Monthly Archives: May 2007

Exalead, Search Engines

New Exalead Video Search (Beta)

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Exalead have launched a video search for the YouTube, Dailymotion, Metacafe, Kewego and IFILM web sites. There is a link to the new beta service on the Exalead home page.

On the results page a pull-down box enables you to sort results by relevance, most recent, most rated, most viewed, or
length. You can also use the “Narrow your search panel to refine your search by source (website) or video length. Below the “Narrow your search panel is a tag cloud showing the the tags and categories of the videos appearing in your results, allowing you to refine your search further. Each entry in the results list includes a thumbnail image of the video, a title, summary, author, duration, upload date, and a viewer score represented by stars.

This video search option is different from the one that is offered to the right of the web search results page. The latter is the one to to go for if you want more serious, business items for example television news reports and interviews.

Inforum

Live videobroadcasting from INFORUM 2007, Prague

For those of you unable to attend the Prague Inforum conference in person, live videobroadcasting of some of the sessions will be available at http://www.inforum.cz/en/videobroadcasting/.

INFORUM 2007 keynote and guest speakers include Peter Jacso, Peter Godwin, Guus van den Brekel and Zinaida Manzuch.

You can choose between the original commentary of the speaker and its simultaneous translation. The official languages of the conference are Czech and English.

These sessions will be video broadcasted:

Conference Opening
New Technologies and Tools for Electronic Information Resources and Services
European Digital Library and Similar Projects Worldwide
Electronic Information -New Solutions for Traditional Approaches
Web Search Update and World 2.0
Managing Effective Access to E-resources
Conference Closing

The conference takes place on May 22nd – 24th.

Business Information, Market Research

MarketResearch.com acquires Profound

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MarketResearch.com has acquired the Thomson Business Intelligence (TBI) Market Research service, known as Profound. Thomson announced earlier this year that they wanted to sell Profound.

According to the press release “the acquisition expands MarketResearch.com’s international reach with additional content and sales presence in Europe and North America. Profound provides a closed-platform, market research service that complements MarketResearch.com’s open-format, web-based service.” It will be interesting to see what pricing model they adopt for it and how, if at all, they integrate Profound with their existing service. MarketResearch.com bought rival company MindBranch in 2005 but the two sites remain. I suspect that, given the different type of users the services have, Profound will be marketed as a separate product.

Exalead, images, Search Engines

Exalead UK and new search features

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Exalead now has a UK version of its search engine that includes an option to limit your search to UK pages only. Both Exalead.com and UK have added a Wikipedia search and options to limit your results to blogs or forums. Alternatively, you can choose to exclude those types of sites. The Wikipedia search includes a “Narrow your search” panel on the results page that lists ‘tags’ for categories, related terms, people, location and organizations.

Exalead Wikipedia search

Exalead has also launched a new version of its image search with over one billion images indexed. The new ‘Face’ filter enables you to narrow your search results to images containing faces. It is not a hundred per cent accurate and sometimes excludes images that are of faces and includes some in which there are no faces at all, but it is close enough. Other options include size of image, wallpapers, image colour, layout and file type.

Search Strategies

Pipl – People Search (beta)

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Pipl claims to be the most comprehensive people search on the web. Simply type in the first and last names of the person you are looking for, geographic location if known, and Pipl goes off and searches “hidden web” resources as well as the usual Google search. I tried it on myself and it did a pretty good job. The Quick Facts presented at the top of the page were correct, and it pulled in information from blog searches, Google Groups, Linkedin, Flicker and Google Scholar. Pipl also searches electoral rolls, directories, collections of peer reviewed literature such as Scirus and Google Scholar, Hoovers and Zoominfo. A search on my husband, Chris Rhodes, was less successful and I failed to find him amongst the thousands of other Chris Rhodes out there. Google, however, came up with him in the number 1 and 2 positions in a standard web search.

As with all of these types of search engine you still have to differentiate between different people with the same name: I do not work for the Honolulu Advertiser and neither am I the marketing director at Laura’s Lean Beef Company! And the quality of the results is variable. Nevertheless, Pipl is worth adding to your bookmarks for people search.

Pipl home page

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