Alternative Search Engines : A UI and a social approach
Due Credit:
SearchEngineJournal
Recently I covered two Search engines that stood out with respect to two trends that I believe will be core to the next big search engine. It is an oft-quoted statement that there are many search engines available in the market but nothing comes close to competing with Google. With the slush of funds and the best of minds perhaps that is true for the time being but lets not forget that there have been many competitors who have gone the same path.
Coming back to the topic, Yoople is an engine that retrieves search results from Yahoo and lets users rank the results according to what they feel is relevant. There are some checks in place to prevent too much manipulation of results but the idea is great cause it brings the social angle to search results, The combination of Man and machine. I came across a video today that had a researcher at MIT comment that Google and Wikipedia were the first among the new series of entities based on collective intelligence. Essentially it means leveraging the best of man and machine. To that extent, Yoople's customization of search results is a great feature.
Next area of focus when it comes to Search Engines is the User Interface. The single text box for query has remained the same since the early days of Yahoo! with a few tabs or buttons added here and there. While no one is really complaining about it, an image search engine that adds a novel UI twist to Google image search is worth trying. Imagery is an engine that adds several new features on top of Google's image search results. Browsing through arrays of images with cataloging type options are really helpful.
While Yoople and Imagery have showcased two areas where a lot of potential exists for more innovation, lets not forget that the domain of search is buzzing with the idea of Semantic search. Its been a technology that has been touted for long by several engines like Hakia and PowerSet refer to search engines computing the concepts embedded in phrases rather than just keywords and link based calculations.
Coming back to the topic, Yoople is an engine that retrieves search results from Yahoo and lets users rank the results according to what they feel is relevant. There are some checks in place to prevent too much manipulation of results but the idea is great cause it brings the social angle to search results, The combination of Man and machine. I came across a video today that had a researcher at MIT comment that Google and Wikipedia were the first among the new series of entities based on collective intelligence. Essentially it means leveraging the best of man and machine. To that extent, Yoople's customization of search results is a great feature.
Next area of focus when it comes to Search Engines is the User Interface. The single text box for query has remained the same since the early days of Yahoo! with a few tabs or buttons added here and there. While no one is really complaining about it, an image search engine that adds a novel UI twist to Google image search is worth trying. Imagery is an engine that adds several new features on top of Google's image search results. Browsing through arrays of images with cataloging type options are really helpful.
While Yoople and Imagery have showcased two areas where a lot of potential exists for more innovation, lets not forget that the domain of search is buzzing with the idea of Semantic search. Its been a technology that has been touted for long by several engines like Hakia and PowerSet refer to search engines computing the concepts embedded in phrases rather than just keywords and link based calculations.
