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Written by Mary Ellen Bates

Google is still the behemoth of search engines, but there is a plethora of alternative search engines that provide features not readily available on Google. They may not have Google's range of products and services but, after all, how many free unlimited-storage email services do you need?

This article cannot cover all the alternatives to Google. For that, check out http://AltSearchEngines.com, a web site devoted to monitoring the world of alternative search engines, complete with reviews of all those other search tools, hosted discussions between search engine representatives, interviews with search engine CEOs and jobs for search engine IT pros.

Visualising Information

Some of my favourite alternative search engines are the ones that offer a visual results page... something more informative than the plain list of search results you get with Google or Yahoo. In fact, some of the search engines that ‘cluster' results are using the results from one of the major search engines, but doing a lot more with those results.

Quintura.com (http://www.quintura.com/) uses Yahoo's search results to create its on-the-fly grouping of search results. Figure 1 shows the search results for the query ‘nanotubes'. In addition to the regular list of sites on the right side, notice the cloud of words on the left. These are the words that Quintura calculated to be key to the query. Since this is done automatically, there are always a few words that are not as relevant (of course). If you mouse over any of the cluster terms, Quintura automatically appends that term to the query and displays the results of a search for the two words ANDed together.



Figure 1.

Note, too, that there are tabs for re-executing your search in Yahoo Images, Yahoo Video and Amazon.com. I find Quintura particularly useful when browsing Amazon. I can see related terms from the literature, scan titles of related books and narrow my search to find just the books I need.

Another tool for seeing clustered search results - one that has even more functionality than Quintura - is TouchGraph.com (http://www.touchgraph.com/). It uses the search results from Google, Amazon and Facebook, and includes tabs for searching Amazon music and movies as well as books. Figure 2 shows the results of a query in Amazon for ‘history of food' - the topic of a recent research project of mine.



Figure 2

Notice that a panel in the upper left shows information on whatever item the mouse is hovering over, and below that are tabs that let you see the results clustered by author, subject, additional queries and so on. What isn't captured in this screen shot is the movement within the screen; you can drag any of the bubbles to re-format the search results or to explore other links. Notice, also, the way that the result clusters are arranged. The main cluster focuses on historical books; the cluster on the right looks at the science of cooking. Click the plus symbol on any of the bubbles in a cluster and that cluster expands so that you can continue to explore that aspect of your query.

Gigablast.com (http://www.gigablast.com/) has been around since 2000, before most people had given much thought to clustering of results. It does not have quite the visual impact of TouchGraph's floating bubbles, but its ‘Gigabits' work as intended. Figure 3 shows the results of a search on ‘bird flu'; note the alternative terms suggested along the top margin. Click any of these, and your search is re-executed with that term instead of the original term. For example, if I clicked the ‘H5N1' link in the search results displayed in Figure 3, a new search would be run on that phrase.



Figure 3

Note, also, the ‘Category’ entries at the end of each web citation. These link to a category within the human-edited Open Directory Project (http://dmoz.org), where you can find additional web sites on avian flu – a nice feature, particularly for our clients who simply need a few good resources on a topic.

If you crave a more visual interface for Gigablast, consider Snap.com (http://www.snap.com/). In addition to seeing a citation for each retrieved web site, you can preview the main page from each site. Figure 4 shows the results of the same search on ‘bird flu’. Note that the page displayed on the right is the top (index.html) page for the cdc.gov domain, not the specific page retrieved from the search. The preview feature is particularly useful when you want to get a general impression of the site – is it purely commercial, does it look professional, is it written for experts or laymen? You can also set your default (through the Settings pull-down menu, shown in yellow) so that you can interact directly with the page through the preview screen. So, for example, I could click any link on the cdc.gov page to explore the site further and, when I am done, I can continue down the search results on the left side of the results page without having lost my place.

Figure 4

Metasearch Engines


While I tend to avoid metasearch engines, because of their inherent limitations, I have come to love Carrot2.org (http://www.carrot2.org/). In addition to offering combined search results from Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, and other search engines, you can query individual search engines separately. But what sets Carrot2 apart is its sorting feature... or rather, features. Instead of relying on the mysterious black box that each search engine uses to calculate relevance and order the results accordingly, you can choose among six different clustering algorithms to create subject groups.



Figure 5

Figure 5 shows the results of a search for ‘assisted living', along with the clustering algorithms available through a pull-down menu (shown in the yellow box). Click any of the terms on the left margin and Carrot2 selects only those results that also contain your selected term. Clicking on the ‘Facilities Directory Listing' link, for example, results in a display of the search results with only items 1, 11, 18, 36, 44, 52, 71, 83 and 88.

Note that you can also click the Sources or Sites tab on the left and see how many search results came from each search engine, or the number of results from each top level domain (co.uk, .org, etc.), respectively. And if you click the magnifying glass icon next to any search result title, a window will open up within the search results with an interactive preview of the retrieved page, similar to Snap.com.

SearchCrystal.com (http://www.searchcrystal.com/) offers a combination of metasearch, search engine comparison and data visualisation, and lets you search the web, images, video, news, blogs and tagged web pages (from Reddit, Digg and so on). Figure 6 shows the results of a search for ‘carnivorous plants' within web pages. Please note that I have moused over the ‘Google' icon, which indicates which of the retrieved pages were included in the first 10 results from Google. This can be a useful tool for demonstrating to clients the lack of overlap among search engines.



Figure 6

Mouse over any of the results, and you will see the page title, meta tags, domain and a snippet of text in which the search terms appear. If you just cannot handle the visual display, you can also click the icon in the upper right corner for a plain text display of the results, along with a colour bar that indicates in which search engines each result appeared.

One more quasi-metasearch engine to consider is Intelways.com (http://www.intelways.com/). It is not a metasearch engine per se, but it allows you to jump effortlessly from one search tool to the next. I find Intelways particularly useful when I am not sure which search engine to use for a specific search or if I want to use a more specialised tool than a general-purpose search engine.

Figure 7 shows a search results page for a query on ‘autism’. The default is to execute the search in Google, but you can click any of the other search tool boxes just below the search query box to re-run the query in Google Images, Google News, Yahoo, Wikipedia and so on. No need to retype your query – just click which search tool you would like to use.

Figure 7

Note, too, the links across the very top of the page - Start, General, Images, Video etc. Each of these are separate groupings of search tools you can also query. Figures 8 and 9 show how the search tool boxes change when you select the Social or Academic groupings, respectively.



Figure 8

Figure9

Granted, some of the search tools in these specialised groupings are not search engines per se, but they may be the perfect resource for finding the information you need from some unexpected sources.

None of these alternative search engines or search tools are likely to supplant Google as the default search engine, but all may be useful when you want a more specialised search or you need clustering tools to help you focus your query.

Mary Ellen Bates founded Bates Information Services in 1991, and provides business research for business professionals and info professionals, and customised training and consulting services for the information industry. She publishes a free monthly e-newsletter of search tips at BatesInfo.com/tip.html and she blogs at http://LibrarianOfFortune.com. You can reach her at mbates@BatesInfo.com.

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