Washington, July 20: Microsoft’s recent launch of its search engine Bing prompted many to stray from Google for the first time in a while.
What they found was a search engine with a few nifty tricks up its sleeve.
But Bing isn’t the only alternative search engine that has managed to introduce features that search kings Google and Yahoo don’t have.
Plenty of newcomers are innovating in ways that can add up to significant productivity gains for you as you search for information on the internet. Here are a few.
Social networking search
Social networking sites – everything from Twitter to the myriad forums on every topic imaginable – have transformed the web in many ways, not least because these sites provide a flow of information that is constantly updated.
Unfortunately, traditional search engines – which rely on store and retrieve technology – aren’t good at indexing up-to-the-minute changes on these social networking sites, and that’s where Collecta comes in.
Collecta specialises in “real time search”, and it focuses on those sites where information is continually updated – news sites, blogs, social networking sites, and more.
Type a search term, and you’ll get not just some stored or cached data that may be months old but rather the latest mentions of whatever you searched for.
What’s more, Collecta continually updates its search results, and you can see those results being updated in real time. It’s a far cry from the constant refreshing you would need to do at most search engines.
Collecta isn’t the only search engine doing real-time search. IceRocket, Scoopler, and OneRiot have similar missions, scouring the “realtime web” and presenting you the results.
Informational search
Sorting through the vast amount of information on the web to find what’s most useful is a job normally left up to you. Most search engines present you with thousands of links, and you’re supposed to scan the first few dozen and figure out what’s worth clicking.
Kosmix takes a different approach. Working as a kind of information aggregator, Kosmix presents your search results in a magazine page format so that you can more easily scan the types of information available.
One section, for instance, is devoted to “featured topics”, while video and image-related results are presented under the more traditional links.
Also, a section of search results is compiled from social media sites. Because its emphasis is on quality rather than quantity, Kosmix tends to favour results from content-heavy sites such as Wikipedia.
—Agencies