Five More Search Tools You Should Know

Have you ever needed to see the search results for another city — maybe because you want to see what PPC ads are shown somewhere else?

Have you ever needed to see search results from a different country, or in a different language? Maybe you’re into real time search, and you’d love a place to find the latest photos and videos being shared on Twitter. Or perhaps you’re planning a vacation abroad, but you’re not sure when is the best time to visit Europe.

It’s time again for another roundup of the latest and greatest search tools and search engines, and in this article, I’ll share five such sites that will answer the above questions (and more). This is the fourth in my occasional series profiling under-the-radar search tools. Links to the previous three are at the end of this article.

SearchMuffin

Look, I don’t name ‘em, I just use ‘em and write about ‘em if they’re cool. And this one is SearchMuffin has a simple premise: Type in a keyword and choose a city from the dropdown menu, and it’ll show you the Google search results that match. Think of it as a sort of geo-targeted competitive research/PPC research tool. It’s about the easiest way I know of to see the PPC ads that appear in other cities.

And best of all, it’s not just limited to major U.S. cities; at the moment, there are 262 choices in the dropdown menu, including such non-metropolises as Roseville, California, and Arvada, Colorado. (No disrespect intended to Rosevillites and Arvadians.)

Glearch

Let’s expand our horizons beyond 262 U.S. cities. What if you needed to quickly see some search results from other countries and/or other languages? Glearch (again, I don’t name ‘em) is an international meta search engine that lets you search by country, by language, and/or by search engine. You can take those three options and customize each to build just the query you want.

Roooby

We’ve written a fair amount about real time search in the past few months, but we haven’t focused too much on the visual element — people posting photos and videos of what they’re doing now. Roooby is one of several real time search engines that capture media, but one of the few that surface both photos and videos. (Although, to be frank, Roooby could do a better job of finding videos by scanning sites such as Qik.com, TwitVid.io, and others that host live video.)

Roooby isn’t the only player in this space. TwitCaps, TwitPicGrid, Pingwire, and Twicsy offer similar real time image search engines.

Spezify

Speaking of media and images, here’s the most visual search tool I’ve ever seen: Spezify. The best way I can describe it is a sort of visual meta search engine. It pulls in results from Yahoo, Bing, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and even eBay and Amazon to create a fairly stunning search results page.

This is serious eye candy. There’s a settings page where you can choose the sources and types of content (images, text, video) you want included. But to be frank, the focus on visuals means the search results have no context whatsoever. You can move vertically and horizontally through the results, but you have no idea why you’re seeing what you’re seeing. It’s innovative to be sure, but for this searcher, it’s too lacking in functionality.

Joobili

Finally, here’s one for our readers in Europe, or for our readers traveling to Europe. It’s called Joobili, and it’s a travel/event search engine with a twist: Rather than telling the search engine what you want to do or where you want to go, you tell it when. There’s a cool date-based slider on the home page to get you started, and once you’re in the results, Joobili lets you see results based on categories (Arts, Sport, Nature, etc.), by country, or by keyword.

If you create an account, Joobili will let you save events to a wish list or a “went” list. You can also rank events to help other users make decisions on what to do and where to go. It’s a clever approach, but as I hinted above, it only covers Europe.

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http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/yahoo-ceo-stop-comparing-us-to-google.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/future-of-facebook-usernames.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/googles-schmidt-rips-microsofts-bing.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/06/history-and-future-of-computer-memory.html

http://globalblognetwork.blogspot.com/2009/07/kosmix-tries-to-avoid-google-search.html

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Source:

http://searchengineland.com/five-more-search-tools-july09-22766

Tags:

TwitCaps, TwitPicGrid, Pingwire, Twicsy, real time image search engines, Spezify, SearchMuffin, Glearch, Joobili, Roooby, real-time Web search, Google, Twitter search, PageRank, Yahoo, Bing, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, eBay, Amazon, Qik.com, TwitVid.io,

Posted via email from Global Business News

Kosmix Tries To Avoid Google's Search Dominance

If a friend suggested that you check out an Internet search service called Kosmix, you might start by tapping kosmix.com into your browser — or you might, as the saying goes, just Google it.

The options suggest what Kosmix and every other search startup is up against. With Yahoo puzzling over its strategy in the No. 2 position, and No. 3 Microsoft reportedly spending up to $100 million to market Bing as a "decision" engine, the odds of any newcomer succeeding in this land of the giants may seem slim.

But Kosmix founders Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman, say they know better than to take on Google or anyone else delivering those familiar lists of blue links. As the Web constantly adds information and images — and as smart-phones and social networks like Twitter and Facebook add new dimensions to search — Kosmix, based in Mountain View, is getting attention for its efforts to differentiate itself as a better way to navigate the growing online clutter.

To look up, say, wonton soup on the search giants leads the user to a list of blue links, some with photos. Kosmix delivers a multimedia showcase. The page is topped by a Wikipedia summary, and a quick scroll leads to a sizable window for how-to videos, blog commentary and conversations, nutritional data and more. A column on the right includes items like Chinese cookbooks on eBay and 24-pack instant wonton shiitake soup from Amazon. There are also a few "sponsored links" — the advertising that is key to the Kosmix business model.

As one blogger described it, Kosmix delivers "an instant encyclopedia page, but on crazy-awesome Internet steroids." Some recent search startups such as Cuil and hakia have fallen far short of their hype, says Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Land, an industry news site. Kosmix, he said, has had some success in the health field with a vertical search site called RightHealth. But it's not yet clear whether some of its broader initiatives — the core Kosmix search and a personalized news service called MeeHive — will win a mass following.

If search grows and evolves the way television did — splintering from a few dominant channels to a multitude — Kosmix and other search players may establish significant roles, Sullivan said.

Kosmix's founders say they are patient. "We have a real long-term opportunity," Harinarayan said. He suggested that the Web is only in "inning two" of a nine-inning game. Kosmix and its founders convey an almost serene sense of confidence amid the frenetic hustle of Silicon Valley. Harinarayan and Rajaraman established track records as successful entrepreneurs and venture capitalists — another reason Kosmix has been dubbed a "startup to watch" by tech mavens.

The duo, who teamed up at Stanford as contemporaries of Google's Sergey Brin and Larry Page, prospered in the dot-com boom with Junglee, a startup they sold to Amazon for $250 million.

Later they formed Cambrian Ventures, making several lucrative seed investments with money raised from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and other successful entrepreneurs. Rather than raising a new fund, they launched Kosmix in 2005, which has raised $55 million from Accel Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Dag Ventures and Time Warner, as well as such A-list angel investors as Bezos and former Motorola CEO Ed Zander.

While Google activates with buttons labeled "Google Search" or "I'm Feeling Lucky" — and Bing uses a symbolic magnifying glass — the Kosmix button says "Explore."

Kosmix's choice of "explore" suggests its qualitative difference. The service is designed to help people who wish to delve more deeply into a topic and aren't in a hurry, and is better for "browsing" a subject area, Harinarayan said. On her blog Life After College, Silicon Valley tech worker Jenny Blake described a comparison between a Google and a Kosmix search. Her doctor had informed her that her triglycerides were slightly high, "which means I need to cut back on my sugar intake."

First she tried Google, "and came up with the typical list of sites to check: WebMD,About.com and Wikipedia," she wrote. "But then I tried my search on Kosmix, and rather than having to click back and forth between a bunch of links, I had a whole page of information to peruse. The Kosmix page had a Wikipedia summary, articles, resources, videos, images, Q&A, blogs and even tweets! I was (and still am) thoroughly impressed."

Sullivan, the editor of Search Engine Land, says the search industry is in a dynamic phase. Reacting to a flurry of positive reviews for Microsoft's Bing, "Google has had to roll out its own guide to interesting things you can do on Google," he said. Meanwhile, Twitter is having a marked impact because it is generating so much unique data and so many "tweets" are themselves a search request, Sullivan said.

The emergence of Twitter, Facebook and other sites as generators of information, Harinarayan said, should benefit Kosmix, because it means there is simply that much more information to organize. "We see the Web as this Library of Alexandria — a repository of all human knowledge," Harinarayan said.

That seemed to tread dangerously close to Google's stated mission: "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." But no, Harinarayan said, Kosmix's ambitions aren't that big. "We just want to organize the Web."

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Source: http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci_12682318?nclick_check=1

Tags: Kosmix, Google search, Cuil, Bing, Hakia, Library of Alexandria, WEbMD, About.com, Wikipedia, Accel Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Dag Ventures, Time Warner, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Stanford, Venky Harinarayan, Anand Rajaraman

Posted via email from Global Business News

Google’s Schmidt Rips Microsoft’s Bing

Earlier today, Google (NSDQ: GOOG) CFO Patrick Pichette said the company was still analyzing Microsoft’s search-engine revamp—and wasn’t ready to comment.

Well, apparently, Google CEO Eric Schmidt is more than ready. Excerpts from his interview on Fox Business Network:

—“It’s not the first entry for Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT). They do this about once a year.”

—“We think search is about comprehensiveness, freshness, scale and size for what we do. It’s difficult for them to copy that.”

—“You earn (share). You don’t buy it with ads, you earn it and you earn it customer by customer, search by search, answer by answer.”

Schmidt gave a similar interview to CNN earlier this month, where he pretty much said the same thing about Bing, and mentioned this key point: “They have some advantages with the Windows monopoly, where they can encourage people to use Bing, probably unfairly. Lets see what the users choose.” And also professed his unabashed love for Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) Kindle, doesn’t say much on a question about YouTube

Source: http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-google-ceo-schmidt-rips-bing/

Tags: Google, Bing, Microsoft, Search, Eric Schmidt, Fox Business News, Patrick Pichette, Amazon Kindle, CNN, Global IT News,

Posted via email from Global Business News