Wednesday, October 15, 2008

The searchers


At the recent ALIA unconference, which was held at Thomastown Library, I learnt about the new search engine Searchme. Unlike other search engines, which display search results textually, Searchme lets you see what you're searching for. When you enter a search term, categories appear that relate to your query. Choose a category, and you'll see snapshots of web pages that relate to your search. You can preview the content of these pages before you click through to them. This is similar to the preview pane in Apple's iTunes. Based on a search I did for pages about our Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, it seems to work quite well. You also have the option to search for web, video, and images, and also create a stack, which is a personal folder of pages of interest.

2 comments:

Sing Chee said...

interesting site. Strange that a search for "Jesus" came up with mormon sites for the first 4-5 hits though :). It does seem a little slow on my connection, looks like google still does it for me!

Ross McPhee said...

The downside of this engine is that it's still in the beta stage, so the search results are obviously a bit iffy, and you also need a reasonably fast internet connection. It's interesting you mention Google, because I wrote this post to raise awareness of alternatives to Google.
http://roscoeland.blogspot.com/2008/10/searchers.html
roscoeland.blogspot.com
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isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2017-26
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for June 2017
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf