New search engines

The following is a list of new search engines that I've found in the last six months or so. The descriptions are generally taken from my weblog, so please feel free to visit it for up to the minute reviews and information. If you want more indepth information on which search engine to use when, try my 'Which Search Engine When' page.

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inSuggest - Personal recommendations. This is very nice. There are two options, both of which work in the same way; web pages and Flickr images. I'm rather more interested in the Web side of things, so that's what I'll look at. You type in a URL of a site that you like to start with (basic URL seems to work best, it gets a bit confused if you go deep into a site). This then sits in a 'stack' at the top of the page. It then produces a list of other pages that are matched to that one in the form of thumbnails produced by thumbshort.org. Next you skip through a few, and when you find another that takes your fancy you click and drag it onto the stack (sounds like a card game!) and the search is refocused with more offerings. You can do this a total of 4 times to get some very precise matching. My main complaint is that sometimes you're shown pages that you can't actually get to because they're forbidden, which is irritating. However, I liked the look and feel of this, and it would be very useful if you're stuck for sites to use. Quick and intuitive - give it a go!

mnemomap is part search engine, part visual, part multi search engine. Type in a word or phrase, get a map of terms of synonyms and neighbours (a search for web gets you net, internet, www, world wide web etc), tags and translations. Below that you get a list of results that you can add to del.icio.us, digg or remove. Tabs allow for further searching of images, digg, del.icio.us and YouTube.

similicio.us. Very simple concept behind this one. Just type in a URL or a specific webpage or perhaps an article and this engine will try and find similar sites. It uses del.icio.us which is fine, but would be even more useful if it also included the related option from something like Google. However, if you're really stuck, give this one a try.

Keotag - tag search multiple engines. This is a meta search engine with a slight difference in that it's looking mainly at the social networking/bookmarking area. Type in your search and view the icons from various resources. Click on one and get a bunch of results. This is a lovely way to quickly search through a lot of social networking sites.

Ajax Whois 2.0 - fast domain name search and whois. This is very helpful if you're exploring domains. It allows you to see if a domain name is available, and if it isn't, you can get information on who it belongs to. It also links into a site called Statsaholic which looks a little like Alexa in that it does a people count of monthly unique visitors, and terms that draw people to a specific site.

It's not that often that I'll just sit and work my way through a search engine these days and go 'ohhh!' and other such expressions of surprise and delight. However when I took a look at Silobreaker that's exactly what happened. Silobreaker is a news search engine, which is a bit like saying a book contains pages. It's far more than that. Let me take you through a few of the functions. Obviously we have our search box, and it comes up with suggestions as you type. I got as far as 'gord' and up popped Gordon Brown's name. A search then produces basic facts and figures with a link to his biography. There is a bunch of YouTube videos as well. We also have top stories, which are updated very regularly - the top story was first reported 15 hours ago and updated an hour ago. A mouseover of the title of the story provides greater information with links to other similar stories, and a link to 'entities' - other people involved in the same story. There's an 'in focus' side box which allows you to look in more detail at any of the relevant subject areas (in this case, Tony Blair, David Cameron, Northern Rock, UK, China, and a good dozen others), and a 'Network' box that provides a graphical representation of the subject with other related areas. There's a 'hotspots' map, and a mouse over allows you to see exactly what is going on in a particular place in relation to the subject of your search. Below that is a 'trends' box, based on all articles on Brown, Blair and Cameron. Next up is a quotes section, in this case with quotes by and about Brown. Finally there is a link to more content, broken down by news, reports, blogs, audio/video and fact sheets. You can personalise the search engine by registering and playing around with the widgets to make your own page. Moreover, you can assist Silobreaker by identifying 'entities', such as people, companies, organizations and key phrases, which they can include in the future. A nice feature which is almost hidden, while on other search engines it's being trumpeted as their entry into 'social search'. In short, this is a magnificent news search engine, and has, in a stroke, just blown away the competition. I really would urge you to explore it - you *will* find useful material there.

Eco-Find - Ecologic Search. It's an ecological search because it uses a black background rather than a white one. There's another one that uses the same idea called Blackle. Black apparently uses less energy than white, though Google's research tends to put some doubt on it. I've tried using a black background and have to say its.... odd. Doesn't really work for me.

SortFix - Improve your Search. This is a search engine that is bolted onto the front of Google, Yahoo and DMOZ, and you can choose which of them you search. The selling point of this engine is that when you have run a search you can click and drag keywords to include or exclude in the search to further refine it. This in and of itself isn't at all remarkable, and indeed I'm not convinced that SortFix chooses the best words/terms to include or exclude, but the click and drag approach makes it very easy.

I got sent a link to eBingBong and from the first look, I was somewhat skeptical. It's got (IMO) a really stupid name, and the font is what I refer to as Google_Clone. The graphics are very basic, they don't even have their own email address, and their postal address is a c/o which isn't impressive. However, let's put that all aside for a moment. It's one of the 'people' moderated search engines in that you can vote for a site when it comes up in a result. This then affects future results. The engine offers you the chance to search Web, Images, News, Video, and Music. There is also a variety of other features, such as a Forum, News, Q&A and so on. It also has advanced search features (not a huge number, but they have them and they work), and these are appropriate for the type of search. It looks like an interesting engine which from the look of it could be useful, but it's very 'quiet' at the moment. Before it can really be taken seriously they need to do some work on the basics and get proper postal and email addresses.

A bunch of charity based search engines:
Everyclick which has currently raised over £350,000 for various charities. They have over 1,000 companies that use the engine as their preferred engine.
ClickNow has raised more than £100,000 since June 2005, and it's a partner to Ask.com
MagicTaxi is another UK based search engine which has tabs to allow users to search Yahoo, Kelkoo and the Wikipedia. They give 50% of their income to charity, and each day a different charity features on the home page.
GoodSearch donates 50-percent of its revenue to the charities and schools designated by its users.
LetThemKnowItsChristmas is an engine that utilises Google and the funds go to the Christian charity World Vision.
CharityHome which donates 80% of its revenue to Charity. This one was started at the beginning of this month, so we've yet to see how much they make.
Search Kindly has so fair raised over $7,000 for various charities.
Charity Cafe is an engine that gives 100% of its profits to Greenpeace, WWF and Oxfam. It was launched in 2000.
Kazazz gives 10% of its revenues to various charities.
Clicks4Cancer gives 70% of its revenues to cancer charities.

The Carrot Clustering Engine takes results and clusters them, kinda like the name suggests. It searches the web using the eTools metasearch engine and then gives you a bunch of results. My search for Everton for example clustered results into categories such as club news, tickets, Evertonians, Official and so on. A search on China gave me People's Republic, Blog, News, History of and so on. The engine also has tabs for Yahoo News, Wikipedia, ODP, Jobs, PubMed and a couple of other options. It seemed to work fine, but to be honest - if I want clustering I'll go to Ask or Exalead as my preferred choices. Still, if you want more options, it's worth a try.

Are you looking for something to do? If so, you might want to try Zvents. It's a search engine that looks for events taking place, such as performing arts, music, sport, art and crafts in various locations (I found events in the US, UK and Australia, though nothing in Berlin, so your milage may vary). I approached it with something of a skeptical eye, but it's pretty darn good! I did a search for 'soccer' (football didn't work) in London UK and within 60 miles. It found a variety of matches, dates, kickoff times, locations, AND gave me a map view as well. It's not perfect - it couldn't find me any movies in Basildon Essex for example, but that doesn't entirely surprise me. The engine also has tabbed searching for movies, venues, restaurants and performers. It quickly found out where Patrick Stewart is acting (Macbeth) with the option of getting tickets, writing a review and giving me a map of nearby restaurants and bars.

Looking for Arabic information? Then try Onkosh which styles itself as 'the only true Arabic search engine'. I have to admit, it's looking fairly comprehensive - web, image, blog, news search options, English or Arabic characters can be used. They also have the Onkosh Bel-3araby option, which lets you search for Arabic words using English characters, like '3' for '?' and '7' for '?'. That brings me to the end of my knowledge on the Arabic language, but if you've been looking for something like this, you may just have found it.

Mary Ellen Bates has written about Intelways over on her blog. Now, Intelways used to be called CrossEngine, and before it was called that, it was called Mr.Sapo. Which is a pretty stupid idea if you want to keep a brand name out in the public eye. I mentioned CrossEngine back in January briefly here, and in more detail over at Search Engine Land. The major difference would seem to be that it's now using about 300 engines to provide you with alternatives, rather than the 200 or so when I looked at it previously. Still does a good job of providing you with options if you want to search somewhere different for a change.

There's a lot of interest in social search engines, and linking them into tagging systems such as del.icio.us, digg, reddit and so on. Consequently I was excited to see 50 Matches which is supposed to give you a total of 50 matches, based on crawled websites that have been bookmarked by social bookmarking services. Utter pants. I either didn't get any results, too few results, or results that had nothing to do with my query. Awful waste of time, grave disappointment.

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