The Search Lounge

The Search Lounge has moved to Searchlounge.org

2004-12-14T17:25:00.000-08:00

I am very excited to announce that the Search Lounge has moved to its new and permanent home: http://searchlounge.org. Please stop by and visit, though I will be making aesthetic and technical changes, so please bare with me.

Be sure and stop by soon because the Lounge is featuring an exclusive interview with Chris Broekhoff, Director of Content for FindArticles.

And lastly, please update any RSS subscriptions you may have and point them to the following URL:
http://searchlounge.org/wp-rss2.php

Thanks and I look forward to any feedback,
Chris.

Blingo

2004-12-08T11:02:00.000-08:00

Blingo

--This “review” is my way of helping Search Lounge readers win free prizes. The review is definitely on the light side. Good luck. In fact, don’t even read this review, just go to Blingo and win yourself a prize--

Type of engine: Sweepstakes, oh and general web search.
Overall: Put it this way: it’s all about winning the prizes. It’s not that the search is bad, but the results are directly from Gigablast so I don’t know that it’s worthwhile rating Blingo’s relevancy. As far as I could tell there’s no difference at all from the Gigablast results.

SUMMARY
Relevancy of results: Same as Gigablast, and I need to do a review of them.
Features and functionality: Average. There’s not much to it other than a search box and pictures of the prizes you can win.
Quality of help and “about us” pages: The “about us” pages are all about winning prizes. I couldn’t find anything search related.
Business model: Lure users in with free prizes, and then show them Google ads.

INTRO
Blingo just released a press release today so I thought I’d be right on top of things by doing a brief review for the Lounge. Blingo uses Gigablast’s results so I won’t spend too much time evaluating the relevancy. That’s best left to a Gigablast review.

The prizes are a one year Netflix subscription, a digital camera, a digital video recorder, an iPod, a $250 Amazon gift certificate, movie passes, and a Sony music gift certificate. Just go to their site, start searching, and hope you’re one of the random winners. (I hope I win an iPod.)

UI & FEATURES
No registration is required unless you win something. So you can just go to Blingo and search. That’s different, if I remember correctly, from iWon, where you had to register. They provide “see also” links that are taken from Gigablast and formatted differently. And there’s a “did you mean” suggestion taken directly from Gigablast.

QUERY EXAMPLES
I searched for Oakland public library and there were four Google ads that went more than halfway down the page. I tried coniferous trees of North America and got the same thing. And both of those queries are non-commercial in my book. But it’s not exactly surprising for a site like this. I should say that the results for both of these queries were good enough that it’s not a waste of time to search on Blingo.

CONCLUSION
If you like Gigablast, you might as well use Blingo. Same results, and you can win prizes. So stop reading this and go win a prize.

Icerocket - Interview with CEO Blake Rhodes

2004-12-06T16:01:00.000-08:00

The Search Lounge is pleased to feature an exclusive interview with Blake Rhodes, CEO of Icerocket. Icerocket is a new search engine from Dallas, Texas that has the unique goal of being responsive to users. Blake maintains a useful blog about the engine To understand his philosophy, this is a good post to read: http://blog.icerocket.com/node/view/14. He writes, "When people write me with suggestions, what do I do? I LISTEN to them!! Without our users, we are nothing. As you can see, we have made several changes to the site based on the emails we have received." True to his creed, Blake was responsive to my request for an interview.

Icerocket offers the following tabs for searching: Web, Blogs, News, Phone Pics, Images, and Find A Friend. For web results, the "archive" link takes you to results from the Wayback Machine and that's always a good thing in my book.

For a search company that's the equivalent of a newborn baby, I like what they're doing and hope to see them grow.

This interview was conducted via email on December 6, 2004 by Chris Fillius.

Blake, thanks for joining us at the Search Lounge. I know your blog was started in September, but how long has Icerocket been live?
We have been live about 6 months.

Can you tell us about any features or improvements to relevancy that are being worked on right now?
Features we are working on: RSS builder, we launched this about 10 days ago, it's a free tool and we will be adding to it. We are working on several things right now, but I can't really talk about them.

For the web searching tab, does Icerocket pull results directly from Alexa?
We actually don’t pull Alexa's results, just the thumbnail images and the traffic numbers. We crawl and index a lot of it ourselves.

Any plans for Icerocket to crawl and index for web search?
Nothing is out of the question. [editor's note: an interesting teaser.]

Currently, you are using your blog in lieu of help pages for searchers. Do you plan to develop help pages or will you continue on as it is? I find the blog to be very useful, but I took the time to look around Icerocket, whereas the first place many users will look for help is in a help section.
Yes we will have help pages in all sections soon.

IceSpy provides good insight into what users are searching for on Icerocket. Do you analyze user queries? And if so, how does that influence you?
No not really, it's kind of fun to see what others are looking for, but that’s about it.

Lastly, what’s your favorite drink?
Coke.

Thank you for your time Blake.

Wondir Land- on Live Q&A and the Social Web

2004-12-02T10:45:00.000-08:00

The Search Lounge got a nice mention on Wondir's blog:

Wondir Land- on Live Q&A and the Social Web
http://wondir.blogspot.com/2004/11/search-lounge.html

"Wondir gets an in-depth review from Stingo. Although the review is mixed, it's very helpful to get this much point for point feedback. All in all, judging Wondir from a "quality of results" p.o.v. may be unfair this early in the game, given that unlike search engines, we don't have the critical mass of online users/answerers or searchable content (in the form of previous asked questions with answers) to really show off what Wondir can do. But if/when we have thousands of questioners and answerers online at any given time, and tens of millions of previous asked questions with answers to search, then I think the same reviewer would have quite a different experience (even if our UI and technology stayed exactly the same). Either way, really appreciate people taking the time to look into Wondir in this much depth. I'll be sure to save Stingo's review."

I'm glad the review was useful to the folks over at Wondir. I agree completely with Allen that with more users will come more answers. And with more answers will come more good answers (as well as some bad ones, but that's part of the fun...)

Exalead

2004-11-30T22:28:00.000-08:00

Exalead
Type of engine: General web search with integrated browsing capability.
Overall: Average.*
If this engine were a drink it would be…a French Kiss. It’s French, it has lots of ingredients, and if you take your time with it, it’ll get you where you need to go.

SUMMARY
Relevancy of results: Average.
*There are good sites in there, sometimes you just have to click around too much to find them. This score is what brings their overall rating down.
Freshness of results: Very good.
I was impressed. Of course I’ll need to check back over time since they just went live and so I assume the index was created recently. They advertise real-time indexing, but I’m assuming (though I don’t know) that it’s just for a targeted subset like news articles.
Breadth of results: Very good.
Not only is the breadth good, but the related terms and categories provide good access points.
Features and functionality: Very good.
Quality of help and “about us” pages: Very good.
Includes keyboard shortcuts and explanations of special features like phonetic search, which I’ll discuss a bit more of later.
Business model: Exalead makes its money by selling enterprise search. The web version of their search is a showcase for their technology. As far as I could tell there were no sponsored links.

INTRO
Exalead is a French company that has been around since 2000, but just recently went live with a beta web search product. Their main line of business in enterprise search, but their web search is a nice way to attract attention. Although I’d heard about them, I hadn’t used Exalead until this review.

They claim they have indexed one billion pages and have plans to increase the size. And hey, a billion pages isn’t too shabby a starting point.

UI & FEATURES
The front door is very sleek and minimalist with its aqua-marine and silvery gray colors, but do a search and you’ll be presented with a lot of information. Although it is a lot of info, it’s very well organized and you’ll be getting around Exalead like a pro in no time. They do a nice job of keeping focused on the site results in the main, central column of the page. The ancillary, though still very useful, stuff is to the left and right sides. Let’s take a walk through it all…

Thumbnails appears on the right side, next to the sites. I’m on a laptop so the images are pretty small, but on a larger monitor I’m pretty sure they’d be clearly visible. Thumbnail images are getting more popular and I think they do have value. However, going back to A9, I’d like to see more engines adopting an easily customizable interface so that I can include or exclude extras like thumbnails. If you click on the thumbnail it loads the site in the bottom half of the search result page. A nice feature is that the search terms you entered will be highlighted on the page. You can also bookmark the result to access it again the next time you’re using Exalead. This is a feature some of the big engines are using, but I’m not a convert yet. Between my browser’s bookmarks, my C drive, my RSS reader, and the online bookmark program I use, I’m not sure I need another set of bookmarks on a search engine. But who knows, maybe someday I’ll be convinced that I want to save at the search level.

Moving to the left side of the page, there are several things to see. For related terms, you can click on the square next to the related terms and it'll cross the term out. Nice way to track movement, especially for someone like me who is constantly refining queries and trying different things. It gets confusing to remember what I’ve already done. As far as I could tell, the related terms refines within results rather than sending out a brand new query.

Related categories pull relevant ODP categories. And Exalead also is displaying the bread crumb trail beneath each site result when it’s available. Thank you! I’ll never understand why the major engines moved away from doing that. There are several excellent web directories and if you map results to a directory it can only help users. The naysayers love to say that only 5% of people browse, but that’s misleading because a) people don’t browse if the interface isn’t done well, as it is with Exalead; b) for those of us who do browse it is extremely valuable; c) let’s run the numbers. Let’s pick a number that represents how many English speakers search the internet each day. How about 250 million? If 5% of those people browse that means that 12.5 million people browse. Obviously I’m making these numbers up, but you get the point. The number of people who like to browse categories is still in the millions, and that’s even with category browse not being promoted by Google.

Getting back to the features, you can limit results to audio or video. Very nice because a direct link to the file itself is actually returned so you don’t have to click to the page and then have to find the file on the page. This is conceptually similar, though implemented differently, to what BrainBoost does when they “snap open” to the section of the page that is relevant. I like this direct targeting of information and getting users as close to their goal as possible.

Exalead’s Advanced search is quite nice. You can limit by country, language, file format, title, and date. In the search method field there are some interesting choices: automatic word stemming, phonetic search, and approximate spelling. You can also set these on the preferences page.

QUERY EXAMPLES
I wanted to start with a relatively easy query, just to get a feel for Exalead’s interface: wes anderson. The results were all very relevant, but like I said, this is a give-me query. I like the way the results page looks. There’s a lot to see, but it’s easy to understand. If you click on the folder icon it will open a new page with results just from that site; sub-pages, in other words. The related terms were good, things like names of actors who have been in Anderson’s movies, other director’s names, and movies that are similar to Anderson’s films, like I Heart Huckabees. The related categories had Rushmore and the Royal Tenenbaums. It also had Indiana Sports and Recreation, which wasn’t relevant to me.

I played around with the phonetic search for wess andersen, but all the results on the first page included the words wess andersen, and didn't deviate from the way I spelled it. I also tried wess andersen with the approximate spelling search method. This did return some sites with the term wes, but no variations on andersen. I’m not sure how they’re building their phonetic search algorithm, but it’s a nice feature to have for those occasional things, like names, that you know how to pronounce but not spell. I also tried to search with the phonetic search for information about the German soccer player Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, pretending I didn't know how to spell his name. I tried karl heinz rumineger, karl heinz ruminiger, and karl heinz rumminiger, but got zero results for any of them. Not so good.

Let’s move on to a query that’s a bit tougher: 2004 world series winner returned NPR.org as the first result. Probably when Exalead did their last crawl the NPR homepage had news about the World Series. The other results on page one weren't so good. I can tell why each of them were returned, but none of them were about the Red Sox’ win. There was a site about the Little League World Series, one about the Poker World Series, and then a few, like the World Conservation Union, that were not relevant at all. However, all is not lost. Lurking there on the left side of the page was a list of related terms that looked helpful. I clicked on the first one, series winner, and a bunch more sites about poker were returned, plus a couple of other random topics. But no MLB. The next related term, world series winner, did better for me. The first result was an article about Manny Ramirez winning the MVP. The results could have been better for this query.

To refine my query, I wanted to try out some Boolean logic. I entered: 2004 world series winner NOT "little league" NOT poker. And indeed I didn’t get anything about poker or little league. However, the World Conservation Union’s site was not only still there, but it got bumped up in the results. I played around with the related terms and the related categories, but the results just weren’t quite right. The categories were too general, like Recreation and Sports, and the terms looked good but didn’t return good sites.

CONCLUSION
I am really excited to see a new web search engine that not only incorporates, but actually highlights, the categories from a web directory. That alone is enough to keep me coming back. But since not everyone is a devout directory user, there are several other nice and useful features on Exalead. The phonetic search is nice to see applied to a web index, even though it wasn't really working so well for me. Also, being able to limit to audio or video files is helpful. Their interface is unique in that it offers several ways to get to results, such as thumbnails, previews, etc. Although most of these features are available in one form or another on other engines, Exalead has done a fine job of combining and bringing all these different elements together. Plus they're searching their own web index.

I hope they put some effort into improving relevance, because that’s the missing ingredient here. With their own index, their unique interface, and their wide-ranging selection of advanced features, Exalead has huge potential.

Wondir

2004-11-23T15:28:00.000-08:00

Wondir
Type of Engine: Question and answer.
Overall: Average.
If this engine were a drink it would be…a shot of Jagermeister. Your first time it’s a bit scary, but fascinating nonetheless, and you don’t really know what the heck it is. But have a drink and you’ll enjoy it for novelty's sake as well as alcoholic (informational) content.

Intro
To put it simply, Wondir is a collection of questions and answers. There are several search related services, as in non-traditional engines, that I keep reading about on blogs and elsewhere. One of them is Wondir, so I decided it’s time to check them out.

On Wondir, anyone can ask and anyone can answer questions. It’s a community-based model that connects those who know with those who want to know. Google Answers is a similar service, and there were several others in the past including LookSmart Live. But all parts of Wondir are free to everyone and their revenue comes from Google AdWords. (For those of you not familiar with this free way of getting answers to questions, there is also an institution in your town called the public library that is free and you can – for the most part – trust the answers you get there. Or try accessing librarians remotely at AskNow. Check it out, it's a fantastic service.) Wondir also distributes its question and answer box to vertical, specialty sites. I like that idea because if you go to ichef.com you’ll see what looks like an ichef question and answer box. However, when you ask a question it takes you right to Wondir. This is a good way for Wondir’s positive strengths to be accessed by people who otherwise wouldn’t go to the Wondir.com site.

Warning, prediction ahead:
As an aside, I predict several things that we think of as different are all going to merge: email, RSS, online bookmarking tools, article databases, web directories, and search engines. The line is already blurring, but consider a technology that is neutral in that it doesn’t care where information comes from so long as it’s relevant. So, like RSS but broader, I can subscribe to the content I want while remaining source neutral. But let’s get crazy and add email into the equation. Right now email is delivered and sorted by sender, date, subject, and a few other flags. But why not deliver and sort it by content so that all emails, blog posts, newly indexed articles, and so forth are filtered by topic. Within a couple years people (or at least this person) will not be using Outlook or web-based email the way we think of it now; I’ll be using some kind of reader that aggregates search results, news feeds, email, and who knows what else into one uber-reader. Think of federated search, but with the added advantage that instead of searching in the past on content that has been crawled, indexed, and stored, we'll be fed in real-time with relevant content from newly published sources like blogs, news, and email.
Back on topic….

UI & Features
Wondir is confusing at first. Not confusing like What is outside the universe? (think about it!), but confusing in that it takes you a few moments to orient yourself. However, you can’t go wrong these days by using the big rectangular “search” box in the middle. I put search in quotes because really it’s an Ask box in this case. But just like a search, you enter your question and then things start happening.

The whole system is very transparent, everything is public, which is probably why it’s confusing at first since there’s so much to see. For instance, the Wondir Question Ticker lets you see what other users are asking and the Question Board shows a chronological list of questions. You can also sort by answered questions or unanswered questions. You can jump to a different day or go to a subject category to see questions by high-level subject such as Games, Travel, Mature Content, etc.

Just like RSS feeds, you can subscribe to be notified when a word or a phrase appears in a question or answer. You can also get answers by IM. Both of those require registration, but you can stay unregistered and click back to the date you entered your question and see if it’s been answered yet or not. Registering really makes a difference though, and any serious users of Wondir should register right away to take advantage of features. Otherwise you’ll be clicking through long lists of questions trying to find ones you’ve asked to see if anyone has answered them yet.

Query Examples
(Query in this case meaning questions.)
I asked, How do you tie a necktie?
I got the response: Your question will be placed in Home Improvement unless you select a different category for it.
I decided my question was really more of a “How-To” and moved it to that category.

But Wondir also returns results from news articles, search engines, and news groups. For search engines, there were five results. Three were relevant from AlltheWeb, and two were not relevant from About. That’s good relevance, but for now I’m testing Wondir’s question and answer service so won’t linger on web results. It turned out someone had asked a similar question to mine already, so there were already answers. Here’s one of them: there is more than one way, why not try, tie rack.com. Well, that seems a reasonable answer, doesn’t it? Unfortunately your intrepid investigator, never willing to stop in my quest to find the truth, was unable to find a site called tie rack.com. There’s a tie-rack.co.uk, but it’s not helpful. Too bad.

I tried a second question: who is the strongest US chess player right now? There weren’t any similar questions already asked, but I was taken to a page with questions about Bobby Fischer, the strongest chess player in US history. Right after I asked the question, it showed up on the question board. I also saw it scroll by on the Wondir question ticker right away. I got an answer in 14 minutes, unfortunately the answer was “Robert.” Some joker trying to be funny. Do you see me laughing? I waited a couple hours but no one supplied a real answer to my question. (Update, I checked back the following day and still no answer.)

There are many useful and legitimate questions. I saw ones about child custody issues, recipes, pregnancy, etc. But it probably comes as no surprise that there are also many nonsensical and silly questions. Here’s a sampling, just for fun:

Question: what can i do about my puppy who just ate 5 snicker chocolate bars????
Answer: report your self to the animal patrol f*#!%r
Answer: …You're a dumb and unfit dog carer, I'm afraid.

Question: my best friend and i really like each other but we're taking things slow but he likes another girl and she also likes him. we want to be together but alot of people are in our way. what should i do?

Question: how do you know when to give up the one you love

Question: What is 1 plus 1?
Answer: 6
Answer: Your I.Q.

And so forth….

Conclusion
The interface is confusing at first, but if you spend a bit of time on Wondir it becomes easier to get around. I like the transparency of the service in that every communication is public, but I’d like to see Wondir make navigation a bit easier. There should be easier ways to view the questions and answers that have already been posted. You can get tricky with things like subscribing to terms, but sometimes you just want to cruise around and look for questions and answers about something without subscribing to it. How about a plain old search box for searching all questions and answers?

To me Wondir is a representational example of the Internet in general: it’s communal, meaning you can be connected to people with similar interests, as well as people who have no authority or business answering questions; it’s got a lot of great content, but it’s also got a lot of crap, and sorting through it is the hardest part; and it's interesting at first, but the real issue is figuring out how useful it is to you.

For now, Wondir is a novelty item to me, but in the future maybe I’ll incorporate their content into my RSS feeds so I can be notified when topics I’m interested are asked about. But I would like to add that there were tons of questions coming in, and tons of answers too, so it seems that there are people who really find this service valuable. Even if it's not valuable to you, it is worth playing around with.

MSN

2004-11-18T13:42:00.000-08:00

MSN (beta-search)
Type of Engine: Full-scale Internet search engine.
Overall: Average.
If this engine were a drink it would be…a Cosmo, but hold the Triple Sec. It’s got most of the basic ingredients, but something’s missing. And without that sweet ingredient, in this case relevance, it just doesn’t taste right.

Intro
I’ve shied away from reviewing the big kids because I didn't feel I could add anything to the abundant amount of literature already out there, but I couldn’t ignore MSN’s beta search. Its release is simply too important to the industry. It floors me that anyone expects MSN’s newly built search to go live in Beta and be better, or even as good, as Google. But the mainstream media, as well as industry watchers, all write about how it compares to Google. Fine, that’s a legitimate question to ask, but I’d like to step back from that comparison and simply judge MSN on its own. It could be argued that MSN might have done better waiting until it has an excellent product, but that isn’t Microsoft’s way of doing things. Building a large-scale search engine with crawling, indexing, and an algorithm is a huge –large, big, mammoth- task, but I guess since they’re Microsoft, it’s expected that they can do it. I’m going to write this review as if MSN search is a new company and not the search arm of the largest software company in the world. Even though MSN has offered search for years, it’s always been farmed out to other companies, until now.

UI & Features
I really like the Search Builder because it’s surfaced right there on the search page. It’s right under the main search box. The advanced fields they currently have are useful, but I bet MSN will be really juicing these up in the future. Be sure to play around with the sliders, one of the industry's latest fads, under Results Ranking. Yeah yeah, I know, only 2 or 3% of users use advanced logic. But maybe that’s because engines don’t let you build the logic the way MSN does now. In my opinion this is the single best front-end feature of MSN’s search, and I hope it jumpstarts the industry to be more creative in helping regular users build complex queries through natural language prompts.

There’s a settings page that lets you do the basic stuff like porn filtering and language preferences. There’s also a place to set default location for local search.

Following in the wake of Google and Yahoo, MSN search now has a blog. They also have a good About Us section, especially the Web Search Help page. I like this kind of transparency, it’s very helpful.

Query Examples
I was at Internet Librarian for a few days, and when I got home my motorcycle wouldn’t start. So what better query to test than instructions for jumpstarting a motorcycle? The very first result was a PDF file. Unfortunately I didn’t bother to look closely at the file extension so when I clicked the link it opened a 76 page PDF file. Not cool. I take full responsibility for clicking on this link, but how about helping me out by putting a PDF icon near the display title instead of in faded letters after the URL. I did a Control F to find motorcycle in the PDF document and the only reference was to inflating a motorcycle’s tires. Not helpful at all. The next result was a blog by a guy from Texas. There are some motorcycle references and the word jumpstart appears, but the ideas are not connected at all. Not helpful. Result # 3 was equally bad, another PDF file, this one having to do with campus security at San Jacinto college. I clicked on every one of the ten links on the first page of results and they were all bad. Not a single one, NOT ONE, was relevant to my query. So what the heck is going on here? I’d say there’s something funky with their proximity matching. Several of the sites were quite large and had a lot of text on them, so it seems like MSN is indexing all the words on the page but paying no attention to how close the terms are to each other. I don’t know if that’s a problem with their index, or if their algorithm isn’t taking proximity into account; if I had to guess, I’d say the latter.

OK, so maybe my query needs to better; computers don’t make mistakes, humans do. I tried jumpstarting motorcycle battery. The first difference I noticed is that this query produced four sponsored results whereas my previous one had none. Do I need to say that all of the sponsored sites are irrelevant? Can you guess what they’re about? They want to sell me a new motorcycle battery. The second thing I noticed is that my Texas blogger is back and so is my 76 page PDF file. But wait, there’s good news. The first result took me to a page with a link to a somewhat relevant subpage. To be specific it’s a message board from the Philippines with various people discussing the topic. I wish MSN had taken me right to the page, but at least it got me close. The second result is pretty good, it’s about batteries for one particular motorcycle model. It doesn’t give actual instructions, but it’s close. The rest of the results are not so great, but they’re better than my previous query.

Time for another query refinement, this time including the name of my bike: Suzuki gs500e jumpstart. Not many results for this one, only one sponsored result from eBay and three not relevant web results. Same problem again, the terms appear on the sites, but nowhere near each other.

A new approach was called for: Search Builder. Going back to the search homepage I entered the following:
Search Terms: jumpstarting a motorcycle (I required the exact phrase).
Site/Domain: *blank*
Links to: *blank*
Country/Region: *blank*
Language: English
Results Ranking: I slid the first bar far towards Exact Match. The second bar, for popularity, I left in the middle. And updated recently I also left in the middle.
…NO RESULTS…

At this point I’m a sad customer and I leave. Or instead of doing it myself I just give up and call a tow truck to jumpstart my bike for me.

I also wanted to do a local search: florist (with location set to Loudonville, NY). Before I get to relevance, one bad thing is that I can’t change my location on the fly. I have to click into Settings and do it there. So even though I’m in California, I wanted to buy some flowers for my sister-in-law so I had to change my default location for her region. Ignoring the sponsored sites, the first few results are good enough that I’m happy. Some of the following results are slightly off, like a weather page that also has a link to shopping categories like florists. The only complaint I have is that from the display data it doesn’t look like any of these florists are actually in Loudonville, but they are in the Albany area so I assume they deliver to Loudonville.

They’re also providing some direct answers through Encarta and other sources. You can ask questions like who is the prime minister of the united kingdom? And MSN will show you this:
Answer: United Kingdom: Prime Minister: Tony Blair
You can also do mathematical calculations (e.g. 4 *4), dictionary definitions (e.g. define laconic) and measurement conversions (e.g. how many centimeters in a mile). I tried other questions like who was jefferson’s vice-president, but it didn't work.

MSN has tabs for News and Image searches. I won’t go into a full review, but I played around with both of these and they were both good. The news was recent and included authoritative sources, and the photo results were relevant.

Conclusion:
Within the context of being a brand-new search tool, it’s not bad. There’s definitely a lot of documents in their index but their relevancy needs a lot of fine tuning. Right now it’s not entering my regular repertoire, but when it takes the next step past this Beta version I will reevaluate it then. From the outside looking in, it seems like they’ve built up their crawling technology, but I’m not convinced they’ve done enough with their relevancy algorithm yet. Nonetheless it's always exciting to have a new large scale engine appear with its own crawling and indexing technology, and this is no exception.

Wayback Machine

2004-11-08T13:06:00.000-08:00

Wayback Machine (part of the Internet Archive)
Type of Engine: Not so much an algorithmically based engine as it is an access point to archived versions of web sites. And an essential tool for searchers.
Overall: Very good.
If this engine were a drink it would be…Cola. I can’t make my favorite drink, Jack and Coke, without it, but I don’t drink it by itself. Just like you can’t search just with the Wayback Machine, but if you mix it with your favorite search engine you’ll be a happy customer.

Intro
Although the Internet Archive has been around for 8 years, and although they’re not really a search engine per se, I love what they do so much that I wanted to write about them for the Lounge. Their goals are lofty, inspiring, and unique. In my opinion they are one of the most important sites on the web. Founded in 1996 by Brewester Kahle, the Internet Archive is a public nonprofit organization whose goal is to create and keep regularly scheduled snapshots of as many web sites as possible. The Wayback Machine is the interface for viewing these stored versions of web sites. The Archive also archives movies, audio files, and books.

Kahle has stated that his organization’s goal is to store everything. “It could be one of the greatest achievements of all time” (2004). It is a clear and powerful mission statement. It has vastly significant consequences for future generations. We can not begin to fathom how differently the last 1,500 years would have been had Alexandria’s Library been preserved and its knowledge not lost. The same can be said for other information that has been lost. “The early manuscripts at the Library of Alexandria were burned, much of early printing was not saved, and many early films were recycled for their silver content” (Kahle, 1996). Although 1,500 years from now scholars will probably not be very interested in a personal web page dedicated to someone’s dog, there are countless other web sites that do contain valuable information on many subjects. Kahle does not want history to repeat itself by society losing valuable information that’s stored only on the web. For preserving books, he has even gone so far as to suggest that every book in the Library of Congress could be scanned. He says that universal access to all the knowledge in the Library of Congress could be had for around $280,000,000. He estimates he can scan and digitize all 28,000,000 books for $10 each. And in terms of the web, he says it “is growing at about 20 terabytes of compressed data a month, which is manageable” (2004). OK, if he says so.

The Internet Archive has been very successful in taking snapshots of millions of web sites, but there is still the major challenge of providing access to it all. Currently they have addressed this by creating an interface called the Wayback Machine that lets users view archived versions of web pages. Just type in a URL and all the archived versions of the site will be presented. The Internet Archive has mentioned here and here that they want to create a textual search interface to its archive, but no such interface currently exists for the public. This is the main area for the Internet Archive to improve in. The Wayback Machine, although incredibly powerful, needs to be augmented by text searching so that users can locate archived web sites by topic. Of course that’s no easy thing to do, but since IA is affiliated with Alexa (also founded by Kahle), maybe Alexa can share its indexing capabilities. Easier said than done.

UI & Features
There’s really not much to say. You just type in a URL, hit “Take Me Back”, and there you go. On the Advanced Search page there’s a few more options such as merging aliases, a.k.a. de-duplicating, where yahoo.com and yahoo.com/index will be mapped to each other. There’s also a function to compare two snapshots but unfortunately this wasn’t working for me.

Query Examples
Go as obscure as you want and there’s a good chance the Wayback Machine will find it. First I tried a search for a Bukowski page I know of. The first snapshot was in March, 1999, and then is followed with periodic snapshots since then.

I then tried something less obscure, http://www.mlb.com, as in Major League Baseball. The first archived page is from December 22, 1996. For 1996-1999 there are only 1 to 5 snapshots per year. In 2000 things started to kick in, but since 2001 there’s been snapshots on almost a monthly basis. But let’s take a closer look just for fun. It turns out that mlb.com was owned by Morgan, Lewis and Bockius, a law firm. Then beginning with the October 9, 2000 snapshot it becomes the homepage for Major League Baseball.

It’s not clear to me why on some days there are multiple snapshots, but it doesn’t really bother me.

Conclusion
If the Wayback Machine ever goes live with a good searching interface it will be incredibly potent. Not only would you be able to target specific web sites by URL, but you’d also be able to search archived versions of all that valuable content that has been lost from the web. Imagine the power of that. It’s the Internet version of a library with its online catalog plus access to the content of all the books the library ever had.

Knowing that the Internet Archive exists and is working quietly behind the scenes makes it easier for me to sleep at night.

Snap

2004-10-28T17:12:00.001-07:00

Snap (No, not the old Cnet/NBC Snap. This is a new Snap)
Type of Engine: Popularity based on user data* and shopping.
Overall: Good.
If this engine were a drink it would be…a Bloody Mary. There’s different ways to make it; there’s lots of ingredients inside it; and you can see all the various colors and vegetables floating around inside whether you want to or not.

*I couldn’t think of a better way to say this, but basically Snap incorporates data into their algorithm about which sites users clicked on. In the search industry that’s known as CTR (click-through rate). If you know a cleaner way to express what kind of engine Snap is, please email me.

Intro
Snap uses click data, including which sites get clicked on and how many sub-pages are viewed by users, to help determine relevancy. They state they have data from 1 million users going back to January, 2004. This is an idea that has been kicked around and used to various degrees by other companies including LookSmart and Google AdWords (maybe others too). But Snap has taken things a step further; not only do they incorporate click-through rates but you can also manipulate your results by data from other users. I’ll explain more later.

--A quick aside: If you’re starting a new company why use the name of a deceased company that did business in the same industry? Snap.com, the departed search engine that was jointly owned by Cnet and NBC and later became part of NBCi, existed for several years. So I was very surprised to see that a new Phoenix had arisen from its ashes (there is no affiliation between the two Snaps as far as I know).--

UI and Features
Because there’s a lot going on with Snap’s UI I’ve broken this section into subsections.
The Home Page
The first thing you’ll notice is their cluttered homepage. It’s jumbled compared to the nowadays ubiquitous Google type of UI. But if you take a moment there’s some pretty good stuff to see. On the left of the page are a few summaries of popular queries: Top Products, Top People and Top Music. On the right are the latest articles from Snap’s Blog. In the middle of the homepage there’s a lot…there is a running tally of the number of searches done. There are also graphs; click on those and you’ll see all kinds of things like stats about Revenue, Search and Advertisers. Check it out. Seeing as how I have a weird hobby of analyzing search queries, I like the keyword statistics page, but I’m not sure the average user has much use for it. But it’s all part of Snap’s goal of transparency.

It’s certainly a different type of homepage, but I think they’d do better to put some of this information into their About Us section or elsewhere. When I first logged onto the Snap site I wasn’t sure if I’d reached a regular search engine or if it was something else like an enterprise search where I was being sold a search product. I am glad that they have all this information, but I wish they’d remove it from the landing page and put it elsewhere.

Related Keywords/Count
After you do a search you’ll see in the upper right corner a list of similar searches and their frequency. Interestingly enough, I remember that the original Snap.com (the Cnet/NBC one) had a similar feature that displayed related searches. I tried a search for library disaster plans and the related keywords were things like library of congress, floor plans, wet, libraries, etc. None of the terms were relevant to my search as stand-alone terms. I clicked on wet because I was curious about it, and of course the related keywords for wet were porn queries that I won’t repeat here.

Refining Queries
After you do a search there’s a search box called Type Here To Refine where you can search within results, almost like a “Control F” find functionality merged with a search functionality. Give it a try, it’s fun to play around with.

Columns
On the search results page there are several columns that appear along with the site results. Clicking on columns lets you sort results in different ways. This is a nice feature, but again it’s one that most searches really don’t need in my opinion. I can see its value for advertisers who may want to purchase a keyword –think of the Overture bidding model – but for the average searcher sorting by conversion rate isn’t necessary. (By the way, the founder of Snap is Bill Gross, the same guy who founded Overture.) You can even reverse sort by rank, but again I’m not sure why I’d really want to do that. The columns in the results are as follows (note: I started to define each one but then realized Snap has a nice glossary so I took it directly from them.):

1. No. of Clicks is the count of users in the Snap Network since January 2004 who did the same search you just did, and who then clicked on this listing. Typically, the higher the better. An asterisk* indicates that the data is estimated.

2.Average Page Views is the average number of pages of this site that were viewed by users in the Snap Network who did the same search that you just did. Again, higher numbers are typically better. An asterisk* indicates that the data is estimated.

3.Cost to Advertiser is the amount that an advertiser pays Snap for referring a customer who subscribes, purchases, bids, registers, or downloads.

4.Conversion Rate is the percentage of users who subscribe, purchase, bid, register, or download at an advertiser's site. You guessed it, higher numbers are better — they typically mean that this advertiser is better at fulfilling customer needs.

5.Domain is the top level domain of the site. Most commercial sites in the United States are '.com' sites. However, depending on the search term, there are often excellent results in other domains, such as .edu (educational) and .gov (government).

You can filter multiple columns simultaneously. For example, in a column that displays numbers, type in '>' (greater-than), '=' (equal-to), or '<' (less-than), followed by a number, and at the same time filter on a phrase in another column.

Shopping Queries
Shopping queries, like ipod, produce different columns. I could sort by price range, type of memory, amount of memory, weight, etc. These columns vary based on the shopping query, so if you search for laptops you’ll see columns like OS, screen size, etc. Very nice because what they’re doing is customizing the UI based on the query, which I love. If you click on one of the results you’ll get a nice preview lower on the page. Although all the results were relevant in that they were indeed portable music players, many of them were actually ipod competitors. It’s a common practice for shopping engines to do this, but I think it impacts negatively on relevance. If I wanted to see ipod competitors I’d search for something like portable MP3 players. Many commercial searches, such as bose wave didn’t get any special shopping columns. Not so good but maybe they’re still building their shopping list.

Corporate Queries
Another type of query that gets special treatment are companies like Amazon. The interface is different: there is a list of most popular sub-pages, a cached snapshot of Amazon’s homepage, a company snapshot, and news headlines. A nice feature, but again it’s inconsistent because when I searched for Nike I got a regular results page.

Logos
Next to each result there’s a spot for a logo. It’s at the domain level so that AOL member personal pages have the AOL logo even though they’re not corporate-sponsored. But as with other things on Snap this is inconsistent. For my Nike query the only sites that had logos were a sub-page from MSN and a sub-page from Amazon.

Query Examples
I cheated a little and included several query examples in the UI and Features section in order to illustrate Snap’s features. But in terms of relevancy, Snap is pretty good. For my library disaster plans query the results were good. Though I should point out that result #1 wasn’t so good because it’s a FEMA information sub-page titled “library.” But I can see why Snap returned it so I’ll let it slide. I reordered results by number of clicks and things looked slightly better because the FEMA site went away. Though again I should point out that for this obscure query the highest number of clicks was only 5. For context the highest number of clicks for Nike was 1,735 followed in second place by 917.

I tried cliff house restaurant san francisco and the results were good. The official page was #1, though it’s interesting to note that it had 1 click whereas the second result, a Yahoo Travel restaurant review, was highest with 8 clicks. This is a good example of when click data can be misleading for algorithms. Even if more people click on the review the official page needs to be the first result. And Snap got it right.

Conclusion
I like what Snap’s trying to do, but I fear they’re overloading the average user with too much information. They’re showing the guts of their technology rather than incorporating it seamlessly behind the scenes. After you do a search and are waiting for the results, which can be slow, the screen will say things like Preparing Data for Display, De-Duplicating Listings and Getting Top Listings. I appreciate the honesty but I’m not sure it enhances my experience.

The columns are fun to play around with but I think they take up valuable real estate that could be used for displaying more metadata and text about the sites. Maybe Snap can play around with its UI the way A9 has and make it more customizable so that I can eliminate or add columns as I see fit.

They also need to take some of their nice features, such as the differentiated results page for shopping queries, and roll that out for many more terms. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they’ll get to this soon.

I want to say one more thing though: Snap is pushing things and I really appreciate that. I like very much that they’re making an effort to be unique and I will definitely pop in periodically to see how they’re doing and what new innovations they've implemented.

Netnose

2004-10-20T22:42:00.000-07:00

Netnose
Type of Engine: User ratings.
Overall: Needs Improvement.
If this engine were a drink it would be…a wine cooler. I like wine and I like juice, but the two together aren’t so great.

Intro
Netnose offers the ability for everyone to rate the relevancy of search terms to specific web sites. If I understand it correctly, sites only appear in Netnose results if they’ve been rated as relevant by a user. I guess that explains why so many queries I tried performed very poorly; the content simply had not been added to their database. I like the idea of user ratings, but a little-known engine like Netnose needs to do more to supplement their immediate relevance, otherwise users won’t come back. Right now it seems like they’re waiting for the community to do enough to make it a usable search tool, but they’re far from that goal.
I almost hate to give them a Needs Improvement rating, but my perspective is that of the searcher and relevance is my goal. So although the technology and goals of letting users add ratings may be admirable, I won't be totally convinced until I see the relevancy improve.

UI and Features
One thing that bothered me was how do I rate specific sites rather than random ones? Let me explain. If you click on rating you’ll go to a page that lets you rate now. A Javascript pop-up window then opens along with a random web site. On the pop-up window there’s a selection of suggested query terms for the site. There’s also a ratings scale of bad, fair, good, better or best. You can also add commercial and adult tags. So you rate each term and then go to the next random site. Generally the suggested terms were decent. OK, so far so good, I suppose. But what about when I do a search? I want to be able to rate the search results right then and there and I don’t see a way to do that. You can assign a category at that point, but not a rating other than dead link/totally irrelevant. It seems like mapping the search results to the rating process would facilitate the process and garner more ratings.

The site submission page actually lets you enter metadata for newly addes sites, including 5 search terms and a category. Although I love the category idea, the categories don’t make a whole lot of sense to me: Just for Kids, Research, How To, Entertainment, Real Time Stats, Shopping, Business Related. Go ahead and try assigning one of these categories, it’s not always easy. There are also questions about whether the site sells products, has adult content, uses pop-ups, or has paid content. Letting the public add metadata is a noble idea and I’m far from giving up on it as viable, but having worked for two different search engines I know first-hand how devious spammers can be. Though I should add that sites don’t go live in search results until other user(s) rate them. All very interesting ideas similar to what some other community sustained sites have done, such as Zeal and ODP. Though those two directories are more browsing-based and Netnose is purely search-driven.

Query Examples
The relevancy is not so good. In fact, some times it’s very bad. For example, I searched for Barry Zito and the 1^st and 4^th results were about Barry Manilow. The 2^nd was about Dave Barry and the 3^rd Barry Choral Society. So then I went to the Advanced Search page and required both terms Barry and Zito and then I got no results. That’s an outcome of no one having mapped Barry Zito to a web page about him. It would be better to default to fall-through results from another engine than to show me sites about Barry Manilow that only match the first term of a two-term phrase query. Bad.

Try doing a search and then refreshing the browser. The ordering of results slightly changes each time. Odd…

Conclusion
I like the idea of Netnose, but for something like this to work there really has to be a critical mass of users working diligently to make a difference. Right now I don’t think that’s the case. Letting users rate sites is an idea that’s been discussed for years. I know Google played around with a toolbar rating system. I don’t think that ever caught on, but does anyone else know differently? It’s a chicken and egg thing here, because you won’t get enough users interested unless the search is good, but the search won’t get good until enough users rate sites.

Entireweb

2004-10-18T13:23:00.000-07:00

Entireweb
Type of Engine: Basic search engine.
Overall: Average.
If this engine were a drink it would be…a glass of brännvin, as in Swedish schnapps. A traditional drink that may never make it into your repertoire but it’s good to know it’s out there.

Intro
Entireweb is a Swedish engine. It’s basic and straight-forward with a few nice touches. Nothing on the front-end drastically sets them apart.
On their About Us page they state very clearly that the search is currently a Beta version, though I don’t know how long that’s been the case.
Their spider is called SpeedySpider.

UI and Features
Entireweb offers several ways to refine queries. There are more than 30 languages to choose from, or you can limit by continent (when did Scandinavia become a continent?), domain, country or a combination thereof.

There’s an advanced search page for Boolean searching. One option they have is “How many rows of 'Page Content' to show.” This is s a nice feature though at present the max is 5 lines. I’d be interested in playing around with setting it higher than that. I’ve always felt that site descriptions on search engines is a major area for improvement.

I like the language and region metadata they show on search results page. Here’s an example (I snipped description and page content to save space):
1. Brad Friedel - Latest News Headlines [SpeedyView]
Description:
Page content:
http://www.myfootballnews.co.uk/Brad-Friedel-Player-News-267.html
Language: english Region:uk
Related links:
http://www.myfootballnews.co.uk/Blackburn-Rovers-Team-News-10.html
http://www.myfootballnews.co.uk/player-news.html

I like the language and region tags. I’m not so excited about Related Links, but that’s because for all the searches I did, I never saw URLs that were not sub-pages from the same domain. So instead of Related Links, it should be called More results from same source. Speedy View is a page preview feature.

Check out their Speedy Spy page. On it you’ll find their Top 20 queries and also the latest 20 queries. I kept entering a search and then quickly refreshing the Speedy Spy page, but I never did see my query appear on the list. I appreciate it though when engines give insights into user behavior.

Query Examples
I had a little soccer injury last week so I searched for “strained calf muscle”. I wasn’t too impressed with the results. The first couple seem to be from commercial sites and when I’m looking for medical info I really want a trusted source. Some of the other results were OK, but they were focused on the knee or Achilles heel with the calf being mentioned in passing. A better results page would have had content specifically about calf muscles from non-commercial medical sites.

The number of results is always pretty low. I searched for “huckabees” and got 4 results. All four were about the movie. The first two were very relevant and the second too were too specific for my query. But where is IMDB? Where is the Apple.com trailer? Where are the movie reviews? And none of the results had the word “huckabee” anywhere in the visual display text and that’s bad.

Conclusion
I’ve had fun reviewing visual and clustering and music and meta-search engines, so it’s nice to return to a classic, AltaVista/Google/FAST/Wisenut/Teoma search engine. Entireweb seems to have a good base to build on. They say they’ve been around since May of 2000, but that in 2002-2003 they redesigned their search technology. So, I’m not sure where that leaves us now at the end of 2004. Is the 2002/03 search the beta search that’s live? If so, that’s not very impressive. I don’t need them to revolutionize their UI or search features, but their relevance needs some improvement. They need to build up the size of their index as well as improving the order of results.

Mooter

2004-10-15T15:04:00.000-07:00

Mooter

Type of Engine: Visual and clustering.
Overall: Good.
If this engine were a drink it would be…an Emu Export, it's Australian, has a funny name, I'd never heard of it until very recently, and it's a safe bet that you've never heard of it.

Intro
Mooter is a visual clustering search engine and I like it. They’re from Australia and have been live only about a year.

According to their Technology site , which actually provides some useful information about what they’re up to, “Mooter gets it results from its own spidering, and a unique index of websites. While we are growing, we are supplementing our index with metasearch, and comparing the results from various engines before applying our analysis algorithms.” This is an interesting statement and I’m not exactly sure what they mean by it. If I had to guess it sounds like they’re spidering other engines’ indexes to create their clusters. Is this different from what Clusty or Clush does? I’m not sure, but would love to know the answer. Please email me if you know. It sounds like they plan to generate an entire web index, but that could be wishful thinking.

UI and Features
For the most part I like their interface, it’s simple and almost cheesy, but somehow likable. The Overture supplied Sponsored Links are killing me though. When you click into a cluster, the Sponsored Links take up nearly half the screen; bad, very bad.

You can click “All Results” to get the full list of results. Mooter maxes out at 120 results, or at least I didn’t find any queries that produced more than that.

If you don’t like the first cluster you see, click on the “Next Clusters” icon (the icon needs some improvement; it looks like a cluster of red pimples) to see another cluster.

Query Example
For phrase searches, each word usually becomes a cluster. For the search “William Styron” one of the clusters was "William." Not good, but then I clicked on the cluster link and the sites were indeed about William Styron, and not just any old William. But still a "William" cluster doesn't really help me.

Conclusion
Even if the name of a cluster doesn’t sound relevant, the links contained therein were generally on target. So I’d say they’re getting the back-end organization of clusters correct, but what they need to do is improve their cluster names and concepts. Maybe more phrase matching rather than pulling out just single terms, as if I know what I’m talking about.

They could also make the visual part of their results more compelling. As it is right now, it almost doesn’t need to be visual because the visual part of it doesn’t add much beyond novelty (and even the novelty is wearing off as more Kartoo-style visual engines appear).

BrainBoost

2004-10-14T08:10:00.000-07:00

BrainBoost
Type of Engine: Natural language.
Overall: Very Good.
If this engine were a drink it would be...a Jack and Ginger. An old-time favorite search type that tastes refreshing after not being tried for a long time.

Intro
Don't be annoyed that there's no space between the words Brain and Boost. Instead, go ahead and ask BrainBoost questions in plain English and you’ll get answers in plain English. BrainBoost boasts that it’s completely automated and uses no human editorial invention. I guess that’s impressive since it's pretty good as it is, but I still think any engine can only get better if editors are used in some capacity. And just because AskJeeves uses editors don’t let that fool you. It's commonsense to me that a successful combination of the two approaches would be best for relevance; but I digress.

The legend goes that BrainBoost was created by 24-year-old software programmer Assaf Rozenblatt. It took him a year to build it and he built it so that his fiancé could better do her college research. (And all I gave my wife was this search engine review blog. Ouch.)

BrainBoost is honest. What does that mean? It means that when it doesn’t know the answer it doesn’t pretend it does know. Usually. Of course it’s not perfect and you get your share of false positive matches, but generally speaking it’s solid.

UI and Features
The Snap Open feature is cool because it opens to the relevant part of the listing; think of an anchor tag where it takes you right to the text on the page that answers your question.
Otherwise it’s all pretty straightforward.

Query Examples
I wanted to know Tony Gwynn’s lifetime average, so I asked:
what was tony gwynn's lifetime average? and I got no results. Strange, since that should be a relatively easy one.
So I refined my query: what was tony gwynn's lifetime batting average? . This time I got 2 results and the second one has the answer displayed right there on the search results page: .339 (turns out from other results I looked at that it was actually .338, but that's certainly not BrainBoost's fault). I didn’t even have to click to the site. Now obviously that has potential repercussions for all the engines that make $ by driving traffic to sites. But for now I'll stay out of the financial fray.

For my next search I wanted to find out how much an annual subscription to Smithsonian magazine costs. So I queried:
how much is a year's subscription to smithsonian magazine? I got 2 results that both had to do with getting a subscription as part of donating to an organization. Not good.
A little refinement was in order:
what is the annual cost of smithsonian magazine? returned no results.
Better try again, but this time I gamed the system by using a keyword-based phrase query instead of natural language. subscription to Smithsonian returned 6 results, 5 of which answered my question. Though with this one I had to click on the actual results (man that sounds lazy) to see the answer to my query because BrainBoost's display text didn’t show me the answer. That’s par for the course with search engines, but I was hoping BrainBoost would display the answer right up front to this query. And in case you’re wondering, how much is a subscription to Smithsonian? had a very similar result set, though it missed one of the results from my previous query and the display text for the same results was different. But the point is I was able to query this by keywords and by natural language and get good, though slightly different, results.

And of course everyone enjoys a good laugh at the expense of natural language engines, just like we all enjoy laughing at translation engines. So here’s a good one: what is a sous chef?. The first result:
-The sous chef is legal. Hes an American.
But then a few results down is this great display text:
A sous chef is a chef ranking above line cooks and below an executive chef or chef de cuisine.
Nice!
Conclustion
Good stuff. I’m a fan and will use BrainBoost when that nagging trivia question hits me, like what’s the population of Wales? . You’ve got to see that one for yourself, because it’s really good.

Clusty

2004-10-14T08:06:00.000-07:00

Type of Engine: Clustering.
Overall: Good.
If this engine were a drink it would be...an Anderson Valley Oatmeal Stout. It's thick and sweet but most people won't ever get to taste it.

Intro
Clusty is a new search tool made by Vivisimo. It’s a meta-search engine so all results are provided by other search tools. Its distinction is that it clusters results so that you can refine your query by clicking on a more focused topic.

UI and Features
Right now in Web Search there’s a drop-down menu that allows you to cluster as follows:
Source – by engine.
Topic – the heart of Clusty which is clustering by subject.
URL – sort by .com, .org, etc. Also by country code and occasionally by a particular domain though it seems inconsistent as to when this shows up. This is an interesting feature, but I’m not really sure what to do with it just yet. I suppose if I were doing a search for government documents it might be useful to look only at .gov results.

Other tabs, such as News and Shopping, have different clustering drop-down options. I’ll let you explore each of these on your own.

Not only can you set which tabs are seen, but you can also customize which sources are searched. For example, for News searches you can choose Reuters, BBC, CNN or other news sources. Very nice.

If you click on News, Encyclopedia or Gossip, then Clusty will generate a page with related content on it. This is a helpful feature but the front-page of Clusty should let you know about it.

To see specific recall information for each engine that was searched, click on the Details link above the results.

Icons – in the search results you’ll see the following helpful icons:
New window – opens result in new browser window.
Show in cluster – this highlights which cluster on the left contains the site.
Preview – opens the site within Clusty’s search results page.

Query Examples
The more I played around with Clusty the more I liked it. For example, try searching for tickets to an event. I tried the query Black Rider tickets, as in the Tom Waits play, and thought the clusters were pretty good because it successfully showed me a selection of sites where I could buy tickets to the play.
Clusty currently errs on the side of higher recall for its clusters, so many of the clusters are irrelevant. This can be OK if it leads to discovery, but I think the major area Clusty can improve upon is tightening the relevance of the clusters. For my Black Rider tickets query one of the clusters was Game which meant nothing to me. Another ambiguous cluster was Your tickets ready. Both of these clusters were poorly titled and the results contained within were not very relevant. I know, it's only one query example and you can't judge from just one query. But feel safe that I've conducted many other queries and most of them have been similar to Black Rider tickets. There have been useful clusters as well as clusters that make you scratch your head.

Conclusion
Clusty clusters on a horizontal plane and that's what they do well: they surface information which lets you scan the breadth quickly. However, I'd like to see them go a little bit deeper into the categories. I didn't see any categories below the second level. In other words, you do your search, click on one of the categories, and then can click on more category and that's all. I certainly don't want them to get carried away by overloading the depth of categories, but I think a couple more layers would be helpful in some cases.
I really wish they'd chosen a better name. Why would you ever name a search engine something that rhymes with lusty? But nonetheless, they're on to something here. I think clustering is a powerful tool that can let searchers discover similar topics or refine their queries. In the future I hope clustering engines will combine with human-created web directories.

KaZaZZ!

2004-10-14T08:03:00.000-07:00

Type of Engine: Meta-search.
Overall: Needs Improvement.
If this engine were a drink it would be...Bud Light, the wingman.

Intro
KaZaZZ! is a search tool that as far as I can tell doesn’t really offer much by way of useful differentiation. Their claim to uniqueness is their Search Mind Reader which pre-populates queries based on analysis of previous queries you’ve done. Maybe there’s a future to this if the query suggestions can really pinpoint my interests, but even then I’m not sure. Just because I searched for something today doesn’t mean I’ll be interested in the same topic tomorrow. And even if you looked at my search queries over time, how would that help predict future interests? Maybe I’m missing something here, but with their current implementation it’s not useful to me.

UI and Features
KaZaZZ! is a meta-search engine with a selection of tabs to focus your search. One thing they do is they limit the number of results returned. A search for Santa Cruz only returned 80 sites. Personally I don't think limiting results is the right answer to increasing relevancy. It seems the sites that get returned are the ones that multiple engines have agreed upon.
On the search results page, check out the right hand side. Most of the refinement links are generic, such as News, Pics and Shop. But the one that got my attention was Music. It offers links to music files, though unfortunately for the query I tried, Mark Lanegan, most of the results were dead links. A nice idea though.

Oh, and Kazazz has a men’s search engine called MaZaZZ! and a women’s search engine called WaZaZZ! . Oh boy. Since I don’t have too much of a search history with their sites, the pre-populated Search Mind Reader queries for MaZaZZ! were exclusively female actresses and models. And for WaZaZZ! the queries were about dieting, beauty and fashion. Groan. The fashion queries were things like Guess, Benetton, Estee Lauder, etc. In other words, they’re trying to send users to shopping sites.

Conclusion
Another meta-search engine joins the fray. I’m not convinced they offer anything particularly useful, though it’ll be interesting to see what they do with the Search Mind Reader functionality in the future.

Musicplasma

2004-10-14T07:54:00.000-07:00

Type of Engine: Visual music search.
Overall: Average quality, yet still very enjoyable to play around with.
If this engine were a drink it would be...a mint julep. It's not your everyday drink, but you'll find it a sweet break from the norm.

Intro
Musicplasma is a music search tool that lets you discover music artists similar to ones you already like. Oh, and it’s visual, like Kartoo.

I’m not really sure how they determine similarities. If I had to guess I’d say they base it on an ontology of genres (rock, rap, etc.), and on mining something like Amazon’s “Customers who bought that, also bought these…” type of functionality.

UI and Features
You can zoom in or out on clusters, thereby focusing or expanding your view of similar artists.

Clicking on the links – those ethereal lines – scrolls the page in that direction. Nice feature!
Clicking on other clusters will refocus the clusters around that artist.
The Design panel allows for changing colors and other appearances if you're into that kind of thing.

Query Examples
Sometimes the clusters make total sense. Try a search for Guided by Voices and the closest cluster will be Robert Pollard, the lead singer who’s done solo albums. Sometimes the clusters are a bit off. Try searching for David Byrne and for some reason Paul Westerberg – lead singer of the Replacements – comes between Byrne and the Talking Heads. I’m not saying that’s incorrect, but my first reaction was surprise. It could be accurate that people who like David Byrne’s solo stuff, which doesn’t sound much like the Talking Heads, might like Paul Westerberg, Warren Zevon and Roxy Music (all closer than the Talking Heads).
I noticed that powerhouses like the Rolling Stones and Neil Young shows up in lots of places. I searched for Prince Buster, the 60s ska pioneer, and there’s Neil’s cluster. A search for Bad Brains similarly showed the Stones lurking one link away. Now obviously Neil Young and the Stones have influenced tons of groups, but I'm not sure that Bad Brains should be one link away. Anyone know why that would be?

Conclusion
I’d like to know more about the links. Is one artist linked to another because they collaborated? Or are they linked because they play similar music? Or are on the same label?
OK, so it’s fun to play with, but give me some song samples.
How about letting me type in more than one group so I can really focus in?
Focus by time period. I really like early Stones, when they sounded like, say the Small Faces, but I hate recent Stones, when they sound like, say crap.

Musicplasma is fun to play with, but it needs to be more practical. Take the visual music search engine and turn it into an audio search engine. If that’s too far-flung, then at least show more context on how artists are linked. But like I said, it sure is fun...

A9

2004-10-14T07:44:00.000-07:00

Type of Engine: Meta-search.
Overall: Very good.
If this engine were a drink it would be...a martini. It's not so much about the complexity of the mixture, but it's always classy and it gets the job done.

Intro
A9 has implemented some really clever UI features. At present they’re searching Google’s Index for web searches, but seeing as how they’re owned by Amazon I expect bigger things from them in the future. Because they're using Google I won't go into relevancy. The UI is the first thing you’ll see and it’s what sets them apart, especially since right now they’re using the Google Index and (I think) the Google algorithm with some slight tweaks. The number of results sometimes varies, though page 1 results on A9 and on Google seem identical.

UI and Features
You can focus your search in the following ways:
Web – searches Google
Books – searches Amazon
Images – searches Google
Movies – searches IMDB
Reference – searches GuruNet

Some nice things worth pointing out
• The UI – the tabs are very easy and load right away so that you don’t have to wait for a new page to load.
• Amazon Discount - If you search on A9 and then go to Amazon.com to buy something, they’ll cookie you and give you a 1.57% discount on purchases. I pleasantly discovered this since they don’t seem to advertise it.
• Search History - They maintain a list of your search history that you see right away when you visit A9. I didn’t think this was the most useful feature at first, particularly now that browsers save searches, but I’ve actually used it to recall previous searches.
• Diary – this function lets you leave notes about sites (I use Mozilla and you need IE so I haven’t been able to do this yet, but it sounds cool).
• Bookmarks – they have a built in web-based bookmark function. Personally I don’t see why this is better than using my browser, but that’s because I don’t spend much time on public or shared terminals. For people who use different computers this is a valuable feature.
• Discover– similar, I think, to Amazon’s “You’ve bought this, so check these out,” but with web sites instead of products.
• Preferences – you can set language default, filtering level, font size and colors. I’m guessing they’re still working on adding advanced features here but they may be limited by searching Google’s index for general web results. Just a guess.

Conclusion
A9 is part of my regular repertoire. I'm hoping they build their own web index and algorithm, then they'll vault into the elite ranks of search engines. If that doesn't happen they've still got one of the finest UIs out there.

welcome to the Search Lounge

2004-10-14T07:40:00.000-07:00

Hi,
Welcome to Search Lounge's new URL. The Search Lounge is a place for me to post subjective reviews of search engines. I hope you find these reviews useful.

Thanks and enjoy,
Stingo.