A Search Engine Smorgasbord

ZDS

On conventional web sites the Google crawler is anything up to a month behind. Looksmart are probably pointing the way for the major search engines to increase the crawl rate with a distributed crawler.

If you want instant gratification, these search engines aim to tap the blogosphere and rss feeds in the here and now ...

Technorati Technorati is a real-time search engine that keeps track of what is going on in the blogosphere — the world of weblogs. Open the'Technorati This favelet' page and drag the link you'll find there to your links toolbar. When you're on any web page click on the 'Technorati This favelet' and see what the blog universe has to say about that page. Or highlight some text and click on the favelet to search the blogosphere. Fascinating.

Feedster Feedster is an RSS search engine. Advanced Search allows you to limit your search to just certain feeds or collections of feeds (OPML). Specified feeds including, your own can be filtered out.

Visually rendering associations in the result set can provide insights into relationships. However one is left with the feeling that more relevant and smaller results sets would largely eliminate the need for visualization in the first place...

Vanilla Vista The original and still the most intuitive way to explore for associations.

KartOO KartOO is a metasearch engine with visual display interfaces.

Grokker Grokker creates visual maps from the web's top search engines.

One way around the 'Results 1 to 3,980,504' problem of impossibly large result sets is to break down the results into sub-groups that are more manageable. Carving these groupings out of the original search set implies a certain degree of intelligence in the search tool...

Ujiko Ujiko has the interesting characteristic of learning from your searches. The relevance of results is the highest of this group.

GigaBlast Gigablast breaks down the results into 'GigaBit' groupings. The relevance of the groupings is noticeably better than Vivisimo. You can get the results of your search returned as an XML Search Feed that can be re-processed. You can also set up a custom search to search up to 200 sites.

iBoogie iBoogie is a metasearch clustering engine.

Vivisimo Metasearch engine that organizes the results into meaningful groups providing users a quick overview of the main ideas buried in the results. For example, with Clustering, if you search for the keywords "German shepherds", Vivísimo will also offer you results organized by "breeds", "training", "breeders", "rescue", and "clubs".

The catch 22 of searching is that until we find out what terms have been used to describe something we can't efficiently locate that pink whatsit with purple spot thing ...

KwMap The art of searching consists in knowing which keywords to search for. KwMap is a tool to help you discover new and related keywords.