Phil Bradley's weblog

XAPHOO Search - Home

XAPHOO Search. is a fairly basic search engine, but it works well enough. It provides access to the web, images, video, news, sport, audio, wikis, PDFs and something called 'sweepstakes'. There's a basic advanced search function (limit to specific sites for example) and an option to limit a search to a specific country. The results are good enough, with a thumbnail option, an email link and a 'quick look' to load the site into the search engine window.

It does what it should do, but in all honesty I can't find anything particularly exciting about it.

SimilarSites.com

SimilarSites.com - Easily Find Similar WebSites. This one works in the same way as all of the other search engines in this category. You type in a site that you like and it'll find well - similar sites to that one. (However did you guess!) Works well, nice and clear, easy to see the results, which are presented with a thumbnail to the left and brief summary to the right. You can vote sites up or down.

It's nice enough, but not good enough to knock my favourite, Web Insuggest off its perch. Of course, if you don't like either of those you can try Similicio.us or Who is like it?

Hunch - a decision search engine that works

I really wasn't sure what to expect when I looked at Hunch as the home screen asked me where I lived. It then asked me a bunch of other questions about what I liked, was interested in, age, sex and so on. I dutifully answered the questions (didn't take long, no more than a couple of minutes) and then Hunch told me that it knew enough about me to start being helpful.

You can look at one of the preset questions, or search for other questions to help you out in decisions you have to make. Let's take one (almost) at random, and I'll walk you through it.

'Where should I live in London?' By a pub/nightlife? North or South? Tube zone? Happening or Quiet? Tube line? Quick answers to these then gave me Wimbledon, Battersea or Dulwich, with a 'wild card' of Richmond. Interestingly I've lived fairly close to ALL of those locations, so you can't get much more accurate than that.

I answered questions on British comedies (again, spot on) and SF films (pretty much a failure), and then explored the service, and said that I wanted to make a decision on the search engine I wanted to use. Wild card answer came up with Exalead which was pretty good. Also tried 'which URL shortening service should I use' and it got that right as well.

If you have a decision to make it's worth trying this out - and it's quite fun as well.

Search engine comparisons

There are a few resources that have popped up in the last few days that allow you to compare searches from the major engines in a blind taste testing exercise. The first one that I came across was Blind Search. Run a search and get a three column set of results - simply choose the one set of results that you're happiest with. You'll then see the engines popped up afterwards; Bing, Google or Yahoo. You have to keep a note of the engine that you like the best, since a tally option that the site originally had has now been removed.

The second engine, which just displays two screens from Bing and Google is called Bingandgoogle which doesn't score much for originality, but is very accurate. Bingle does exactly the same job and you cannot really tell the two apart; the only difference being that you can switch results entirely to one search engine or the other.

Of course, if you don't like any of these you can always try Tripleme which does a search across Yahoo, Google and MSN Live (which I'm guessing is pulling results from Bing).

GrabAll allows you to compare two pane results for Google, Yahoo, Ask, Bing, DMOZ, AltaVista, Gigablast and Looksmart.

Scour lets you check out results from Google, Yahoo and Bing with a nice sort option.

Searchboth will compare results from Google, Yahoo, Ask, Dogpile, MetaCrawler, AltaVista, Looksmart and Websearch again in a two pane window approach.

Soovle takes a different approach by providing on page access to Google, Wikipedia, Amazon, Answers, Yahoo, Bing and YouTube, Type in your keyword and Soovle comes up with alternative terms - click on any of them and your search will be run on the appropriate engine.

SimilarSites

SimilarSites - Find Similar Sites. No prizes for guessing what this site does. Yup - type in a URL and it will try and find sites that are - well - similar to that one. I tried various different sites and I was satisfied with the results that I got. There are a few of these sites appearing now and I've got a listing of them at http://www.philb.com/sitebasedinfo.htm#similar. My favourite is still InSuggest however since it's smooth, well put together, attractive and lets you add more sites to focus your search.

New Search Engine Duck Duck Go

The wonderful people at Pandia alerted me to Duck Duck Go which is a new search engine that's trying to provide better results with less spam. It has a nice simple Google like interface, which is as minimal as you can get. Depending on the search query, Duck Duck Go (I have no idea why it's called that by the way) either provides a small factual box with information (which unfortunately it takes from Wikipedia; disappointing), asks for clarification (Duck Duck Go knows Apple can mean different things. Which meaning?) or displays a series of results, though quite limited. Any serious searcher is going to continually be clicking on the 'more links' option.

There is a nice shortcut icon bar to the right which allows searchers to copy their search directly across to YouTube, Twitter, IMDB, Amazon and so on. Nice touch.
I'd like to see this engine doing a lot more however. No help options! No RSS feeds, no indication of any options to allow users to search across news, images, blogs and so on, without leaving the site. While I was happy with the search engine it didn't hugely inspire me to be honest, and while a spam free search engine is great, I generally do find Google works pretty well for me in that area, and I'm still to be convinced about DDG. One to bookmark and revisit in 6 months or so I think.

StillTasty: Your Ultimate Shelf Life Guide

The StillTasty search engine isn't really one that I'd normally mention in my weblog, but I discovered it a while ago and mentioned it in Twitter, then forgot its name and had to spend ages refinding it again. So it's in the blog in order to make my life easier.

Basically you provide it with a product, it asks you some questions to clarify what you're interested in and then tells you how long the product can safely be kept for. I asked about cheddar cheese, we clarified this down to an opened block in a wrapping that was kept in the fridge and I got a suggestion for 3-4 weeks. It also gave me some suggestions on the best way to keep it, what to do if mold develops and so on.

The site also provides answers to very sensible and quite interesting questions - is bottled water safe to drink after its sell by date, and is it safe to still eat pizza that's been left out overnight as two examples. (Yes and No, in case you're wondering).

This is a site that's a real time sink, so only go and have a look when you can devote a good half hour or more to it!

Visuwords; graphical dictionary

If you like words, you'll love playing around with Visuwords, which is a graphical dictionary. Type in your word and you're more likely than not to end up with a graphical creation like this:

You can hover your mouse over each definition and click to re-search the dictionary. The coloured links indicate useful information about the word and its relationship to other words. It uses Princeton University’s WordNet, an opensource database built by University students and language researchers.

Nice, attractive and quick - bound to attract children as well as adults.

Dooblet - find alternatives

Sometimes you just want to find something that's a little bit different. Different game, rock band, author, software or whatever. This is where Dooblet comes into play. Type something into the engine and it will produce alternatives for you.

So a search for 'chess' returns 'go' and 'checkers'. A search for Google gives us Yahoo, Microsoft and Exalead. Alternatives for Everton give us Liverpool, Chelsea and Arsenal. Firefox? We're directed to Safari.

This is a surprisingly accurate resource and I like it a lot. If there isn't a suggestion for your search term Dooblet will give you the chance to add something. The major downside with this engine is that you can't actually search the web for your results. You'll need to cut and paste to go across to another search engine in order to do this, which is irritating and a major flaw in the service. However, as alternative engines go, this one isn't bad.

There are plenty of other 'suggestion' search engines in case you like the concept but don't like this engine, and they're listed in my 'Which search engine when' resource.

April 1st is 'Day without Google'

“Day without Google”. is an idea that AltSearchEngines came up with. Can you manage for a day without Google's search engine? If you're in doubt you can try some of the suggestions on their listing, or try my 'Which Search Engine When?' resource.

Whatever though - take a punt and try a different search engine!