Habitually Good

Search or Google is the way most people surf the Internet today (of course the other is probably RSS, but anyway). This is what I used to think till recently when I examined how I surf the internet. And also, as Google returns more and more irrelevant results for simple queries (not everyone can form advanced queries now, can they?), this medium of surfing becomes very time consuming.

Now, I subscribe to various blogs through RSS to get my daily feed (no pun intended), but if I am looking for something specific then I have no choice but to go and Google it. Well, due to some insights shared by a colleague of mine, I came to know that a lot of people feel the same way and unlike me some are doing something about it. There are loads of neo search engines out there which are adding twists to search. Some are Meta search engines which allow users to query multiple search engines together; others allow searchers to rate their results and then adjust the index accordingly; and there are those which harness the power of social networking to search.

There are several flavors to this theme and each one is interesting in its own accord. Following are a few that I liked:

• www.url.com – This is a meta search engine which pulls results from multiple search engines and then asks users to rate the search results for relevance when they visit the actual page. Then they adjust their rankings accordingly.
• www.yoople.net – This is another meta search engine which pulls results from Yahoo and Google, and then allows users to adjust the ranks of the page by dragging and dropping the results in the right slot (i.e. the right slot according to the user). Nice UI, very simple and Web 2.0
• www.lijit.com – This is the one that I find most interesting. It is based on social networking principles. You basically make a network of trust and then when you search, the results will be marked up according to contributions by members of your network. To see the ideas behind this in a better way, look at www.getoutfoxed.com (it was called Outfoxed before it went Lijit (pun intended)).

Then there is the big daddy of all: Google. Google launched Google Co-op some time back and now they also have something called Subscribed Links as well as Google Topics.

• Google Co-op – allows you to build custom search engines to which you can add your own index and also add relevance scores for given categories. This gives you the ability to build specialized search engines which should make it easier for people to find what they are really looking for.
• Subscribed Links – this allows anyone to create list their best search result for a given keyword and share it with others. Then when they search for this keyword next, they will see your result on top of the Google Search result. Google has some recommended subscribed links to which you can subscribe if you are logged into your Google Account. Check them out at: http://www.google.com/coop/subscribedlinks/directory/Latest
• Google Topics – this is another very nice feature (though limited in its scope). Google has setup certain topics such as “Health”, “Autos”, etc. to which users can contribute. Users can further categorize these topics into smaller groups (e.g. Autos can have Photos, Reviews, etc.). Now what happens is that when you search for keywords belonging to these topics, above your search results, Google will show these categories which will allow you to filter your results automatically. Try http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Gears+of+War&btnG=Google+Search

Well, I think the Google Search refinements could each be treated in a separate post all together (or maybe a separate post for each one). I am going to setup a custom search engine (and will share the link) whenever I get the time.

[tag]Search[/tag], [tag]Social Networks[/tag]

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