Microsoft just made a 100 million acquisition of semantic search engine Powerset in its bit to improve existing Internet Searching Technologies for its Live Search. I use Live Search regularly and would say the results are now very comparable to Google and in the case of Image Search much better organised.
Better search is always good, but as a lot of people have been expressing, searching in natural language (“what is the capital of France?”) is not too useful for anyone who has used the Internet up to now. What I would like to see in a search engine is one that can differentiate “free” products from “free download!” or “free 30 day trial!”
Anyway for such a dominated market with Google going on over 60% market share (and even more mind share) a lot of competitors pop up quite frequently. For many niche markets and specific type searches these can be much better, so here are a couple of the better ones:
FilesTube
A search engine for file sharing. FilesTube indexes downloadable files across the Internet. Works quite well, especially with the filtering of files to ‘mp3’, ‘mpeg’ etc.
PDF Search Engine
A search engine for PDFs, E-Books and other electronic documents. Has simple but effective searching.
Twingly
Mentioned it here a few days ago. A new blog search engine, I’m interested to see who it manages to compete against the larger but ailing Technorati which recently got a new round of funding.
Icon Look
I’ve seen a few Icon search engines but Icon Look is the best one I’ve used both results wise and its interface. You’ll find both small and high resolution icons, a useful resource for anyone doing design work.
Retrevo
This service is designed to match a product with a manual. Actually a very good search engine for doing product research before purchasing.
Look Torrent
I used Scrape Torrent for quite some time, but I recently found Look Torrent which is an awesome search engine for finding torrent files. Its best feature is the option to select your favourite torrent sites for it to search.
Related posts:
Reevaluating Google is the best theorySearch for Torrent Files with Pizzatorrent
Best Torrent Search Engines
Emule and Torrent search with google
Google File Search “Share it” 1.0 Final
:/ don’t like any of these and I can get all their functions on google with some greasymonkey(s), also scape torrent and other torrent searches get their torrents from public sites
Try searching for “freeware” – and try -”free download” -”free * trial” ;) Cheers. OA
In France Google has 90% marketshare. For my part I’ve tried then switch to Yahoo engine 6 weeks ago and find it as good and in some aspects even better than Google (but not for pictures search).
Also I use more and more dedicated search engine through Firefox keyword search which is a great feature.
http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/smart-keywords.html
For example if I search for “paris”:
w paris -> wikipedia only results
yf paris -> yahoo france results
gm paris -> paris on google maps
etc
francois
actually yea google image search is really improving, but flickr is always a better option.
I just dont like the idea of one dominant company, it makes everyone so dependent on them. Just ask any blog that gets dropped off the google index, Darren Rowse from Problogger almost got his traffic halved for a couple months.
I just use them all and hope I get lucky. Kinda like playing the slots in Vegas…you never know where the that red 7 is gonna pop up.
François, c´est bon savoir cette info.
I have been doing an awful lot of work with French friends online. I’ll pass this on to them.
Now, does this mean that MS is finally done trying to pimp Yahoo!?