of Jewish culture – Jewish cuisine, Kosher food etc.
Mountain
Snow
Glacier
Avalanche
Crevasse
Pyramidal peak
Topography
Hill
Serac
Summit (topography)
Cirque
Icefall
Ski resort
Snow blindness
Mountaineering
Snow bridge
Quinzhee
Ski
Types of snow
Ski mountaineering
The concepts (objects, names, places etc.) in your query must have a corresponding page in the English Wikipedia. That’s not usually a problem, as Wikipedia has a page on nearly every conceivable concept or topic. However, the pages you enter must be “significant” enough to calculate similarities to other pages, otherwise the position of the page in the concept space is difficult to determine.
Smart Wiki Search uses the link structure of Wikipedia to calculate which concepts each page is associated with. It is easy to see why looking at links can help group pages by concepts. For example, pages about mathematics have a lot of links to (and from) other pages about mathematics. Pages about the Apollo moon landing have a lot of links to pages about NASA and pages about the moon, etc.
More specifically, Smart Wiki Search uses the so-called eigendecomposition of the Wikipedia link transition matrix. Eigendecomposition provides of a number of special vectors, called eigenvectors, and their corresponding eigenvalues. These vectors are special because even a relatively small number of eigenvectors having the largest eigenvalues can capture all the most important properties of the link structure.
It is well-known that Google uses the eigenvector with the largest eigenvalue (the so-called primary eigenvector) to rank pages in their search results. Any other eigenvector cannot be used for ranking or scoring the pages, however they can still carry almost as much information as the primary eigenvector, and they can be very effectively used for grouping pages. Smart Wiki Search uses ~1,100 eigenvectors with the largest eigenvalues. The primary eigenvector is discarded. More information about the algorithm can be found on the Algorithm page.
The algorithm only uses the link structure and page titles to perform the search. It does not use terms or keywords that it encounters on the page. Because there is no need to determine what the meaning of the particular term or keyword is, the pages it returns generally deal with the same concept or concepts that you entered. For instance, if you enter “Flower” and “Bee”, it will find pages where these two concepts overlap – those are pages about pollination. Compare these results to a typical keyword search (Google, for instance: Flower, bee, site:en.wikipedia.org), and you will see just how much less focused on the concepts the keyword search is.
Source: Smart Wiki Search
Thanks to MakeUseOf.com
For Answers from India, it’s the Question Box!
August 22nd, 2009 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Global, Innovations | No Comments »
In India, we use call boxes to connect people on the street to our live Internet information service. Here, the Question Box is a simple telephone intercom which requires no literacy or computer skills. Users place a free call by pushing the green button. They connect to an Operator sitting in front of a computer with internet acess. Users ask the operator questions in their local language. The operator goes online and finds their answers, translating English results back into the local language. The physical Question Box units have gone through several design cycles. They now can run completely off the grid, using mobile phone and solar technologies.
Question Box’s backend software logs all call data and indexes operators previous queries and answers, allowing it to get smarter over time. It uses a specialized local databases or ‘off-line internet’ solution allowing it to work in any situation, whether it’s on or offline, powered or using backup generators.
The database is customized with information relevant to the location we happen to be working in at the time. Although, some answers are universal this makes sense, as most of the questions asked have to be understood in the context of their locale (ex. “What is the price of grain?” could be asked in Pune or in Kampala. Each require different answers.)
Source: Question Box
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