Phil Bradley's weblog

AmboCarta esoterica search

AmboCarta search. Searching for esoterica isn't something that I do very often, but should I ever need to, I can try this search engine. It's actually built on a Google custom search engine, so it has the usual advantages and disadvantages that you'd expect. So if you ever need to quickly pull up stuff about tarot cards for example, try this one. The engine is linked into a commercial site which provides users with a virtual tarot deck and place to display them in order to do a reading with a client. It's a really clever idea, though admittedly a niche market.

Panabee

[Edited to add] Panabee has now changed its functionality. It is now a resource that allows users to find domain names, based on inputting two terms. I've blogged about the new version.

 

Panabee. I'm liking this. It's a classic concept with a slightly different twist. Run your search and Panabee displays a split screen of results from 2 different engines. (During the search stage it also provides suggested search terms.) However, you can then choose to display results from various subject areas such as images, shopping, reference, real-time, gossip and so on. In each category you can then choose from various different engines - in the video section for example is the chance to search from 14 of them.

The nice thing is that you can have one pane displaying results from your favourite image search engine, while the other displays web results for example. It's a little like creating your own merged or blended set of  results. Nice, simple fast and effective.

Tweckr - The eyes of twitter

Tweckr. Simply a collection of images uploaded to twitter and updated every 20 seconds. Search by keyword is possible. Unfortunately there are some NSFW images that load (yes, even with a search for 'librarian' - go figure!) so I can't really recommend it for any serious research. However, watching over 100 images a minute fly by is quite hypnotic. There are an inordinate number of photographs of food that are posted!

Collecta for realtime search

I've seen a few of these real time social search engines around now, but I have to say that having taken a quick look at Collecta it's not at all bad. It pulls content from blogs, blog comments, Twitter, Jaiku, Indentica, Flickr, TwitPic, yFrog and video from YouTube and Ustream. It has a three column approach; left hand for search, hot now topics, options and the like, centre column for results and right column to expand the result. It does the job well.

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• Collecta Adds a Multimedia Twist to Real-Time Search (mashable.com)

Whozat? The People Search Engine

Whozat? The People Search Engine. Regular readers will know of my limited enthusiasm with regards people search engines. That is to say, I've not really found a good one yet, and am still hopefully looking. Is Whozat? going to be the Holy Grail of these engines?

It calls itself a search engine designed to find and display information about people. Well yes, that's a fair start; what else would they say? Anyway, you type in your victim's first name, last night and middle name or initial. There's also an option for keywords, which is quite useful. Unfortunately, there's no location option. This is not good; even an option to limit to or exclude the US from the search would help, but no.

I tried various options for my name (phil, philip, with and without initials) and the phil bradley version with appropriate keywords came out best. The search results were not bad, to be fair. There's a summary tag, images, related queries, an opportunity (at last!) to refine by place, gender and age with a concept cloud that you can refine by, which I also have to say wasn't bad.

Behind the summary are various tags for emails, wikipedia, videos, images, friendster, (not friendfeed though), facebook, myspace and Linkedin. Nothing for Twitter, social bookmarking services, key search engines though, which I found rather odd.

Results can be narrowed in various ways - those mentioned, but also by clicking a tick/cross option with each search to narrow things down. I found using the refine by concept to be the best approach though.

It wasn't a bad experience, but equally I wasn't brimming over with confidence either - the email option only suggested one address, the Facebook option wasn't helpful, and the LinkedIn version was pretty poor as well.

I tried the engine with a few friends and library noteworthies. If I already knew who Brian Kelly and Karen Blakeman were I'd have found them pretty easily, but if I wasn't certain of the spelling it might have been a slightly different story. Of course, when you use an engine like this on 'john smith' or 'jane brown' things become harder more quickly, though again, the concept cloud did help quite a lot.

So in summary - not bad. I enjoyed the various refining methods, and on the whole it wasn't too bad. Still not 'the one' though, so the hunt shall continue.

Flickr's new search functionality

Flickr isn't exactly known for its innovation, so it's nice to see that they've updated their search offering recently. When you run a search you'll get a set a results similar to these:

 

You have options to view images in small or medium and there's a toggle to view detailed information on each picture (though I couldn't find anyway of switching back to the previous view other than the back button!), and you can mouse over an image to highlight a little information offering. Clicking on that displays the image and information about it - who took it, how often it has been viewed, comments, favorites, when taken and so on.

There are also links to appropriate Flickr groups, specific photographers and places. Images can be displayed using one of three options, recent, relevant and interesting. It's a shame that there isn't a toggle for Creative Commons content - you still have to use the advanced search option for that. However, all told it's a nice move and makes searching their billions of images a little easier.

BackType for conversational search

BackType is a real-time, conversational search engine. Conversational search is a new way of searching the web to surface what reputable people are saying about topics and webpages that interest you. They index and connect online conversations from across the web in real-time, so you can see what people are saying about topics that interest you.

The search option is fine, giving you main headlines and a series of comments below. It pulls content from weblogs, social bookmarking sites, Friendfeed and so on. There's also a twitter link to your search term as well. I'm not entirely convinced on the speed however... the most recent reference to libraries is apparently about 6 hours ago, though to be fair, if I choose the 'all' option instead of 'relevant' I get material up to a few minutes ago.

This probably isn't an engine that I'd use much myself - I'd be inclined to move along to Icerocket's Big Buzz to be honest. However, it's there if you fancy trying it.

Navisso Search

Navisso Search. This is an interesting search engine that I discovered thanks to AltSearchEngines. Their main value (according to them) is the thing that I like the least, ironically enough. They say: "Navisso is an independent web search engine that (unlike many other popular search engines) does not rely on external search feeds. Our focus is to build a reliable, content-driven searchable index while reducing spam and other undesirable pages within our results... We are interested in building a true search engine by providing accurate, real, and relevant search results to our visitors. That said, we will never push any results to the top, unlike many other search engines."

This is supposed to ensure that 'official sites' don't get top billing, because they're not always the best. This is true, and I've certainly seen times when a fan site is better than the official one, particularly with films or books. However, one of the problems facing is the searcher is 'do they want the best resource or the most authoritative?' The truth is usually somewhere between the two, and I think this is where Navisso falls down. My martin luther king search didn't return any of the key sites that I expect to find, though the racist site was actuallly on the first page - clearly a case when an unofficial site, put together for devious means gets a better ranking than the good stuff.

So what DO I like about it? The functionality is good. Their 'OR' option is slightly strange, since it's {cat dog} but you can do a wildcard search based on * (librar* for library, libraries etc) and there's a nice unknown character ? and they also provide options for nested logic.

Still in its early stages yet, so the database isn't that large, but it's an engine I may well revisit at some point in the future to see how it's developing.

Latest IRN out now.

Internet Resources Newsletter: Issue 175 September 2009 is now available - just follow the link. Always a useful resource, and never an issue goes back that I don't find something really good to go off and explore.

Top 25 Free e-books Sites, the Definitive List

Top 25 Free e-books Sites, the Definitive List. I don't know for sure just how definitive it is, but it's a good collection with a brief description of each site. If you're into ebooks this is a page to bookmark!