New Search Engines
April, 2001
In this article:
1. Vivisimo
2. SearchIQ
3. About.com
4. Ixquick
5. Queryserver
Vivisimo - Fast MetaSearch Engine Organizes Results for You
http://www.vivisimo.com
= must have/try
Vivisimo (in Italian "Vivissimo" means "very alive") is a new type of meta-search engine capable of providing some interesting features. First and foremost, by being a meta-search engine, this search engine is specialized in simultaneously searching several major SE (search engines) including: Fast, MSN, Yahoo, AltaVista, Lycos, Open Directory, Excite and Webcrawler. It also provides for each result, the SE that provided it and the ranking position of that result page on that specific SE.
Vivisimo key feature is its ability to group results intelligently into separate and aptly titled folders. In this way it is much easier to identify among the search results, the type of URLs/web addresses that best fit our query.
Vivísimo does not crawl or index the web as most other traditional SEs do. It organizes rather the outputs of other search engines: URLs, titles, and short descriptions. As its developers say, this should be technically termed a "clustering engine".
Here are Vivisimo specific key functionalities:
1) Queries one or more web search engines.
2) Analyses and processes their result pages to extract the documents (titles, URLs, and short descriptions).
3) Groups the documents based on this information, not the full web pages.
4) Orders the groups and the documents within each group.
5) Displays the hierarchical categories.
Vivisimo is also very fast, and it sports a minimalistic and superfast loading search page.
Who can benefit from Vivísimo's technology?
Organizations or individuals that need to make sense of large amounts of textual information can benefit from Vivísimo, which can be applied to any type of textual content.
It is also possible for international organizations and research institutions to fully integrate Vivisimo technology with their own SE, or to apply this technology to the proprietary content they already have. Vivísimo can work with any search engine and its output can be customized to match a client's look and feel. Vivísimo licenses its clustering technology to other companies on an OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturers) basis to enhance their own product or services.
If you have a working search engine on your organization site and it is accessible over the internet, Vivisimo staff is willing to set up a fully functional demo for your institution.
Just describe your interest and send your URL to:
demos@vivisimo.com.
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SearchIQ - Valuable Search Engine Tools Directory
http://www.zdnet.com/searchiq
= must have/try
The smartest tool for finding information on the net!
This is SearchIQ promotional slogan on the website.
I must say that they come very close to their claim.
SearchIQ is not per se any type of search engine, but it is a nice and well organized directory of all search engines, rich with reviews and an actual rated guide to their best use.
Search engines in SearchIQ have been categorized according to topics of interest (including Education, Reference, Science, Information technology, Multimedia, Software & Freeware, among many others), as well as the type of search engines themselves (Individual, Meta-Search, Specialty SEs), software-based search tools and expert guides to subject resources in many areas.
On the home page of the service you can find a classification of the top ranked Search Tools according to their ability to return fast and relevant results from the Web.
http://www.zdnet.com/searchiq/
The site also provides an "Hot List" section in which one can directly access the very best Search Engines in each different category.
http://www.zdnet.com/searchiq/hotlist/
The site has also a section called "Search Smarter" which guides readers to a set of useful tutorials on how to improve one's own capabilities in using Search Engines.
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About.com WebSearch - Clearinghouse for everything about SEs
http://websearch.about.com/
= worth knowing
A similar resource to SearchIQ, but with more editorial content, discussion boards, and many links to articles and reviews is the About.com website dedicated to "Web Search". The Guide/expert of this site is Mr.Chris Sherman, who is indeed a renowned authority in the field of search engines, and who provides reviews and advice to over 700 search engine-related resources.
Also here you can find well organized access to tutorials on using SEs, and a categorized directory of SE, according to different topics.
http://websearch.about.com/internet/ websearch/mlibrary.htm
The site also offers advice on promoting a website to the search engines, as well as tools and tips to integrate search engines into one's own web site.
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Ixquick - Cluster-based meta search engine with site rankings
http://www.ixquick.com
= must have/try
Among the relatively new, fast and performing search engines, I would certainly like to spend two words for this powerful and easily customizable meta-search engine.
As you probably know by now, meta search engines, work by querying simultaneously several traditional search engines and acting rapidly on the results, by aggregating, filtering and sorting what they find as most relevant.
Like Vivisimo, Ixquick does this, and does it particularly well.
Among its key features:
1) Iquick works in seven languages, automatically recognizing your point of origin and automatically providing the SE interface in the most appropriate language (English, French, Spanish, Deutsch, Portuguese, Italian and Deutsch).
2) Ixquick searches many prominent engines simultaneously (in parallel). The customizable pool of SEs it can query contains the following 14 SEs:
AOL
Altavista
Excite
Fast Search
Goto
Hotbot
Infoseek
Live Directory
LookSmart
Lycos
MSN
Snap
Webcrawler
Yahoo
3) Further, Ixquick lets you jump directly to the search engines when an engine's results seem particularly valuable to you.
4) Ixquick awards one star for each search engine that placed a site in its top ten. Since different search engines value different content, a site that appears in multiple top ten lists (and therefore with many stars) is likely to be very pertinent! (Try typing: "web usability" even without quotes and see the results. You will see several results being listed with 5 stars.
Each one of these sites has therefore scored in the top 10 of at least 5 search engines. See at the end of each result description, the list of search engines on which the page was found by Ixquick and its specific ranking on that SE.)
5) Last but not least, Ixquick allows you to put a fully working search box on your own website, for free, without forcing your users to leave your site for theirs.
http://ixquick.com/eng/link_instructions.html
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Queryserver - Simple and straightfoward, customizable
metasearch engine
http://www.queryserver.com/
= interesting, promising
This is another very useful, very simple to use, powerful and easily customizable meta-search engine. Highly recommended.
Its strong point is the ability for the user to easily customize the way the search is run, and the type and amount of results to obtain.
This meta-search engine has been tuned to work well also in 5 pre-selected interest areas which are:
Web,News, Health, Government, Money
The home page is extremely clear and simple to use, yet offers many alternative options to customize your query.
This SE is fast performing, and the results page is very efficient, offering clusters of organized information, according to the similarities of the pages found.
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