Alternative search engines

The Search Engine Watch website has an article about a new search engine alternative called Mojeek, whose developers believe " believes a truly independent and tracking-free search engine must be built from scratch."
The post also has links to a longer article from May 2018 that discusses 12 other search engine alternatives along with screenshots and a discussion of the pros and cons of each.
Why bother? Growing concerns about privacy and biased results in Google searches are making alternatives more appealing to users.

A graphical history of Google search results

Google has been around for almost twenty years now. Search Engine Watch has created a visual history of Google's evolution, "including its many successes and its few notable failures, through the lens of the humble Search Engine Results Page (SERP)". They also provide an updated look at search engines that are currently an alternative to Google - even though about 80% of desktop computer users vhttps://www.netmarketshare.com/search-engine-market-share.aspx?qprid=4&qpcustomd=0 Google for their search engine.  

New Search Engine for USDA Research from the National Agriculture Library

The National Agricultural Library (NAL) has launched PubAg, a user-friendly search engine that gives the public enhanced access to research published by U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientists. NAL is part of USDA’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS). PubAg is a new portal for literature searches and full-text access of more than 40,000 scientific journal articles by USDA researchers, mostly from 1997 to 2014. New articles by USDA researchers will be added almost daily, and older articles may be added if possible. There is no access fee for PubAg.

Search engine comparison

A new site called NoBrandSearch is an experiment to compare the core competencies of all the search engines in the market. Every time you search you will get two anonymous sets of search results side by side. Click on the result set you like the best, and you will get the name of both search engines. The idea is that this will give you an unbiased idea of the search quality of search engine like Google, Yahoo!, Bing, etc. The site was developed by Hakia, which describes itself "as a general purpose "semantic" search engine, dedicated to quality search experience... Hakia’s semantic technology provides a new search experience that is focused on quality, not popularity. hakia’s quality search results satisfy three criteria simultaneously: They (1) come from credible Web sites recommended by librarians, (2) represent the most recent information available, and (3) remain absolutely relevant to the query."

New search engine presents results visually

There's a beta release of a new search engine called Spezify that presents your results visually in a large collage. It aggregates search results from many sources including Flickr, Amazon, Yahoo and Twitter. Try searching for "chocolates" and look at the yummy results. Of course you could also search for something more law oriented and see what you get.

Mednar search engine for health information

Deep Web Technologies’ Mednar has been named the 2008 best health information search engine by AltSearchEngines, a well-respected blog that focuses on specialty search engines.
Mednar (still in beta) is a one-stop federated search engine designed for professional medical researchers. It enables users to quickly access information from a multitude of credible sources, including deep web content not indexed by popular search engines. “Mednar offers access to an array of databases that are simply not mined by other health search engines and features a dependable email alert service that enables users to keep up on the latest publications on the medical topics of their choice,” said AltSearchEngines reviewer Hope Leman. “Mednar is the Secretariat and gold medal winner of medical search at this point.”

Microsoft LiveSearch offers prizes

Microsoft wants YOU to use Live Search - and is offering prizes if you do. A new MS rewards program, called SearchPerks, lets you earn points for using MS Live Search; the points can then be redeemed for prizes ranging from music downloads to an XBox controller. To participate in the program you need to sign up before December 31 deadline and agree to download a small program tracking your usage. Once this is installed users will get one “ticket” for every Live Search query (but Microsoft is capping the total number per day to 25); when the program ends in April users can trade the tickets in for prizes or donate the rewards to charity.
Oh, and note: you must use Internet Explorer as your browser for the searches. No points if you use Firefox, Chrome, Safari etc.

Yahoo search drops Boolean

Online magazine reports that Yahoo! search has dropped support for full Boolean queries. The NOT and AND operators are gone; the OR operator still works. Since AND is the default, it is not always needed. The NOT operator can be replaced with the minus sign before a term, but nesting with parentheses fails, especially for a search like (term1 AND term2) OR (term3 AND term4). Google still accepts the most popular Boolean terms, and Exalead even supports the NEAR operator. Live Search is now the only major search engine with full Boolean support.

New search engine launched by former Googlers

Techworld reports that a new search engine called Cuil - that's pronounced cool - has been launched by some former Google employees. It features a superclean interface - even cleaner than Google - but the background is black instead of Googly white. Included on the search page is the number of webpages it has indexed - 121,617,892,992 as of this morning. Cuil claims to go beyond traditional approaches by analysing the context of each page and the concepts behind each query so it can provide better rankings by content rather than popularity (semantic web). It organizes similar results into groups and sorts them by category and offers tabs to clarify subjects, as well as suggestions on how to refine searches.

Very cool new search engine

Snaps to Mary Ellen Bates for pointing us to Searchme, a cool new search engine. According to their press release, Searchme "uses visual search and category refinement. We think it will help you find what you’re looking for, faster, with a lot less spam. It’s a new way to search that takes advantage of the size and bandwidth of today’s Internet and the increasingly visual way that we all interact online. The idea for Searchme came when Mark Kvamme, Searchme’s chairman, got tired of looking through a bunch of unrelated results for articles on motocross. He suggested to founders Randy Adams and John Holland that they create a search engine that sorted results into categories."
I've only used it a little but I'm impressed so far, and Mary Ellen Bates always has excellent tips.

Top Tech in Pgh

Today's issue of Pop City features a story on the Top 10 Pittsburgh Tech companies to watch in 2008. Included in the list is Vivisimo, the search engine company in Squirrel Hill, which was also was named 2008 Technology of the Year for the third year in a row for the best Enterprise Search Solution by InfoWorld magazine. According to InfoWorld, "Vivisimo Velocity 6.0 extends its easy search interface and ability to crawl enterprise repositories with social tagging, bookmarking, and networking. Voting and ratings improve search accuracy, while tagging provides another way to filter results. Searches can be annotated with comments for increased collaboration."

Wikia: new search engine set to launch

The buzz is all over the internet - Wired, CNet, and the WaPo to name a few sources - that Wikipedia is set to launch the new Wikia search engine next Monday, Jan 7. The main difference with Wikia search is transparency- users will be able to contribute to how pages are ranked and to edit search results, and the search engine will have open-source search algorithms and application program interfaces. WebProNews is a little dubious about the venture - their editorial entitled "Wikia Shmikia" reminds readers that there are other ways to search that aren't getting much press.

Google and the future of search technology

Technology Review (Jan/Feb 2008) has an interesting interview with Peter Norvig, director of research at Google, where he talks about what Google search has been doing and where it's going.
on natural language searching: "...we don't think it's a big advance to be able to type something as a question as opposed to keywords. Typing "What is the capital of France?" won't get better results than typing "capital of France." But understanding how words go together is important. To give some examples, "New York" is different from "York," but "Vegas" is the same as "Las Vegas," and "Jersey" may or may not be the same as "New Jersey." That's a natural-language aspect that we're focusing on."
Over the next 2-5 years he sees increasing personalization of search results, increasing integration of various types of content, and the increasing importance of delivering information to cellphones and other small devices with small screens and awkward keyboards.

Lecture Browser

Technology Review has a fascinating report about how researchers at MIT have developed the Lecture Browser (RealPlayer required), a search tool that lets users search the library of online video lectures at MIT by keyword. Using the Lecture Browser you can locate a lecture video and pinpoint the segment of that lecture that interests you without having to go through the whole video.

Seeqpod finds "playable" files on the web

Seeqpod is a new media (music, videos & podcasts) search and recommendation website that indexes uploaded media files from around the web and lets you instantly play what you find when you search. It builds its index by crawling media-related sites, blogs, social networks –anywhere that "playable" files might be found. The technology used by Seeqpod was built in the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley Labs.
But is it legal? According to Seeqpod, "Like most other search engines or social networks with content, SeeqPod does not stream or allow downloading of media. SeeqPod does not host media. SeeqPod indexes and links to submitted media its vertically targeted crawling system finds in the deepest quandrants of the internet. SeeqPod operates like a search engine technology company and social network combined. SeeqPod adheres to the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act). "
Katie has been using Seeqpod and highly recommends it.

Google search

There's a feature article about Google on the front page of the NY Times Business section today. The reporter who wrote the article was allowed to spend a whole day with the Google search-quality team, attending some internal meetings and talking to several top engineers whose job it is to keep tweaking the search engine to make it better and better. The Google folks didn't give away any secrets - no access to the magical algorithms - but did shed some light on how they continue to improve search results. One of the engineers explained what Google has done in a nutshell:
“Search over the last few years has moved from ‘Give me what I typed’ to ‘Give me what I want’ .” Let's hope that Lexis and Westlaw can evolve the same way.

Speaking of Google, a rumor is going around that they're adding new functionalities to the Google Image search. Pandia Search Engine News reports that Google has made a silent launch of a new face search function; according to Ars Technica, the technology is a result of Google's 2006 acquisition of Neven Vision, a company that had developed techniques for facial recognition in photos. To see what it's about, go to Google Image Search, type in your search terms (I used "Sidney Crosby"), and click Search. On the Results page, go up to the website url and add "&imgtype=face" at the end of the url; when you enter this url, you will see results that are more face than anything else. Ars Technica also says if you add "&imgtype=news" you will get results that are from news articles. Where is all this going? "Even cooler (or creepier, as the case may be), one day Google's image search may be able to find faces of specific people based on image analysis/recognition alone instead of relying on the text associated with that image to identify the person in the photo."

Do you Google?

Google is beta-testing a new search engine called SearchMash. It's actually the same Google search engine but with a different user interface. According to Google, it's very much an evolving site. Here's a brief summary of what I've found out about it by using it a little:

Searching: The search page is totally basic stripped-down Google, just a search box, clean and elegant. There's no advanced search page or preferences. But you can use the same Boolean operators as on Google, and the same field limiters (like site:.edu) - although I found that the "filetype" limiter doesn't work on SearchMash which is a drawback.

Results: The real difference between SearchMash and Google is how your search results are presented. You get a list of results somewhat similar to Google. But they are numbered, and they are more compact. There are no ads or sponsored sites (at the moment). And the usual list of webpages is on the lefthand side of the page, but on the righthand side of the page you can see what search results were found in Images, Blogs, Videos and Wikipedia, which I found useful in some cases. A nice feature is that when you go to look at the next page of results the first page results are still displayed, so that it's like scrolling infinitely through the search results.

I read about SearchMash on the SearchEngineWatch blog, and the writer contacted Google to ask about SearchMash. Google replied that "SearchMash is an experimental search site operated by Google. The goal of SearchMash is to test innovative user interfaces in order to continually improve the overall search experience for our users." When you use SearchMash, you can give feedback to Google about how you liked it right from the results page.

New Legal Search Engine

The Law Librarian Blog today announced a new search engine called Law.com Quest that searches the "Legal Web", a selection of hand-picked law firm websites and legal blogs, in addition to the content from award-winning ALM publications like the New York Law Journal, Legal Times, The Legal Intelligencer, Law Technology News and Corporate Counsel. From a quick look at the search engine and website it appears to still be a work in progress, and they welcome feedback that will help to improve the search engine.