8 Top Alternative Search Engines

"iLibrarian" blog posted on 7th of May information on 8 alternative Search Engine:

Looking to go beyond Google for Web search? If so, you’ll want to check out these eight search engines listed by Web Worker Daily as viable alternatives to the search heavyweight including interfaces which allow you to search web forums, video, images, and people. Here are their suggestions:
* Addict-o-matic
* Redzee
* Omgili
* Dogpile
* Truveo
* Blinkx
* QnA search
* ZabaSearch

Scirus.com Updates

Scirus.com New Interface

For those of you who are still not familiar with Scirus.com - this is the Best Science & Technology Search Engine, an Elsevier product.

The Scirus development team worked closely with Elsevier's User-Centered Design Group to create a new user interface design. The clean, refreshed interface will enable you to find the precise scientific, scholarly, technical and medical data you need more quickly and easily than ever before.

One of the main aims of the re-design was to take powerful, but less frequently used features from the Scirus Advanced Search page and make them more accessible as post-search refinement options. This change will give Scirus users the power of Advanced Search, without the complexity, in a single click.

Features of the re-design include:
* Visibility: More search results are immediately visible ''above the fold'', by improving the use of screen real estate
* Intuitiveness: Highly appreciated features are moved to areas of the screen most suitable for the human eye, following accepted HCI guidelines
* Exposure: The full range of content sources is further exposed and highlighted through the use of new navigator functionality
* Ease of use: Batch selection of items for export, print or saving has been greatly simplified

Scirus Topic Pages continue to grow
Scirus Topic Pages is a freely accessible wiki-like platform where topic experts, upon invitation, create synopses of the state of research around particular topics and also recommend links to relevant reading material. The Scirus search index complements these recommendations by suggesting relevant articles and web pages based on topic-title keyword analysis.
Examples of the latest Topic Pages include:

- "Obesity and the Brain" by Dr. Angelo Del Parigi

- "Laboratory determination of Listeria monocytogenes virulence" by Dr. Dongyou Liu
After implementing the Editorial Policy for the management of the Scirus Topic Pages platform in January, the Scirus team has now finalized a Creative Commons license, which allows users to share and adapt the information on the Topic Pages freely for non-commercial purposes. Both the Editorial Policy and the licence can be viewed from links at the bottom of the Scirus Topic Pages homepage.

Carrot2: New Open Source Search Results Clustering Engine

My previous post informed you about this new "Wikia Search Engine" that is available on the Internet since last week, and today I learned from Mary Ellen Bates newsletter that there is another new search engine available for Info's to explore in time of desperate need. This is what Mary says about Carrot2.

Carrot2 (http://demo.carrot2.org), an open source search-results-clustering engine, just recently out in beta. In a nutshell, it takes search results, analyzes them and, on the fly, creates groups of the most common concepts or terms from those results. Since this is all done by algorithms rather than by humans, expect the odd result every once in a while, but I found the clusters to be consistently useful.
Carrot2's default is to search the web using eTools.ch, a Swiss meta-search engine that queries 10 search engines, including Google, Yahoo, Ask and MSN. However, since eTools only returns the top 20 results from each search engine, I prefer not to use eTool search results. Instead, you can click a tab to limit your search to Google, Yahoo, MSN, Wikipedia, PubMed and a few other finding tools. Because clustering is a computationally intensive process, Carrot2 limits the search results by default to the top 100 results from any of the search engines. However, you can click the Show Options link and set Carrot2 to search and sort up to 400 results. (Note that increasing the number of search results also increases the number of results from each search engine when using the eTools meta-search engine from 20 to 40.)
Geek that I am, I find it even more intriguing that, under that "Show Options" link is a pull-down menu that lets you select which of six different sorting algorithms you want to use. The clustering results are dramatically different (although keep in mind that the search results themselves stay the same -- only the clusters change). With my "social capital" search, I was able to see a variety of groupings of my search results, and identify some of the key writers and terms.
Carrot2 may not be your day-to-day search tool, but it is tremendously useful for those searches in which it is difficult to sift the wheat from the chaff. www.BatesInfo.com/tip.html.

P.S. I have just had a look at this Search Engine. It is not difficult to use and explore. I will add direct link on this blog, so it will be easier for you to access when you need.

Social Bookmarking Sites Which Don’t Use NoFollow : Bookmarks and Search Engines

Social bookmarking allows web users to search, share, organize, and store the bookmarks of different web pages. This can be done publicly or privately (in private groups), or a combination of the two. People who are allowed to view the bookmarks can view them using a variety of different functions to sort and tag them....

.....NoFollow is a non-standard HTML attribute value which is used to police the outbound link value of user generated content, especially blog commenting. NoFollow is used to communicate with search engines to tell them that a link should not be used to pass on link juice, or “PageRank”.
The idea is that it will help reduce people who spam links, making sure that search engines get better results when keywords are searched, and many social bookmarking sites havee implemented this strategy.

Social Bookmarking Sites Which Don’t Use NoFollow

* Listible is a newer social bookmarking site

* Furl, one of the services offered by LookSmart

* Yahoo My Web 2.0 Beta is a social search engine

* Propeller is a hybrid of social bookmarking and social news sharing

* Flickr gives social bookmarking a different spin – the site is all about photos.

* Digg.com can get a little crazy and confusing, since it is open for anyone to post sites and leave comments.

* Technorati Faves is a great place to bookmark sites

* Slashdot is the original when it comes to social bookmarking sites

* Searchles is a social bookmarking oriented search engine with tagging, video upload, groups and voting.

How Search Engines Can Use Social Bookmarks: Monitoring social bookmarking services like Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon and Ma.gnolia can help search engines in multiple ways....

Click on the TITLE to view the full-text article.

Bates InfoTip:Google Can Do That?

Mary Ellen Bates from Bates Information Services Inc. shared some ideas from Internet Librarian Conference. This is what she has to say:
I recently spoke at the Internet Librarian conference in Monterey, CA and one of the presentations I enjoyed doing the most was on the hidden features of some of the major search engines. I have covered some of them in early Info-Tips, but the following are a few of my new Google favorites.

* Google lets you search for a range of numbers, in any format. To include a number range in your search query, type in the lower and upper numbers, separated by two periods - e.g., 15..50 I had a chance to try out this feature in a real-life search; I wanted to find a set of wireless headphones on Amazon.com costing between $50 and $100. I typed in the query (wireless OR cordless) headphones $50..$99 site:amazon.com and, sure enough, I retrieved a wide selection of wireless headphones within my price range. Note that Google is smart enough to recognize decimal points - some of the items I retrieved weren't an even dollar amount but were, for example, $57.83. This feature could also come in handy if you are looking for a mention of a range of years.

* Speaking of date-searching on Google, you can limit your search to only those pages added or changed within the past [whatever] days. This can be a useful feature if you re-run a search regularly; just limit your search to the pages added or modified since you last ran your search. You can do this not by adding text in the search box but by modifying the search results page URL by adding the following text to the end of the URL and clicking [Search]: &as_qdr=dn (where n is the number of days you want searched) So, for example, to limit my search to the last 18 days, I would add &as_qdr=d18 to the end of the search results page URL.
Keep in mind that this isn't a perfect date-limiting search. Some web content management systems automatically refresh a web page frequently, without necessarily making any changes to the page. Those pages will have a recent date but the content within them may have been unchanged for months.

Courtesy: Bates Info-Tips for November 2007. Click on the title to view this and other tips from previous newsletters