A new feature are link previews in the selection process. The description of the link along with other information (if available) are displayed in the web browser. Take a look at the picture to see how this is done:

That’s a big change to the previous version of Cybersearch where you did not get these previews. Another new addition in Cybersearch 2 is support for the Bing search engine which can now be used alongside Google Search. The default search engine can either be Bing or Google with the other search engine available through keyword commands in front of the search term. A set of predefined keywords are already available. It is for example possible to search IMDB (with imdb in front of the search term), Wikipedia (with wiki in front) or Google Video (gvid) with the option to add new keyword searches easily.

The latest version of Cybersearch can be downloaded from the developer’s website. It is only compatible with Firefox 3.x.

Related posts

• Youtube Video Download (11)
• Youtube It Firefox Add-on (4)
• Youtube Comment Cloud Firefox Add-On (4)
• Yahoo Mail Notifier (1)
• Web Updates Check with Fireclip (0)

Windows users need to create a new file in the location they want the search shortcut to appear. This can be the Windows desktop or any other location on the computer system. The file needs to be renamed so that it makes use of the .fnd extension, the file name itself does not matter in this case at all. You can for instance create a text document and rename it to search.fnd.

A click on the newly created file (e.g. search.fnd in this case) will directly open the Windows search interface. This is usually faster than having to use the start menu search option in the operating system.

Related posts

• Windows Search Replacement Fileseek (2)
• Windows Search 4.0 (12)
• Smallest Desktop Search Tool (2)
• Portable Desktop Search Software TheSearchMan (8)
• Windows IFilter Explorer (1)

There is such a tool – SearchMonkey. SearchMonkey attempts to bridge the gap between Beagle and locate/find by adding a powerful regular expression builder to a GUI searching tool. And SearchMonkey does quite well at this task.

In this article you will learn how to install SearchMonkey and use its powerful regular expression builder to power your searches.

Installing

As you have come to expect, installing SearchMonkey is simple:

1. Open up the Add/Remove Software application.
2. Search for “searchmonkey” (No quotes).
3. Select SearchMonkey for installation.
4. Click Apply.
5. Enjoy.

Once SearchMonkey is installed you will find it in the Accessories sub-menu of the Applications menu.

Using SearchMonkey

Figure 1

When you fire up the SearchMonkey tool the main window will appear (see Figure 1) with three tabs: Basic, Advanced, and Options. For standard searching the Basic tab should be fine. You can not add regular expressions to the Basic tab. Only within the Advanced tab can you take advantage of regular expressions in your searching.

And since anyone can use a basic search GUI, let’s skip right to the good stuff within the Advanced tab.

Advanced searching

Figure 2

When you click on the Advanced tab you will see the regular expression builder right away (see Figure 2). As you can see you can apply regular expressions to the both the file name and the file contents. Let’s walk through the process of creating a regular expression for a search. I want to search all files within /home/jlwallen for any file containing the phrase “Figure” more than once. To do this click on the Expression Builder button for the “Containing” section. When this is clicked this it will open up a new window where the expression can be built.

Figure 3

Here’s how we build our expression. Since our expression will only apply to the contents of the files click the Expression Builder button for the “Contains” section. When the new window appears (see Figure 3) immediately go to the “Text contains” section and select “The phrase” from the drop down. In the text area immediately to the right of that drop down enter  ”Figure” (no quotes). Now select “One or more times” from the “Occurs” drop down. The expression is built, it now has to be added by clicking the “Add” button.

This is where the behavior gets a bit odd. After you push the Add button you have to put the OK button to add the expression to the main search window. The problem is, by pushing the OK button your default web browser will open to the SearchMonkey web page. This has nothing to do with your searching. You can close your web browser (or the tab SearcMonkey opened) without any effect to SearchMonkey. After the web page opens, go back to the SearchMonkey window and click Cancel which will take you back to the main window. Now you should see, the “Containing” section the string “(Figure)+” (no quotes). That is the expression to find all files that contain the string “Figure” (no quotes).

Click Start and you will quickly see the results pile up (given your file system contains files that match the expression.) Depending upon the size of your hard drive, the amount of files/folders on your machine, the complexity of your regular expression, and the speed of your machine the search could take some time.

Final thoughts

That gives you an idea how SearchMonkey is used. If you’re looking for a search tool that gives you far more power at your fingertips than the standard fair, SearchMonkey might be the perfect solution for you. Not only can you search your entire file system, you can create some fairly complex regular expressions to add power to your searching.

Related posts

• Worio Combines Bookmarking And Web Search (2)
• Wolfram Alpha Gets Its First Core Update After Launch (3)
• WinFS, Was it Really so Good? (1)
• Windows Search Replacement Fileseek (2)
• Windows Search 4.0 (12)

The search option in the Windows XP start menu for instance will still use the basic Windows search functionality instead of that of the newly installed search tool. Enter Reroute XP Search, a lightweight software program that offers the functionality to change the default Windows XP search tool to another tool of the user’s choosing.

All the portable program does is to change the link in the Windows XP start menu so that it points to the third party search software instead of the default Windows XP search tool. It will not change the search functionality of the classic XP start menu.

All it takes to change the link is to run the Reroute XP Search application to browse for another search tool on the computer system. A click on the Apply button will change the link to the selected search tool (it apparently is also possible to select any software, even those that are not search related).

The program comes with a Restore Default button in case the settings need to be reverted again at a later time. Most users who have installed third party search programs are probably using hotkeys instead to open the search interfaces. It can still make sense to change the link in the start menu as well as there are definitely users out there who do not use hotkeys at all. Reroute XP Search is available at the developer’s website. via Technix.

Related posts

• Microsoft Filter Pack (4)
• Windows IFilter Explorer (1)
• Portable Desktop Search Software TheSearchMan (8)
• Windows XP: Default Internet Browser Per User Profile (0)
• Windows Vista Start Button For XP (5)

The shortcut [CTRL F] allows them to search in the active tab but that’s about it. The following article contains three interesting and hopefully useful Firefox tips that improve the local search in the Firefox web browser. Two of the tips are add-ons for the web browser while the last is a setting that provides smoother access to the local search options.

Tip 1: Getting rid of [CTRL F]

The first tip is a basic tip but nonetheless helpful for users who search on pages regularly. Firefox offers an option to start the search on the page immediately without having to press CTRL F first.

Users who want to change to the faster way of searching on a page can do so by opening the Firefox options, switching to the advanced tab in the options and checking the Search for test when I start typing box. It is from then on possible to perform a search on the same page by simply typing the search term.

Tip 2: Search in all open tabs

The Find in tabs add-on provides another interesting search option. It allows Firefox users to search in all open tabs instead of just the active tab. This can be pretty useful for users who do research and have multiple tabs open on the same subject.

Find In Tabs

Tip 3 Smart Find Add-on

The Smart Find add-on adds another interesting option to the Firefox search option. It can find words related to the search phrase which is extremely helpful if words (either the search phrase or the phrase on the website) has been misspelled.

Smart Find

Do you know other tips or Firefox add-ons that improve the local search in the web browser? Let us know in the comments.

Related posts

• Firefox Drag And Drop Search (0)
• Whitelist Bookmarks In Adblock Plus (1)
• Save And Paste Form Data In Firefox (1)
• Remove Microsoft .Net Framework Assistant From Firefox (33)
• Prioritize Tabs In Firefox (1)

The Windows IFilter Explorer provides an overview of all IFilter plugins that are installed on the Windows operating system. It will display the path and name of the IFilter along with the filetypes that it supports. Various software programs are listed as tabs on the top to switch to the known IFilters of these programs.

It has to be noted that IFilter Explorer has not been updated for about three years which means that some newer applications that make use if IFilters are not in the list. This does not interfere with the data that is displayed in the application window on the other hand. (for example: Windows Search 3.0 is shown in the tabs but not Windows Search 4.0).

The IFilter Explorer can be used to analyze the various IFilter plugins that are installed on the computer system. It can also be used to find filetypes that are not fully indexed by the various applications that support iFilter. The developer of the application is offering several IFilters for download on the website. It does seem that the application is not developed actively anymore.

Related posts

• Microsoft Filter Pack (4)
• Portable Desktop Search Software TheSearchMan (8)
• Change The Default Windows XP Search Engine (4)
• Windows Search Replacement Fileseek (2)
• Windows Search 4.0 (12)

TheSearchMan definitely falls in the second category with its tiny size of 19 Kilobytes. The portable desktop search software program can be executed from any location of the Windows operating system. It provides a very basic search interface that allows users to select a folder and search term. The program will then display the search results in its interface with the possibility to open the containing folder or files directly from the search results.

One of the most important features of TheSearchMan is the ability to perform a second search that only searches within the search results to refine the search results again.

It is possible to use wildcards to replace one character (?) or multiple characters (*). The search is performed fast, probably not as fast as in search engines that make use of a database or other means of storing file information to increase search speed. It does usually take a few seconds to display the results which is perfectly acceptable for most uses.

TheSearchMan will not search within files. Users who do need that functionality might take a look at Locate32 which offers that. TheSearchMan on the other hand is a lightweight – most likely one of the smallest if not the smallest – desktop search application (50 KB unpacked) that can be downloaded from the developer’s website.

Related posts

• Everything Is A Rather Unusual Desktop Search Tool (13)
• Windows Search Replacement Fileseek (2)
• Windows Search 4.0 (12)
• Windows IFilter Explorer (1)
• Tags For Your Files (3)

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.

Related posts

• Wolfram Alpha Is Live (16)
• Cuil (7)
• Worio Combines Bookmarking And Web Search (2)
• Test Google’s Next-Generation Search Engine Infrastructure (3)
• Spice Up Google Search With Google Fx (4)

The search engine mashup displays a single search form on the main page. It will perform searches on both Bing and Google and display the results in two columns on the same page with the Microsoft Bing search engine on the left and the Google search engine on the right. This makes it easier to work with both search engines and compare results in the same window.

The service displays its search form on the top of the screen so that users can perform additional searches on both search engines right away. It is furthermore possible to use a search form in one of the columns to search in one search engine exclusively. The search for web browser that is shown in the image above shows that both search engines list Firefox, Opera, Google Chrome (Google Browser), Safari and Flock on the main page. Google links to the Maxthon web browser additionally while Microsoft to the defunct Netscape browser. Funny though that both are not linking to Internet Explorer on their first results page.

Both columns offer the full functionality offered by the search engine including image and video search. Bing And Google offers an easy to use mashup that delivers results from both Bing and Google making it extremely convenient to work with and compare both search engines.

Related posts

• Take a blind test and change your searching habits (8)
• Microsoft Bing Search Is Live (11)
• Google Unified Search (3)
• Worio Combines Bookmarking And Web Search (2)
• Wolfram Alpha Gets Its First Core Update After Launch (3)

This functionality is available to all users. Registered users on the other hand can add the social bookmarking component to the mix. A Facebook or Worio account is needed for this. Once the account has been created it is possible to start saving bookmarks which will shape the profile over time meaning that Worio will use that data to display recommendations. If a user tags a lot of operating system, backup software or networking topics then that is what will be recommended primarily to him.

The account creation is a breeze for Facebook users as most data will be imported from there. Another interesting feature is the ability to import bookmarks from Delicious which also works incredibly well. Every page can be added to the bookmarks. If a user chooses to do so a new overlay image appears that displays tag recommendations and options to add or remove tags before saving the site.

A bookmarklet is provided that can be used to tag and add active websites to the Worio profile. The site can also be added to the list of available search engines.

The verdict:

The developers have created an easily accessible bookmarking site that adds to the search experience with its recommendation engine. It does well as a bookmarking site alone but excels when the search is used as well.

Related posts

• Yahoo integrating Delicious into search results (0)
• Delicious Not del.ico.us (4)
• Yahoo vs. Google vs. Msn, Search commands compared (4)
• Yahoo Search Assist (1)
• Xoopit To Become Yahoo Mail Exclusive (5)

Like the name suggests it starts off by displaying everything – that is all files and folders – of a computer system. It eliminates all files and folders that do not match the search query of the user in the instant the key is pressed. What this means is that thousands of file names and folders will be displayed at the beginning, for example 1.5 million on a Windows XP test system.

Entering characters will reduce that amount drastically so that the required files and folders will be left in the end. To ensure that all files and folders have to be added to the index at start. It might take a minute or two depending on the amount of files. The developer mentions that indexing 1 million files will take around 1 minute. The index will be stored on the computer’s hard drive in the same location that the file was launched from. The one million indexed files and folders take up about 5 Megabytes of hard drive space.

The desktop search tool uses between 50 and 60 Megabytes of computer memory and about the same mount of virtual memory while running. The items can be sorted by name, path, data or size.

The search supports Boolean expressions, wildcards and regular expressions. The faq contains a helpful list of the expressions that can be used in the search.

Another interesting aspect of Everything is that it can launch an HTTP server so that users can search for and download files.

Everything will run on Windows 2000, XP, 2003 and Vista and can locate files and folders on local NTFS volumes.

Related posts

• Portable Desktop Search Software TheSearchMan (8)
• Desktop Search Engine DocFetcher (6)
• Google Images Downloader (25)
• Bing Downloader (5)
• Youtube Video Search Is A Barebone Youtube Downloader (2)

Iconfinder is easier to use because it let’s you view License details and tags without going to a new page, and lets you download the icon as well without switching pages (this is rare). IconLook also has some good options, for example you can select sizes before performing the search, narrowing your search instantly. Iconfinder has the same functionality, but you can narrow only after your initial search.

Overall I like both sites, perhaps the best practice is to use both. Since neither will provide pages and pages of results, you can easily scan through both sites and find the best icon for you. If you know any other icon finding sites I’d appreciate you sharing, I’m always in need of some good icons!

Related posts

• Create Desktop Icons With Simply Icon (5)
• Worio Combines Bookmarking And Web Search (2)
• Wolfram Alpha Gets Its First Core Update After Launch (3)
• WinFS, Was it Really so Good? (1)
• Windows Search Replacement Fileseek (2)

The document formats that get added by the filter pack are .docx, .docm, .pptx, .pptm, .xlsx, .xlsm, .xlsb, .zip, .one, .vdx, .vsd, .vss, .vst, .vdx, .vsx, and .vtx whcih are basically all the new document formats that have been introduced in Microsoft Office 2007.

An IFilter basically allow the Windows Indexing Service and Windows Desktop Search so that these file formats become searchable in Windows. The Microsoft Filter Pack can be installed on Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista or Windows XP.

The Microsoft page states that the software package has been updated to version 2 on October 9 although the download is still for the Microsoft Filter Pack 1.0.

Related posts

• Windows IFilter Explorer (1)
• Change The Default Windows XP Search Engine (4)
• Windows Vista Start Button For XP (5)
• Windows Vista Sidebar For Windows XP (51)
• Use Dreamscene On Windows XP (14)

You will also be aware that WinFS was removed from the feature list when the Longhorn project was reset.

The lack of real discussion and comment from Microsoft seems to have led to a great deal of speculation, rumour and myth concerning the WinFS file system which really has more in common with the “Microsoft should rewrite Windows” movement of thought than actual reality.

I know personally I had a lot of misconceptions about the whole thing, perhaps due to the fact I’m a non-programmer. What confused me the most was the while using Vista I came across a lot of functionality which seemingly resembled the WinFS I had heard so much about, yet I frequently heard the comments about Vista being pointless because it lacked the promised Longhorn features.

However Ed Bott’s article “Why Do You Want WinFS?” explained a lot and after checking it out and reading around I discovered a lot of interesting things. Apologies if this is old news to you, hopefully some of you will find this interesting:

WinFS was never going to replace NTFS:

WinFS was not a new file system designed to replace NTFS, it was a system designed to run on top of NTFS, which potentially provided the capability to be moved between OS’s:

“WinFS is based on SQL Server and its core feature is to provide a data relations mechanism. This means that your pictures are related to dates, events, and persons and so on. This allows you to perform a search such as "All pictures of Joe taken the last month". This query is not possible for a traditional file system such as NTFS, but will be a trivial part of WinFS. In reality, WinFS stores are simply SQL Server database files (.mdf files) with the FILESTREAM feature enabled. These files are stored in secured folder named "System Volume Information" placed into the volume root, in folders under the folder "WinFS" with names of GUIDs of these stores.”

WinFS was a drag on system performance and potentially had a bad programming model:

Boy, and you complained about Windows Vista. Imagine if Vista had included WinFS, Microsoft wouldn’t have had a chance against the forum haters. (Or, ironically, perhaps people may have actually accepted system performance slow down thinking it was worth it for this great new technology)

According to Dare Obasnjo; “The third thing I worry about is that the programming model will suck. An easy to use programming model often trumps almost any problem. Developers prefer building distributed applications using XML Web Services in .NET to the alternatives even though in some cases this choice leads to lower performance. The same developers would rather store information in the registry than come up with a robust alternative on their own because the programming model for the registry is fairly straightforward.”

Vista can do much of what WinFS was intended for:

From the WinFS development blog (2006: “The vision for a richer storage in Windows is very much alive.  With the new tools for searching and organizing information in Windows Vista, we are taking a good step towards that vision.”

Perhaps what is the most frustrating thing with WinFS is that Vista actually does include much of what WinFS was intended for but without the kind of disadvantages previously mentioned. It clearly doesn’t have WinFS, but most of what was relevant and useful for end users has been included. You’ll find much of those features present in the Windows Indexing and Search technologies.

The irony of this is that if consumers and developers have so far been so unwilling to utilise the current technologies of Vista than what does this say about their willingness to adopt something even more radical which would have been the result of WinFS?

As Paul Thurrott wrote some time ago about WinFS, “the big deal, of course, was desktop search, a capability that had always been part of the plan, but was being promoted because of the sudden rise in Internet-based searches.” This never changed through the Longhorn/Vista development and integrated searching is the single biggest improvement in Windows.

Other WinFS features included metadata sorting, filtering and indexing, virtual folders and shared data between applications. All these are essential aspects of WinFS and can be found in Vista. Here is one more detailed example of just how powerful some of the Vista search tools are. 

You can also take a look at Paul Thurrott’s Virtual Folders showcase here.

If I’m wrong about any of these statements, maybe even completely up the wrong tree then let me know!

Related posts

• Windows Longhorn Blog (0)
• Windows Vista SP1 Download (12)
• Windows Vista SP1 breaks applications (2)
• Windows Vista Editions – Do you know the differences ? (6)
• Windows 7 Wishlist (11)

In short, Cuil (pronounced ‘cool’) is a brand new search engine founded by a team consisting of ex-Googlers and various other Internet entrepreneurs including the founder of AltaVista. The team contained members who had worked on Google’s search engine index itself, and led real credence to their claims.

Cuil stated they had a larger index to Google, provided more relevant results by analysing content rather then incoming links and had a more intuitive interface.

What happened was that Cuil crashed soon after launching, got back online then began providing some pretty dodgy results for search terms. It consequently got slammed across the blogosphere and media, not too good a beginning for any startup.

How did this happen?

CNET revealed that the non-relevant results was a consequence of the differing architecture of Cuil’s searching technology compared to Google.

“This is because Cuil isn’t set up as a massively parallel search network the way, say, Google is… Each of Cuil’s search appliances is specialized to a particular subcategory of results. There are machines that understand and index sports; others are experts on medicine, etc. As these search machines get overloaded, Sollitto said, they drop offline for some queries, and the machines left online return less-than-relevant results that then appear at the top of users’ pages.”

This sounds plausible enough but I guess the real question is, Will this make a better search product eventually? Considering Google still stands head and shoulders above its competitors in terms of relevancy Cuil is going to have to do a lot of work to make headway against such a web giant.

The other main issue was in how Cuil marketed itself. Claims of a bigger index is really quite pointless considering that when Google itself launched, it had the smallest index out of all the 90’s search engines.

Cuil’s arguments about search indexing technology also seemed a little inaccurate by stating they would create more relevant results by analysing content itself, not just incoming links like Google. Considering Google’s entire business depends on the accuracy of its indexing its ridiculous to assume linking is the only determinate of their results. An estimated 200 different factors are used in the Google search algorithm and are constantly tweaked. Google recognizes there is no one way pages can be ranked relevantly and perhaps Cuil should to.

Cuil faces a lot more competition then Google did back in 1998 so I’ll be interested to see how this turns out. I do think their interface is more intuitive, however unfortunately even that could do with some ironing out as the pages seem to associate completely random images with websites.

Related posts

• Wolfram Alpha Gets Its First Core Update After Launch (3)
• Cuil Search Engine (15)
• Worio Combines Bookmarking And Web Search (2)
• Wolfram Alpha Is Live (16)
• Test Google’s Next-Generation Search Engine Infrastructure (3)

Windows Search is basically a desktop search application much like Google’s Desktop Search. It builds an index of the files – and other information like emails – on the system after installation which takes some time depending on the size of the hard disks and the amount of files stored on them. Some users reported indexing times of several hours in previous versions of Windows Search.

It does take this long because Windows Search does not only index file names and attributes but also file contents for selected files including most text formats like Word and HTML documents but also media files like images and video formats.

I still prefer Locate32 which is resource friendly and faster in my opinion.

Related posts

• Windows Search Replacement Fileseek (2)
• Tags For Your Files (3)
• Smallest Desktop Search Tool (2)
• Save and Locate all Files on your hard drives fast (3)
• Portable Desktop Search Software TheSearchMan (8)

The default type is comprehensive which means that Google observes everything for the user. It can be changed to video, blog or web related alerts which would exclude the rest of the types. Alerts can be send out once per day which is the default value. That can be changed to once per week and to when it happens which could mean that you get bombarded with emails if you happen to observe a popular term.

A Google account is needed to configure and manage the alerts. The mail on the other hand can be entered freely and does not have to be the Gmail address.

Make Use Of have posted about a service called Feed My Search today which converts Google Alerts into RSS Feeds. That’s definitely convenient to use and highly recommended.

Related posts

• Worio Combines Bookmarking And Web Search (2)
• Twingly Blog Search (7)
• Search Bing And Google Simultaneously (14)
• Search (5)
• Google Search Options (2)

Once you have quick links enabled, all you need to do is create some custom searches. Now let’s see what you can do here. For example I get a lot of comments on some of my Youtube videos and I like to take a look at them and keep track. However I don’t like them clogging up my inbox, so I have a filter that archives them right away. I could create a filter for the comments, even a filter for comments on separate videos, but I can also search for them, and create a quick link to that search page by clicking “add a quick link” to the side. The major advantage of this method is that you don’t need to create a lot of labels. I find that labels are great for organizing, but if you use too many, it’s the same as not using them at all.

You can use these quick links for much more than just listing comments. Since you can list any search page, why not list all the video’s you’ve received either by attachement or from youtube? Just create a search for these items and add them to your quick links. This can be of great help if you’ve been emailing with a collegue and you know he sent you the traffic analysis, but can’t remember when and where. Just create a quick link to all doc files sent by that person and you can browse through the files easily.

Related posts

• Yahoo to offer unlimited Email Storage (8)
• Yahoo Mail, Search And Messenger Upgrades (2)
• Xoopit To Become Yahoo Mail Exclusive (5)
• Worio Combines Bookmarking And Web Search (2)
• Wolfram Alpha Gets Its First Core Update After Launch (3)

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

• Worio Combines Bookmarking And Web Search (2)
• Windows Search 4.0 (12)
• Why Google Chrome OS Will Have No Huge Impact (20)
• Twingly Blog Search (7)
• Take a blind test and change your searching habits (8)

The biggest challenge both search engines face is trying to keep their indexes spam-free and provide accurate results.

Enter Twingly Spam-free Blog Search.

Twingly takes on the blog search market with a home page that is somehwhere in between the between Google’s trademark spartan interface and Technorati’s crowded portal.

In terms of usability and design I think Twingly is defiantly the superior, sporting a suitably web 2.0 style look and easy to use interface. To me Technorati is far too crowded and Google’s blog search a little boring and lacking.

The main features as outlined by founder Martin Kallstorm are

- Spam free search
- Social search. The users enhance the search results by voting on posts they like. Bloggers enhance the search results by linking to posts they like
- Subscribe to search results by RSS and alerts via email
- Language functionality: Translation of search results and filtering based on language
- Twingly widget platform. Parts of Twingly.com can be incorporated into blogs
- Hot Right Now. Overview on hot topics in the blogosphere
- User directed development through a tech plan open for voting.

The only thing I don’t like about this is the need to register a new account to get full functionality from Twingly. Part of the fact Technorati’s ranking systems are no longer considered that accurate is because many people never use the voting or contribution features as they require logging in.

The technology behind the service is maybe the most important aspect, more so then the design or UI. Twingly has a pretty small index at this point of around 30 million blogs concentrated on the region of Europe. There is no explanation of how the Spam free blog service works and although the website has now been released publicly, spam-free search is still labelled as beta.

I think they stand a chance of competing with the aging Technorati, even after it receives 7.5 million in funding as reported by TechCrunch. Technorati is error-prone and losing popularity, Twingly is a fresh face which may or may not prove beneficial to blog owners and readers.

Related posts

• Worio Combines Bookmarking And Web Search (2)
• Search Bing And Google Simultaneously (14)
• Search (5)
• Matt Cutts confirms Google Punishment (1)
• Google Alerts (0)