gHacks technology news » search engine

Google Images Downloader

Martin — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 10:47:07 +0000

Google Images is part of the Google search engine. It can be used to only search for images in the Google search engine with options to filter the search results. It is for example possible to define a minimum image resolution, image type or color. Images that are displayed in the search engine cannot be downloaded directly in their real size. The search engine user needs to visit the website the image was posted on to do that.

The Google Images Downloader solves that problem by providing the means to download multiple images from Google Images directly. The portable software program is available for the Windows operating system. The user can either copy and paste a Google Image search url into the application or grab the url from the active page in the program directly.

It is then possible to grab the image links from Google Images. The program will grab results from the first five pages by default; A figure that can be changed in the interface directly. Other filters include the allowed image formats and to block html files. All images will then be downloaded to the directory that the user specified in the interface. It takes only a few seconds – depending on the Internet connection of course – to download dozens of images from Google Images.

Multi Image Downloader can be downloaded from Freeware Files. The program is compatible with Windows XP and Windows Vista (and likely Windows 7 as well).

Tags: google images, google images downloader, portable software, search engine, windows software

Search, Play And Download Music With Songr

Martin — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 16:16:26 +0000

Legal mp3 search engines search the Internet for mp3 files that they can legally provide to their users. These are mp3 that are provided as samples by record labels and artists, free mp3 released under a license like Creative Commons or other audio files that can be freely distributed.

Songr is a Windows application that will search ten mp3 search engines for music that the user is looking for. Among the mp3 search engines that are supported are playlist.com, Skreemr or Mp3realm. It will also search Youtube indirectly by utilizing the Justhearit service. The developers plan to add nine mp3 search engines (including Groveshark) to the program to increase the quality and quantity of search results.

A search is performed by entering an album, artist or song name in the search form in the main interface. Songr will then search the various mp3 search engines and return the combined results of that search. The name, duration, bitrate, size, search engine and relevancy are shown in the search results. These information are not always displayed which means that they are only supported by some of the search engines.

A right click on a row in the search results opens a context menu with options to play or download the selected song. Another interesting option of Songr is the search by lyrics feature. The program tries to identify a few words that are entered and displays possible artists and songs which can then be searched for with a double-click.

Songr requires the Microsoft .net Framework 3.5 and is compatible with Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7. It can be downloaded from the developer’s website.

Tags: download-mp3, mp3-search, search engine, song, windows software

Google Plans More Changes To Google Search

Martin — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 19:26:56 +0000

Google’s latest change to their search engine homepage was not welcome by all users. The increase of the font size was a shock to many who used to work with the same search engine page for the past years. Some users even got as far as claiming that they would move to another search engine if Google would not undo the changes. Soon userscripts and Firefox extensions were created that would bring the font size back to its old size.

Users who have been in shock then might want to stop reading at this point because it could get worse. Techcrunch was the first to write an article about Google’s new experimental homepage which only displays the Google logo and the search form on the page initially. No buttons, no other links.

Those links only become visible if a user moves the mouse in the window. Take a look at the video to see how the new Google search page could look like in the future:

Users with eagle eyes notice that there is no Search button at the end of the form and no I’m feeling lucky button either. It somehow does make sense from a usability standpoint. Many users simply type in the search query and hit enter on the keyboard to perform the search. Since they do not move the mouse at all for this operation they do not need the links on that page. Everyone moving the mouse might want to click on the links or use the mouse to perform the search.

It still could be very confusing for users and it is very likely that many will call tech support to ask if something is broken. You can also visit the custom search page if you want a barebones search interface.

Tags: Google, google custom search, google search, search engine

Perform Plain Google Searches Without Video, Image And News Results

Martin — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 15:23:27 +0000

If you perform a Google search nowadays you get mixed search results. Google not only displays the first ten pages that is has in its index for the entered keyword but also image, video and news results. Sometimes ads are also added to the search results and placed on top of everything else.

Some search engine users might want a cleaner search results list without the additional search results that are offered by Google. The Digital Inspiration blog found an interesting alternative url to perform clean Google searches without video, image and news results.

Users who want nothing but the plain top 10 search engine results for a specific keyword can point their web browsers to http://www.google.com/custom to perform a custom search without the additional search results and advertisements that are added to the default Google search.

Google default search:

Google custom search:

It is also possible to add the custom Google search engine to the list of search provides. How this is done depends on the web browser that is being used. A quick overview of how this can be done can be found in the article about Google’s Sandbox search engine here at Ghacks.

Tags: Google, google custom search, google search, search engine

Google Search New Custom Search Options Added

Martin — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 11:11:56 +0000

One of the latest trends in the search engine market seem to be custom search options, search filters and specialized search parameters. Google has introduced the search options in the main Google search engine a while ago. These were made up of advanced search parameters which have been accessible before (before starting search) and new filters. A click on the Show Options link on a search results page will open the available options in a sidebar.

Google has added new custom search options yesterday which are now accessible in Google Search. The following four options have been added to Google Search:

Past hour and Specific date range: With these tools you can choose to see only the most recent results in our index, or see results from a specific time period. This can be particularly helpful when you’re looking for the freshest information, or if you have some idea of when the information you’re looking for may have been published to the web.
More shopping sites and Fewer shopping sites: Now you can choose “More shopping sites” to show additional commercial pages and display prices from those pages right in the search results. If you’re doing product research and are not quite ready to make a purchase, you can choose to see “Fewer shopping sites” to filter out many of the commercial sites.
Visited pages and Not yet visited: Rediscover pages you’ve visited before by clicking “Visited pages,” or filter out the websites you’ve seen by clicking “Not yet visited.” This can be particularly helpful when you’re researching something you’ve already explored and you want to return right where you left off. To use this option you’ll need to be signed in to your Google Account and have Web History enabled.
Books, Blogs and News: Click on these filters to see results only from these sources. Putting these filters together, along with videos, forums, and reviews, allows you to quickly switch between different source types right on the search results page.

The past hour and specific date range parameter was accessible through url parameters before only. The inclusion in the search options makes it easier to use this parameter. Search engine users can now increase or decrease the amount of shopping sites that are displayed in the Google search results which can be very handy depending on the type of search performed.

Visited pages and not yet visited is only available for users who are logged into their Google account and have web history enabled. This can be interesting to continue a search at a later time without having to revisit pages that have been visited before. Books, blogs and news finally allows to refine search to only see results from these sources. They are similar to the previous source filters which allowed search engine users to only display results from sources that were videos, forums or reviews.

It would be interesting if Google would reveal statistics about these custom search options to see how many search engine users make use of them. Which leads to this question: Have you used the custom search options?

Tags: custom search, Google, google search, search engine, search options

Bing & Ping Preview

Martin — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 11:07:35 +0000

The Microsoft Bing development team is trying to distinguish their search engine from Google by adding new features to their search engine. The latest feature that the team is developing goes by the name Bing & Ping. It has been designed to offer Bing users better options to share search results. This feature resembles the “social” buttons that are displayed on blogs and other websites. Bing & Ping integrates Facebook, Twitter plus email and copy options in the Bing search engine.

Only specific results, called Bing’s Instant Answers, can be shared this way. This includes translations, sport results, weather conditions, financial information and more.

Microsoft is now offering signups for the Bing & Ping preview.

Thanks for your interest in the Bing & Ping preview. If you want to participate in the preview program, please submit your Windows Live ID. If you do not have a Windows Live ID, you can register for one by going to https://signup.live.com. You will receive a reply confirming your acceptance into Bing & Ping via e-mail to the Windows Live ID you provided. The e-mail will provide additional details on the features we’re testing out, including some examples of how to use them.

Users who are interested to test this new feature can sign up at the Bing & Ping Preview page. Users who signup for the preview will receive an email once the service has been activated for them. The email will contain instructions and examples on how to use the service.

Tags: bing, Bing & Ping, facebook, search engine, twitter

Bing Visual Search

Martin — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 22:00:42 +0000

One of the new improvements that Microsoft introduces in their search engine Bing is a Silverlight driven visual search engine. Visual search meaning that pictures will be used to display and navigate the search results instead of text and text links. The benefit is a better search experiment with the limitation that it only works for specific topics and not every search. Microsoft has created roughly 30 different visual search niches in the categories entertainment, famous people, reference, shopping and sports. The shopping category contains the visual search topics cell phones, digital cameras, new cars, handbags and HDTVs.

A click on any topic will open the results in an image grid. The results are automatically sorted. The cell phone results page for instance sorts the different cell phones by brand. Hovering over a cell phone will display a search term in the Bing search box; A click will perform a normal search in Bing for the search term.

Various sorting options are provided in a drop down menu at the top. Cell phones can for example be sorted by Bing popularity or contract price while the movies in theater can be sorted by release date, title, metacritic rating or weekend box office earnings.

The search engine will automatically sort the results without reloading the page. Bing’s visual search can be a comfortable way of exploring specific information. It is handy for Internet users who want to research specific topics like movies that are currently playing in cinema, popular books, top iPhone apps and dog breeds. This is especially a good solution for users who do not know where to look for this information. Internet veterans usually know the websites that they have to open to find the information that they are looking for.

Bing Visual Search (link) is an interesting concept but it is currently limited to a few dozen popular topics, probably to ensure that the quality of the results remains high. It is probably not going to be introduced on a larger scale in the near future.

Update:

Bing Visual Search is only available to visitors who are using the United States version of the search engine (maybe some others but that has not been tested). If another country is shown in the top right corner then a page not found error is displayed. To access visual search users need to change the country to United States.

Tags: bing, bing search, bing visual search, microsoft bing, search engine

Google Real-Time Search

Martin — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 14:19:41 +0000

Google Search offers several options to limit the search results by a selected time frame. One is available in the advanced search parameters which allows users to search only in results that have been published or updated in the last year, month, week, day. The other becomes available in the newly added Search Options on the search results pages. Options there are similar with the addition of the recent time frame which seems to return results from the last 24 hours as well.

None of them can be considered real-time search results. Ran Geva posted an interesting article over at the Omgili blog which described a way to change the search parameters further to come close to real-time search results in Google. The default Google search result urls contain the qdr:x parameter if the results are filtered by time with x being replaced by d for days, we for weeks, m for months and y for years.

All he did was to replace the x value with n for minutes and s for seconds to get results that have been posted in the last 60 minutes or 60 seconds. It is furthermore possible to add a number behind the n or s value to customize the query further. The parameter qdr:n20 would search for results that have been indexed in the last 20 minutes.

The custom search parameter will be displayed as past minute or past second after performing the search and will persist even when conducing new Google searches. Seconds usually do not yield many results (if any at all) while minutes are usually well indexed already.

Steve Rubel acted quickly and created a bookmarklet to display the Google search results that have been indexed in the last ten minutes.

The bookmarklet can be changed easily to search a different time frame. All that needs to be done is to change the qdr=n10 part in the bookmarklet.

Tags: Google, google real-time search, google search, google search bookmarklet, real time, real-time search, search engine

Microsoft Will Upgrade Its Bing Search Engine This Fall

Martin — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 10:08:08 +0000

Microsoft’s introduction of its Bing search engine has revived search engine competition it seems. Bing did receive some praise since its introduction and Google has since then reacted by offering search engine users a preview of their upcoming search engine technologies in the form of the sandboxed search engine Caffeine and a limited test run of Ajax powered search which is delivering search results faster to the user.

Twitter has been full of messages about Microsoft’s coming upgrade of their Bing search engine. Most messages suggest a release this fall with some suspecting a release as early as the coming week. Relatively few information are provided about the changes that Microsoft is introducing in Bing 2.0. Some noteworthy ones are:

Silverlight powered Bing 2.0 on its way this month?: That’s the message coming out of yesterdays annual company

BING 2.0 terrific !! watch out guys ! bing + silverlight in maps = amazing !! goodbye google

It has to be noted that the tweets are coming out of Microsoft’s company meeting which suggest that most original information are provided by Microsoft employees. Microsoft on the other hand did not officially comment on the messages that have been posted.

It is also unknown if the search result quality has been improved as well or if only selected modules of the search engine have been optimized and improved. Guess we have to wait at least another week before we know for sure. What would you like to see in the new version of the search engine?

Tags: bing, bing 2.0, bing update, microsoft, microsoft bing, search engine

Did Google Just Increase The Font Size Of Google Search?

Martin — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 08:05:51 +0000

It is not often that Google changes something on the front-end of Google Search. The only element that the Google developers change regularly is the logo that adds a little bit of change to the search engine every other day or so. Changes to the rest of the front-end on the other hand are rare and it came as a surprise that the font size of the search form has been increased significantly. This has been tested with various web browsers like Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer which all confirmed the change. We first thought it was caused by a Firefox add-on or Greasemonkey script or related to the Firefox update yesterday but this is apparently not the case.

The font size of the Google search result pages on the other hand do not look like they have been changed as well. The new font size looks and feels alien on first glance which can be attributed to the fact that the font size has not changed in years.

Not everyone might experience the new font size. Reasons for this could be that Google is testing the font size in Google Search and showing it only to some of the search engine visitors. Another reason might be that Google is adjusting the font size based on the visitors screen resolution.

Let us know if you see the larger font size in Google Search as well and what you think of it.

Update: Users who prefer the old font size can install a Greasemonkey script to revert back to the old font size.

Tags: Google, google search, google search font, search engine

Compare Current And Upcoming Google Search Results

Martin — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 11:05:57 +0000

Google is currently giving webmasters and other interested users a sneak peek of their upcoming search algorithm. Interested users can open a sandboxed search engine that is using the new Google search algorithm to test it. Google is mainly offering this new search engine to webmasters to test website rankings but it can also be used by other users as it seems to be faster and with less advertisements in its current stage.

Webmasters who want to compare search engine results can open the old and new Google search engine in two tabs to compare results. A more practicable solution is the use of a tool like Compare Google which displays search results on one page.

Users can enter a search phrase and an optional domain name on the search page. The tool will then display the old and new Google search results next to each other on the same page which makes it easier to identify ranking changes. Domain matches will be displayed in red so that ranking changes for a specific domain name can be identified on first glance.

Compare Google is a free online tool that can help webmasters find differences between Google’s old and new search result ranking algorithm.

Tags: caffeine, compare google, Google, google caffeine, google sandbox, google search, search engine

Add Google Sandbox Search Engine To Web Browsers

Martin — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 08:56:45 +0000

You might have already heard about Google’s new sandbox search engine that is showcasing a new search infrastructure. Google invited webmasters to test the search engine and provide feedback which might indicate that the search engine algorithm is still tweaked. Users on the other hand can enjoy a Google search engine without advertisement and other annoyances that displays results faster and is said to list less spam results on the search engine results pages.

Some users might therefor like to switch to the new Google Search engine. The sandbox search engine can be opened directly by pointing the web browser to this url: http://www2.sandbox.google.com/

The manual approach works nicely but there is also the option to add the Google search engine to the web browser’s search box. The following guide will show how to add the new Google search engine to various web browsers:

Firefox

Firefox users can download the Add To Search Bar extension for Firefox. This add-on makes it super-easy to add new search forms to the search box in the Firefox web browser. All they need to do after installation is to visit the Google Sandbox search engine, right-click it and select Add to Search Bar from the context menu.

Opera

Opera users can right-click the Google search form to add the search engine to the Opera search box. The entry Create Search opens a menu that can be used to add Google Search to the search box. Users need to add a keyword for the search which will then appear as one of the search engines the Opera user can pick from.

Google Chrome

Google Chrome users need to right-click the address bar of the Google browser and select Edit Search Engines once they have opened the sandbox search engine. Google Chrome will automatically detect the new search engine and display it as one of the available search engines. The Google Sandbox search engine can then be added as a default search engine.

Internet Explorer 8

Internet Explorer 8 users need to open the following website in Internet Explorer [link]. The Google Search engine can be added by pasting the url of a TEST search in the Google Sandbox search engine in the URL field on the page and selecting a name for it. A click on Install will open a menu to add the Google Sandbox search engine to Internet Explorer.

Tags: firefox, google chrome, google sandbox, google search, google search engine, internet-explorer, opera, search engine

Test Google’s Next-Generation Search Engine Infrastructure

Martin — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 15:48:06 +0000

Did you know that Google – like many other search engines – changes their search algorithms hundreds of times per year? Search results get tweaked all the time by the developers and it is most of the time behind the scene changes that are not revealed to the outside. Webmasters have learned to live with those changes and are able to spot some of them by observing the search engine rankings of websites. Webmaster forums do occasionally get flooded by webmasters if something drastic happens.

It is not often that a search engine invites users to test it’s search infrastructure. Google invited webmasters yesterday to test out their next-generation search engine infrastructure. Interested users can point their web browsers to http://www2.sandbox.google.com/ to perform a live test.

For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we’re opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.

Webmasters usually have the advantage of being able to check how their websites rank for certain keywords which makes it easier for them to spot differences. Most users who commented in the original post at the Google webmasters website mentioned that search results in the new search engine would be more relevant. It was also noted that less spam websites would occupy a position on the first three search results pages.

A quick test for some of the keywords that Ghacks ranks for did not reveal any major changes. Please post your opinion about Google’s next-generation search infrastructure in the comments.

Tags: Google, google search, google search engine, keywords, search engine, seo, serps, webmaster

Google Adds Quick Search Options To Google Image Search

Martin — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 21:16:21 +0000

Google introduced a new feature to Google Search in last month that would allow users to quickly change several important factors of the search without having to configure them in advanced options or using a plugin or add-on to do so. The new features are available by clicking on the options link in the Google search results. They are displayed on the same page in a sidebar like interface and provide quick access to options that allow a user to change the time period of the search results, the type of results, view related searches or display more text in the description of each search result than usual.

This new type of comfortably accessing search options has now been brought to Google Images as well. Users who conduct a search in the Google Image search engine will now be able to click on the same Options link to access and change several important search parameters.

The options allow a search engine user to specify a certain size for the images that are displayed in the search results, change the type of image (face, photo, clip art or line drawing) or specify a dominant color. All of these options are also available in the advanced image search parameters. The benefit for the search engine user is that these options are now directly accessible.

Tags: Google, google image search, google images, google search, image search, search engine

Microsoft Page Hunt

Martin — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 08:39:02 +0000

Microsoft’s new search engine Bing is doing quite well in several search engine marketing studies. It could do better and one interesting idea that the Microsoft researchers had was to create a game that would help the search results to be better. The game is an experimental game that is currently available on the Microsoft Labs website.

It basically centers on the following idea: The quality of search engine results can be improved by adding a human factor into the equation. Page Hunt will display websites to its visitors who have to guess the search phrase that is used to find that specific page in Bing. Points are awarded if the website is in the top 5 of the search engine for that query.

The researchers on the other hand are able to learn from the data that the users enter. They can use both positive and negative hits to improve the quality of Bing search results. Websites that are displayed to users range from commercial websites to those that promote open source software like Open Office. It is however sometimes quite difficulty to find the right search term to get the points.

Head over to Page Hunt if you want to play a little game and help Microsoft improve the quality of the Bing search results. Page Hunt requires Microsoft Silverlight.

Tags: bing, bing search, microsoft, microsoft bing, microsoft page hunt, page hunt, search engine

A Look At 4 Realtime Search Engines

Martin — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 08:35:08 +0000

Realtime search seems to be one of the buzzwords of the year. Many search engines have plans to include realtime search in their search results. Microsoft’s search engine Bing already does include Twitter results in search results pages. Quite a few realtime search engines are already accessible on the Internet and this article will take a closer look at four of them: Feedmil, Oneriot, Scoopler and Collecta.

All of these realtime search engines have in common that they retrieve data from various sources upon the user’s request. The data is usually fetched from services such as Twitter or Friendfeed but also from blogs, social media sites and podcasts. Differences mainly exist in the way the results are presented to the user and the filtering options that are provided.

Feedmil

Feedmil offers a few features that the other realtime search engines do not offer. It comes with a slider that can be used to define the popularity range of the results. It is for example possible to concentrate on popular sources for the results only. The service can also filter results by type so that only results produced by a certain type of website or service are displayed. The types include blogs, micro-blogs, podcasts and social media among others.

Feedmil divides the search results page in two columns. The main column displays search results based on time and popularity while the sidebar column displays hot feeds related to the search term. The presentation of the results is excellent although they seem to be filtered before they appear on the page (we would have expected more Twitter results of the past four hours for a popular search term such as Google). It would also have been nice if the pages would not have to be reloaded when switching between the various news sources.

OneRiot

OneRiot looks almost like a conventional search engine. It mixes search results from various sources on the search results page. Sources used include blogs, Twitter, forums or Friendfeed and popular websites such as Userscripts or Digg. The results can be sorted by Pulse or Realtime with Pulse displaying popular results while realtime concentrates on fresh results. The results page looks a bit messy which can be mainly attributed to the avatar icons and the two different link colors that are used by OneRiot. The results look almost like Google Adsense ads which by default also use two different colors for their links.

Scoopler

Scoopler divides the results in three different columns with two showing results related to the query and one displaying the hot topics of the day. The main column displays the search results in realtime which becomes apparent as the posting time is usually less than five minutes ago. It will display results from a variety of sources including Twitter, Youtube and blogs. The main column gets updated that frequently for popular search terms that it is almost impossible to keep up.

The right column displays popular results and can be filtered to display only images, videos or links.

The auto updating page strongly emphasizes the realtime aspect of the search engine. It would have been nice if there was a way to pause the search results from being updated or to add certain search results to a personal area where they could be accessed at a later point in time.

Collecta

Collecta is the final search engine of this article. It will also display realtime search results and auto-update the page just like Scoopler. It comes with a pause function which is very handy as the results are displayed in rapid succession if a popular search term has been entered. The service uses four different categories that can be filtered in the search options: Articles, Comments, Pictures and Updates.

The results are displayed in the main column of the page. A little bit irritating is the orientation of the page as it is aligned on the left side of the screen and not centered. A click on a result will display the full message in the right column from where it can be viewed and processed further.

A way to add multiple results to the right column would have been nice. As would have been if the source of the result would have been displayed in the main column.

Verdict

Realtime search engines have one problem: They can either display all results which are impossible to keep up with for popular search terms or display only popular results from sources that they have picked (e.g. Twitter accounts with a follower count of at least 200). Both options will dissatisfy some users. It would have been nice if the services would offer a better customization of the results by offering the user to add individual sources to them. Letting a user add Twitter, Youtube or Friendfeed users and channels, blogs and websites or social media sites could be interesting for many users as this would take the RSS reader concept to the next level by mixing it up with other sources that have been handpicked by the user.

Tags: collecta, feedmil, oneriot, realtime, realtime search, scoopler, search engine, twitter

Bing Downloader

Martin — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 06:39:10 +0000

You might want to try out Bing Downloader if you are a huge fan of the Microsoft search engine Bing or enjoy looking at the wallpapers that get posted as background images every day. Microsoft has made the deliberate decision to add a background image to their search engine by default. Most likely to look different than their greatest foe Google Search. Some users have expressed the desire to download these background images to use them on their computer systems.

It is possible to download the Bing background image manually. How it is done depends on the web browser used. Firefox users can for example simply right-click on the image and select View Background Image to view the image in a new tab from where it can be saved to the computer system.

Bing Downloader has been designed to automate the process. All it does is to display and download the latest Bing background image. There are no advanced options available like downloading previous background images. All the user needs to do is to run it once per day to download that day’s background image to the computer.

The background images usually have a size of 958×512 which makes them not suitable as wallpapers for computer systems with large computer monitors unless the user decides to center the wallpaper. Bing Downloader is a free 10K download. It requires the Microsoft .net Framework 3.5.

Update: Bing seems to use different background images as can be verified at the Bing Image Archive.

Tags: bing, bing background image, bing downloader, microsoft .net framework 3.5, microsoft bing, portable software, search engine, windows software

Wolfram Alpha Gets Its First Core Update After Launch

Martin — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 16:54:25 +0000

One thing that many webmasters and users do not like is that search engines keep them in the dark when they update their search engine, be it search engine algorithm changes or other updates. The Wolfram Alpha team seems to have felt the same way as they decided to release information about the first core update after the launch of the new search engine on their blog.

The blog lists the major changes of the core update mentioning in the end that about 1.1 million data values have been affected by the search engine update. Most of the changes listed in the blog post add new searches or information to the search engine. This includes for example the updates to some European countries like Slovakia, regions (like Wales), country borders (India, China..) but also more interesting comparisons (USA deficit vs. UK), combined time series plots of different quantities (population Germany gdp) and additional ways of searching for information and data entries.

There is obviously still a fundamental different between the information that are provided by Wolfram Alpha and classic search engines like Google Search, Bing or Yahoo Search. The developers are however on a good way to fill a gap that most users were probably not aware of until they discovered that they could use Wolfram Alpha in a certain way to compute information that would take lots of manual work otherwise.

Still, the search engine is limited and it sometimes depends on the phrase if it understands the search query.

Tags: data, google search, internet, search, search engine, wolfram alpha, yahoo search

Desktop Search Engine DocFetcher

Martin — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 15:37:10 +0000

DocFetcher is a document search engine that, unlike prominent desktop search engines such as Google Desktop Search or Everything, is best suited for indexing and managing document formats only. Most document types are supported starting with plain text documents to scripting languages such as html or php to Microsoft Office formats like doc and xls but also the Office 2007 variants docx and pptx plus formats of Office alternatives such as Open Office or Abiword documents.

Another difference between DocFetcher and other desktop search engines is that the former was designed to index document folders only and not an entire hard drive. This means that the initial setup of the document search engine is more time consuming as the user has to point the application to specific folders on the computer’s hard drive that contain the documents that should be indexed by the program.

The advantage of this method is that the program uses less system resources and is able to offer a better result quality. A few options are available to filter the result list. It is possible to specify a minimum and maximum file size, select some or all of the supported file types and locations that have been indexed by the desktop search tool.

Search results are displayed in the same interface with their title, size, filename, type, path, author, modification date and score that is computed by DocFetcher. A left-click on any document will load a preview of the document’s contents in a preview area in the interface which is great for accessing information of documents quickly as the search term is highlighted in the preview of the document.

DocFetcher (via Essential Freebies) comes as an installer or portable version for the Windows and Linux operating systems. It requires Java to be installed on the computer system.

Tags: desktop search, desktop search engine, docfetcher, document search, documents, google desktop search, java, linux software, search engine, windows software

Torrent Search Engine TorrentFetcher

Martin — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 11:35:04 +0000

Several torrent applications such as uTorrent provide access to a torrent search that originates in the client software. Most launch the search on a website in the default web browser instead of displaying the search results in their own interface. TorrentFetcher, a desktop Torrent search engine, offers torrent search capabilities right from its interface. Everything that is connected to the search is handled in the software program.

The user needs to enter a search term and can optionally select a category, change the number of results and the download directory for the torrents. The interface will then be populated by search results after a short time. It will list the title, seeders, peers, the size and date of each torrent that has been found during the search.

A double-click on any search result will automatically download that torrent to the directory specified in the header of the torrent search engine. It should be noted that TorrentFetcher will not download the contents the torrent is linking but only the torrent itself. This means that it has to be used in conjunction with a Bittorrent client such as uTorrent.

It works very well with torrent clients that automatically monitor a directory for torrents and begin downloading the files automatically after finding a new torrent file in that directory.

The software developer does not reveal the torrent search engine that is used to populate the results. An option to reveal that information and probably even exchange that torrent search engine with another one would come in really handy. The search in its current stage seems to be concentrating on English torrents. It would also be nice if the results could be sorted by clicking on a column so that the search results could be sorted by date for example.

TorrentFetcher is a handy software program to find torrents. Adding some of the previously mentioned features would increase its reach.

Tags: bittorrent, search engine, torrent search, torrent search engine, torrentfetcher, utorrent, windows software

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