Phil Bradley's weblog

Kindernet!

Kindernet!. This is a search engine for children. The interface isn't terribly exciting, and won't really attract or appeal to their age group audience of 12 or under. However, it seems to do a good job - I did the rather boring dictionary of rude words test with it, and it worked very well - either giving no results, results that were appropriate for children and excluded the adult interpretation or popped up a box pointing out that some words in the search couldn't be used.

As well as a web search option you could search for images, there's a page of reference tools available and a site of the day. If you're looking for a search engine to use with children you might want to research this one for a while (please don't assume that it's safe based on my very brief tests!). I'd be happier if they re-designed it to make it more visually appealing for youngsters though.

100 Useful Niche Search Engines You've Never Heard Of

100 Useful Niche Search Engines You'€™ve Never Heard Of. Actually, you've probably heard of a good number of them, especially if you read this weblog on a regular basis! However, it's a good collection, focussed on US students though, so some of the engines will not be useful. It's arranged into categories:

Extracurricular
Quick Answers
City guides and travel
Shopping search engines
Business
Academic and reference
Social media and people
Multisearch
TV, Video and Radio
Medical students
Law students
Meta search engines
Photographs and images
News
Jobs and real estate

HowDoYa adds relevancy to search

HowDoYa. is a search engine that I've mentioned before - it finds sites or pages that show you how to do things - plan a wedding, clean a car and so on. When you've done a search you get to see some keywords that match up with What, Who, Why and Where. Now they've added in a spectacles option, or X-Ray vision as they term it, which allows you to click on the  glasses and see which keywords are included in the specific site you're looking at. This allows users to quickly see if the result is really what they're after.

It's a very clever and interesting twist - to be honest, it's much easier if you try it, so toddle off and take a peek.

Addictomatic

Addictomatic searches the best live sites on the web for the latest news, blog posts, videos and images. It's the perfect tool to keep up with the hottest topics, perform ego searches and feed your addiction for what's up and what's now.

I have to say - it's not at all bad. It pulls out content from Ask news, technorati, Live.com news, Google blog search, digg, YouTube, Flickr, Blinkx, Truveo video search, Word press, Yahoo web search, Bloglines, topix, Newsvine, delicious, and Wikio.

Thanks to Gwen for this one.

PARAseek.com - The Paranormal Search Engine

I recently found PARAseek the Paranormal Search Engine. My normal run of the mill test searches really wouldn't have cut it here, so I did a search on where I live. 3 of the 4 results no longer worked. Well, ok, maybe not their fault, but I was not impressed with the blood dripping font, references to television programmes and so on. I think there's probably a real need for a search engine that covers this subject area sensibly, but this isn't it.

Find It Custom!

Want something customised? Then you might want to look at Find It Custom! It's a search engine that lists resources, sites and so on that allow you to customise things. It's still in beta and in the very early stages (the top 10 guides only have 2 guides so far), but it might be worth bookmarking and peeking back again now and then.

Bryns Brain - visual search engine

Bryns Brain is a visual search engine that's crawled out from under the woodwork. It's trying to challenge the likes of RedZee and SearchMe. To be honest, it's a bit like leprosy battling it out with TB and Malaria to see which comes out on top. Anyway...

You put in your search terms (you may be able to do more than phrase searching, but there's no advanced search function, no help screens, no examples, so you're out there on your own, with the forbidding dark screen) and then you're faced with a tiny teensy screen with 9 little thumbnails on them. What are they of? You have no way of telling - these beasties are small. Disconcertingly they also move due to 'Tiltviewer' every time you use the mouse.

Eventually of course your curiosity gets the better of you, so you click. And the thumbnails get bigger, so you can actually get a little feel for what's on the page. One nice thing is that you can 'flip' the page over to get a brief summary. Now, this is the fun part. You've looked at the top three, and then you've got to try and manipulate your mouse so you can get a small snippet on screen of the next row of three. Failing that, you click elsewhere on the screen, this takes you back to the thumbnail overview and you can try again. I will confess I only discovered this by accident. 2 mouse clicks to move to new results - that's an interesting concept!

Results were uneven. I had a total of 10 results for the word 'confederate'. For my 'country search engines' term I had 17 results - there was a gap in the 9 maxtrix, a bit like a missing tooth.

To be fair, it's only in Beta at the moment. And I'm unusually caustic, even for me, this morning. But really - these things are just such a pain.

Green Maven - The Green Search Engine

The Green Maven is your gateway to the Green Web. They're a search engine that focuses on green, conscious, and sustainable websites. It works well if what you want is in that subject area - if you do rather more general searches the results start to get a little bit flaky.

How long is long enough? Retaining personal data

A pdf on the subject of search engines and how long they can keep personal data is to be found here: Opinie WP29 zoekmachines.pdf. Basically the Europeans are saying 6 months is long enough, while the major players are less than impressed with this. All except Ixquick of course - Ixquick.com deletes its users' search data (including IP addresses) within
48 hours and has done so for the last 2 years.

Acronym Finder adds 600,000 human edited definition

In total there are over  4,211,000 abbreviations, acronyms, and initialisms at the Acronym finder. It's a very useful resource if you've not discovered it before.