Oct 15, 2007

Semantic Search Engines: Closer to Reality Than You Know

I was just browsing over at WebWorkerDaily.com and found a post by Samuel Dean on new search engines. Samuel Dean put together a list that was helpful, because I've been seeking new ways to search information as both a frequent web surfer and as marketing savvy.

I already knew about Dogpile but did not know about Freeality. Some of the other alternatives to Google.com, Yahoo.com, and Business.com, such as Clusty, offer different ways of searching that will save time or offer efficient ways to display your search results.

When I produce music, I often search music production forums to find sage wisdom from people with professional production experience. I can now search forums better with Omgili, with their focused results based entirely on digging through forums. Or, I might search for Magazine articles while seeking out Aspiration Advocates to join AspireNow. So, using MagPortal allows me quicker access to this type of article or author. The idea of a human assisting in search, as with ChaCha, is interesting, but when I searched for an article I recently published on Bootstrapping 101, ChaCha delivered first page results, whereas my article on Bootstrapping 101 ranks #2 out of 289,000 on Google. Score one for Google.

I'm starting to search for video more and more often, and noticed that Truveo displays down to categories and enables a drill-down even into categories like "iVillage videos". Truveo offers an alternative to YouTube and Yahoo Video.

The search engine that caught my immediate attention most out of Dean's list, though, is Kartoo.

According to Dean, "Kartoo is a very interesting way to have your search results come back as a large graphic. Hover your mouse over components in the graphic, and you’ll see Flash-based visual representations of sub-topics relevant to your search pop up. You also see images that accompany individual search results which can help you drill down to exactly what you want."

Kartoo is basically a search result displayed as a mind map or idea web; a similar concept as Visual Thesaurus, but applied as a search function.

I like seeing a picture-map of my search results. Want to see it in action? Go to Kartoo, and then in the field, type in AspireNow. Check out how they profile this unique and helpful self-help site. You can see the PICTURE links to several related links from AspireNow, just as you would have received from a Google search; however, with thumbnails and text choices mapped as choices to drill-down into next.

This form of search ought to appeal to visual learners.

The only downside to Kartoo was the length of time required by the search genie to return data took longer than a Google search.

Search 3.0 is here: there's BIG NEWS in SEMANTIC SEARCH coming up this week. I still remain very curious to see what is coming from Radar Networks. On October 14, 2007, Radar Networks posted a blog article from the Guardian Unlimited Observer: "This week Radar Networks will emerge from 'stealth mode' and give the first public demonstration of its technology. It will launch a website combining elements of social networking with an 'intelligent' search engine - in effect, a site halfway between Facebook and Google.



Chief executive Nova Spivack said: 'It will be one of the first examples of Web 3.0. Imagine a tool that intelligently and automatically shares and organises knowledge for you. If, for example, you are researching a health condition, you might find all sorts of information on the web and you might also want to find people who know about it. All this information goes in, we run artificial intelligence on it and organise it for you.'"

Radar Networks is due to showcase the search engine on October 19, so stay tuned, as I'll keep you posted on search methods offering more breakthroughs to save you time and gain information more efficiently.

Post by Scott Andrews, CEO of ARRiiVE Business Solutions and host of the ARRiiVE: Innovations In Business show. ARRiiVE helps executives improve sales and build interactive marketing, launch products and services, and build dynamic, cross-functional collaborative teams. For more information, contact info (at)ARRiiVE (dot) com.

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