Wikia Search is the new project by Jimmy Wales who created Wikipedia. Instead of using an algorithmic approach it combines that approach with user feedback to provide everyone with better search results. The theory sounds nice, let users week out the spam and fake websites like Made for Adsense sites and websites with no content.

But, and this is a big but in my opinion, we will most likely see more and a different kind of manipulation that could have a huge impact on search results. That being said Wikia Search Alpha launched a few days ago and the interface looks clean and crisp. It’s fast as well and has some nice Ajax build in that adds to the usability of the search.

The search itself is not up to the point yet and one should not use Wikia Search just yet to research a topic. Ratings do not work yet as well but that is understandable if you consider the fact that it is the first public release. One difference to other search engines are so called Mini articles that will be shown in the search results.

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Rapidshare is a file hosting goldmine if you know how to search it properly. There are basically two ways to do that. First, you can use Google search parameters to search Rapidshare. Several websites offer a basic search interface that does nothing more than to add the parameters to your searches and display the Google search results. Then there is a different kind of website that has its own database and performs searches using it.

The second kind of site tends to be more up to date because they use several sources for finding new Rapidshare files including user submitted ones. I do not like the first kind of sites to search Rapidshare that much because I can enter those parameters by myself into a search engine like Google and get the desired results.

To be able to compare the Rapidshare search engines I have performed searches for the terms “video”, “avi” and “windows”. Finding files is one thing but finding working files on file hosting websites and keeping the file database up to date deleting files that have been removed from the file hosting website properly is another. This has also been born in mind.

continue reading "5 Rapidshare Search Engines"

Deleted websites is probably not the right catchy phrase that I should use. What I mean is that it happens sometimes that you find a search result in Google or follow a link from another website only to find out that nothing is found. Sometimes the information that has been could be essential. Fortunately for us there is a way to display the contents for most “The Page cannot be displayed” websites.

Even if the contents of a website get deleted they are still accessible through caches which means that we will most likely be able to get everything we need. Most major Search Engines use caches and store information of their crawlers in there. The crawlers report the contents of a website to the Search Engine who stores it in its cache.

Google, Yahoo, Live and Ask all offer a cached version of websites in their search results. Clicking on a cached link will display the content that was last reported by the crawler to the search engine.

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Even if you do use Yahoo search regularly you might have missed the Yahoo Search Assist feature. To be honest, i had no desire to use Yahoo as a search engine until the recent actions of Google made me change my mind. Ankit, who recently commented on my blog wrote an interesting article about Yahoo Search Assist and I decided to give it a go.

But first, where is it and who does one enable it. Yahoo Search Assist is available after searching for a search term at Yahoo Search. A small down arrow icon is shown beneath your search term on the search results page. If you click that arrow the Yahoo Search Assist box will be shown.

The box has two parts. The left part displays related search terms and the right part, entitled Explore Concepts, which combines related search terms and displays new search results when clicked.

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Privacy should be a major concern for everyone on the Internet these days. You would be surprised what search engines such as Google know about you - well, not really about you unless you have a real name account with them and are logged in when performing searches.

Have you ever searched for something personal on Google ? A disease for instance, work or religion related searches ? There is an easy way to search Google anonymously though which I will describe shortly only. There is nothing wrong in searching for general stuff without hiding your IP and identity but when it comes to personal information that are part of the search you should use an anonymizer to make sure this information is not stored in Google’s databases.

Googlonymous is basically a frontend for a Google search that replaces your IP with the one from their server which means that Google will never have access to your IP. Even more interesting in my opinion is the two hour long video which can be watched on the site detailing the dangers of data mining.

continue reading "Search Google Anonymously"