a few of the *other* search engines

I'm giving a bunch o' talks at the Computers in Libraries conference, one of which focused on alternatives to the major search engines. Here are a few highlights:

Quintura has some cool data visualization features, and on-the-fly clustering of results. It's based on Yahoo's search engine, and has tabs on the top of the search results page for viewing results in Yahoo video, images, Blinx and Amazon. What's interesting is that, if you mouse over a term in the search cloud, it re-executes the results, appending that word to your search query.

Kosmix takes a different approach. It provides filtered search results for searches related to health, US politics, finance, video games, travel and autos. I'm particularly impressed with the clustering of results; for example, the US Politics section lets you filter your results for liberal or conservative points of view, for opinion and satire, or for political blogs.

Clusty, a product of Vivisimo, offers on-the-fly clustering of results. It's automatic, so some topics cluster better than others, but I find it useful for identifying concepts related to my query, and for disambiguating search results of words with multiple meanings.

Comments

[Mark Vane]

Hi, Found a cool news widget for our blogs at www.widgetmate.com. Now I can show the latest news on my blog. Worked like a breeze.

[George S.]

I use Clusty as well because I too find the clustering of results helpful. NorthernLight (http://www.northernlight.com/library.html) was the first search engine that I remember that did this, with links to your search terms in business publications as well. Then they made the bone-headed decision (IMHO) to only allow searches to members who paid monthly dues. Well, after a few years (& losing a bunch of mind-share, I reckon) they opened their search engine back up again for free. Frankly, Clusty does the job good enough when I want to cluster stuff, but it's useful to try the same search in Northern Light occasionally, too.

[Mike]

What do you think of Exalead? http://www.exalead.com/search/homepage (I believe I first heard about it from you actually.) I used to enjoy using this site -- until they changed the search interface. Specifically, I used to love the feature where you could sort results by date. Since they changed the interface however, it seems to be a bit 'clunkier.' I'm not a fan of their Advanced Search screen and even when I put in a date for websites, for example, that were modified before 1999, I still receive sites that were updated in 2002, 2004, etc. Plus once I get the results, I can no longer sort it by date. I have to trust that all the sites that are retrieved are within my search parameters. I wonder what happened!?! Do you happen to know of an alternative search engine that allows this kind of search?

Thanks,
Mike W.
Reston, VA