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Special Search Engines
The internet has grown to a point where there are billions of web pages that users can access. They can range from huge social networking sites (such as facebook) to small specific need or personal websites (My personal blog). With so much information out there on the internet, how can users find exactly what they are looking for? Well the main and obvious solution is to use a search engine such as Google or Bing. Now these are great and work well, but sometimes they might be too broad, return too many results that aren’t quite right. This is where Specialised Search Engines come in.
These specialised search engines are designed for specific searches, such as searching only for videos or only for discussion boards. Below is a list on some special search engines I have found:
- Truveo – Searches video content from Youtube, News sites, content portals, etc.
- Blinkx – Similar to Truveo, it searches for video content. It also uses sound from the videos and transcribes it into text for more relevant searches.
- Omgili – Lets users search for results that are found in forum discussion boards. This can be useful for finding questions answered by a community.
- Pipl – Pipl will search for information about people. You can enter the name of a person and Pipl will search everything on the internet about that person.
- iSearch – Lets you search for people by name, email, phone, or even screen name.
These are just a few of many different specialised search engines available.
As video content is a huge part of the internet these days, i want to look at Truveo and Blinkx a bit closer and compare the two. To start, they both claim to be one of the biggest video content search engines on the internet, but i think Blinkx has a huge advantage of Truveo by its speech recognition ability which would give a lot more meaning to a video which would result in much better search results. I did a little test between the two by trying to search for my own youtube videos, so i put the same search query in both search engines and see which one got my videos. It turned out that Truveo didn’t find any videos at all, while Blinkx found over 38 000 results, i checked the first 10 pages, none of which where my videos, but they where relevant to the search. I then tried to search the exact name of one of my videos and had a similar result. This time Blinkx only finding 14 000 results.
At this point I decided I would try searching the original query “toyota supra lakeside” in Youtube itself, which was the first query I tried in Truveo and Blinkx. Youtube showed me all of my videos within the first 15 results. I then tried searching the same query on Google Videos search and got a similar result to the Youtube search.
When it comes back to Truveo and Blinkx I think that Blinkx is a better search engine. It actually showed results for a fairly broad query when Truveo showed nothing. Also generally Blinkx was nicer to use with a nice inbuilt viewer for results and animated thumbnails of the videos which help identify what has been found. But to be honest, I will stick with Google.
Below is a list of sites that contain information and lists of special search engines. Also used as references.
http://www.labnol.org/internet/search/special-search-engines-not-google-or-yahoo/1601/
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_top_100_alt_search_engines_april07_update.php
John McLaughlin 