“Search For Meaning” says hakia’s web site. “hakia is building the Web’s first “meaning-based” search engine, one that will bring answers and meaningful results to questions on any topic”. And then “hakia deploys fuzzy logic (approximate reasoning) methods to allow flexibility so that the Ontological Semantics solution becomes feasible in a Web search application with stringent constraints.” That would normally be enough to make me run a mile and avoid it like the plague, but this new search engine had been recommended to me by Alan Pritchard, a fellow Member and Fellow of CILIP. Alan assured me that it found material he had not seen before and was worth investigating.

My first standard test search on ‘gin vodka sales UK’ hit the jackpot. Highlighted at the top of the screen and above the list of results it said “Great Question :-)”, followed by some figures and a link to the UK Gin and Vodka Association (yes, it really does exist). To be honest, though, any half decent search engine should be able to crack that one. On ‘why is grass green’ it completely lost the plot, but my first mistyped ‘what is grass green’ came up with the goods. Very odd. Other test searches such as ‘Hubbert peak oil’ and ‘car ownership UK’ performed well and hakia did indeed come up with some high quality sites in the top 10-20 that were not in the top results of the other mainstream engines.

I have forced myself to use hakia alongside Google, Yahoo, Ask and Exalead for what I call real-life searches. It is a bit erratic at times but at others it comes up with some real gems. Today, I was looking for current headline inflation rates in the UK compared with the underlying inflation rate. Not only did hakia find the official figures for me but it also offered sites explaining the different indices and the background to the changes over the years.

Definitely one to try and watch for further developments.

Jux2 (http://wwwjux2.com/) is back having been sold by its previous owner on eBay for over USD 100,000.

Jux2 is a meta search tool that runs your strategy through Google, Yahoo and Ask Jeeves and presents you with a combined list. Nothing unusual or innovative in that, but you can also look at just the unique results found by each of the three engines. The closest alternative that I have seen is Dogpile (http://www.dogpile.com/), which enables you to view the lists of results from the “big four” side by side and highlight the unique pages. For Firefox fans there is a plugin for the search box that adds Jux2 to your list of favourite tools.

Blinkx and the Times Online have launched a co-branded toolbar called Times Online Smart Search. This is a variation on the Blinkx desktop search with content from the Times being delivered via the blinkx News channel. It works in the same way as the standard Blinkx desktop search in that it analyses what the user is viewing at the time and delivers related content. Blinkx and Times Online have also customised the Smart Folders that update themselves automatically with content relevant to a topic specified by you. I have to confess that in the past I have been very confused as to how to get this to work but I think I’ve finally cracked it.

There are two versions of Times Smart Search: a light version that does not search your own PC but gives you access to Smart Folders and some custom-made Times Online services, and the full “advanced” version that includes desktop search. They are only available for PCs running “later versions” of Windows – there is no Mac version at present – and the toolbar works with both IE and Firefox.

It is not obvious on the Times home page where one can download the Smart Search but I think the starting point is the invitation to try Smart Search beta.

Business Week’s Best of the Web Poll has now entered its second round. There are now 8 search tools under the Work-Search category: Google, Yahoo, Snap, A9, DogPile, Technorati, Clusty and Exalead. All are excellent tools in their own way. I was thinking of voting for Yahoo but eventually went for Exalead, mainly because of the proximity search option and the Advanced Search features of phonetic, approximate spelling and pattern matching. The last is particularly useful for cheating at – ahem, I mean solving crossword puzzles!

trovando – search different

I picked this one up from Phil Bradley’s blog. Think of it as Turbscout with lots more search engines and lots more types of search. The search tools are organised under tabs such as Web, Images, Reference, News, Blogs etc. Click on a tab, enter your terms and click on each tool in turn to run your search. I particulalry like the URL tab which, amongst other things, finds pages that link to your known URL (backlinks), runs a Whois on the domain name, and finds archived copies of the page. And there is a custom tab where you can build your own collection of search tools.

Gigablast Toolbar

Gigablast is the latest search engine to launch a toolbar for your browser. At first glance it seems rather Spartan when compared with other toolbars such as Yahoo’s and Google’s but it does have two unique and very useful features: search the sites linked from the current page and search the sites in your bookmarks. Unfortunately it is only available for IE at present. There is a plugin for Firefox users at http://mycroft.mozdev.org/download.html?name=gigablast&submitform=Find+search+plugins but this only adds Gigablast as an option to the built in search box.

Dogpile Adds MSN

Meta search tool Dogpile had added MSN to its collection of search engine. It now searches Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves and MSN all at the same time. You can compare three search tools at a time using Dogpile’s new Search Comparison and see how much overlap there is between them in the first 20 results.

When you run a web search, as well as combining and removing the duplicates from the results Dogpile automatically shows you the Top 12 from Google and Yahoo side by side on the right hand side of the screen. Unique results are highlighted. You can close these boxes or add columns for MSN and Ask Jeeves by clicking on the relevant icons.

In addition to web meta search Dogpile has an images search (Yahoo and Ditto), audio (Yahoo and Singingfish), video (Yahoo and Singingfish) and a News option (Yahoo, Topix News, Fox News, ABCNews). Interestingly, Google and MSN are omitted from the images and news meta search.

The Yellow and White Pages search covers the US only.

Official Find – The Official-Site Searcher

This site claims to make it easier to find the official web sites of top brands and companies. Type in your brand name or company into the search box and you should find the official site at the top or in the top 5-10 search results. For major brands it seems to work well, except that you still have to watch out for advertisements at the top of the results. I had problems, though, with some UK and European brand names and in particular with household cleaning products.

I was on the point of being moderately impressed, but when I ran the same searches in Google most of the results looked identical except for the UK and European brand names. Google managed to find most of those and placed them in the top 3. I then realised that I use Google.co.uk as my default and when I used Google.com the results looked very similar to Official Find’s.

I am not sure what is so special about Official Find. The “About” file refers to their InstaNav which instantly searches for Official Sites with each keystroke and presents results in a drop down menu in the actual search box. You should then be able to select and click on the site without going to a search results page first. They go on to say that “InstaNav tm will make searching at Google and other search engines feel old fashioned!” None of the claimed features worked in Firefox and in IE I kept getting warnings about Active-X.

Verdict: I’ll stick with the boring old fashioned search engines.

Swoogle
Just heard about this tool at the Prague Inforum 2005 conference. Think of it as a sort of Google for the semantic web.