Quest for perfect Search Engine --Part3

Mon Mar 09 12:00:00 IST 2009, by Abhishek Mehta

In the giant ocean of data called Internet a diver is waiting, on a boat named computer. His mission is to find time/business saving pearls lying under this gigantic ocean and he wants them right now! He has marked the probable area to look for and is well equipped with search instrument like Google/yahoo/MSN. But ocean is getting deeper, denser, rougher, darker and polluted every passing minute. His instruments are of top grade but helpless against the high tides of growth, development, mutation, misuse, and neglect which are constantly changing the surface of the ocean. Diver is an adamant iron horse and isn't going to give up either, so let me welcome all such divers again to the world of web searches and information retrieval.

Part 1 of this blogging series contains reviews on Semantic engines and Part 2 covered the clustering engine types in detail. This blog is the last one of the running series. Lets have a deep look into some engines that make use of the technology for channeling a different user experience. These engines do not impress web searches with over the head linguistic or mathematical models. They give a boost to the human senses, directing common sense to act stronger and swifter. So lets roll the dice:

Does a sizeable preview/screenshot of search results helps you in short listing relevant results from non-relevant ones? If yes, then Snap is the engine for you. This engine is based on the idea of showing a big enough screenshot of the result page before you actually open it. Navigation of the previews (results) is done in a very user friendly and innovative way. Once user starts looking at the previews and actual results, navigation becomes as easy as clicking up and down arrows of your keyboard.

Ranking of the results is based on 'Snap Rank' algorithm. Snap evaluates where users go after a search - what listings they choose and how many pages they review on that site, right after the same search you did. The overall popularity of the site also influences the ranking.

Most interesting part of this website for me lies in their contextual advertising business. Lots of web surfers might have seen web pages with special kind hyperlinks, which opens up advertising or informative widgets (some time irritating also) as shown on right of this post. Explaining this business of snap is out of scope of this blog but I am putting an image of it just for correlation. Snap claims to have 200000 websites enrolled for this program.

If you haven't heard about Google's initiatives from me till now, then here it goes. Google is not sitting on a LAZBOY and watching all new technologies crop up and eat into its advertising share. It is on its feet and attempting a mass scale, collaborative search effort with coalition of the willing called "Google SearchWiki".

SearchWiki is a way for you to customize your search results. You can do re-ranking, deleting, adding, and commenting on search results, which you are able to find with help of Google search engine. For doing this you should have a Google account and should be logged into it. Having Google account does not mean getting into gmail, just create a passport with Google with your personal email address. You will always see a "sign in" option on any Google web search page (Just look for it at the right top).

Once you have done a search and liked it, move it to the top results page by clicking on up-arrow button appearing next to the result, or remove it if you don't want to see it again. These changes will be persisted in your account and will always reappear in your favored way. One can also add results (urls) in his favored list if they are not appearing in the Google. This can be done by going to the bottom of the result page and then clicking on the link saying, "Add result"

You can also leave a comment/s on the selected result for your own future reference but make sure you should not type in personal data, as these comments (not ranking) will be made public to the other users. Webmasters don't have to worry about this feature, as individual rankings do not affect overall rankings of the pages with respect to the query fired.

Microsoft's SearchTogether is a free Internet Explorer plug-in that allows groups of people to collaborate on Web searches. All you need is Internet explorer 7 or above with windows live account and your co searchers in your buddy list. Just the way MSN chat messenger works. Download the SearchTogether plug-in on all of your machines and you are ready to roll.

SearchTogether can benefit any group of people who are interested in investigating a topic together, such as students working on a group report, colleagues working on a joint project, or friends planning a shared vacation or other social activities. SearchTogether supports both synchronous and asynchronous collaboration styles.

Collaboration is a very important aspect of web searching, as everyone who is doing research on the web isn?t alone. As a student or product reviewer, subjects have to be researched collectively with friends/colleagues over various search engines. But the biggest bottleneck in collaborative effort is the communication over the live actions. SearchTogether has the answer for this problem as it can search Google, Yahoo, Live etc. Results can be shared and communicated along with all types of queries used from one research to other. Recommendations and comments on the results and topics can also be shared immediately. This is a very effective platform but might need few hours of training and head forging to extract the maximum value. This initiative from Microsoft research lab is promising one, but needs some UI upgrades and have to come out of Beta version.

There are reservations in the searching community that Yahoo is not so serious about adding context based and semantic value to its searches. But that is not fully true when you look into the alternate path which yahoo has taken. Yahoo has opened up its search indexes to third parties, which are interested in building better search experiences. This initiative has forced all other search engines to follow the suit.

Every company, which believes that it can provide better search options, Should re-index the web over and over again? After all it has already been indexed many times by Google, Yahoo, Live or Ask. The answer according to Yahoo is 'NO', and it is rightly so. With the launch of Yahoo 'Search Monkey' and BOSS services many new startups have got a fairly big web indexes to compete with monopolistic biggies. Why to be Cuil when you can be green enough to be Cluuz, Kosmix, Hakia, Clusty, Quintura, and Kartoo. All the engines, which I have mentioned, are using Yahoo search indexes and are focusing their efforts on getting better at 'search results'.

Conclusion

Almost two decades have grown up and have quenched their thirst for information using the keywords. It's a cliché but more then half of the searches in the world are done using Google. Sheer power of votes from web citizens has made Google number one search engine.

Engines like Cluuz, Kosmix, Hakia, Clusty, Quintura, Kartoo, Snap, Powerset etc don't even make up a percent of all the web searches done worldwide. Adventurous, supportive, optimist and people in need of vertical knowledge prefer these kind of upcoming engines. For the time being, all of us have to live with whatever strongest contenders we have selected in field of semantics, clustering, Meta search, federated search and verticals.

But searchers and search engines have to grow up and growing they are. We are just few years away from an engine that adds exorbitant value in our web searches. Lets wait till this new innovation strikes.

Posted at 12:00AM Mar 09, 2009 by ABhi in Trends  |  Comments[2]