Currently, users can choose from 1,225 different bilingual search combinations.


Recently, 2lingual has added 11 more languages to its Bilingual Search Service.

The total is:
Arabic
Bulgarian
Catalan
Chinese (Simplified)
Chinese (Traditional)
Croatian
Czech
Danish
Dutch
English
Filipino
Finnish
French
German
Greek
Hebrew
Hindi
Indonesian
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Latvian
Lithuanian
Norwegian
Polish
Portuguese
Romanian
Russian
Serbian
Slovak
Slovenian
Spanish
Swedish
Ukrainian
Vietnamese

Nun ist also mit Search.io ein neuer Vertreter dieser Spezies online. Eine Besprechung dieser Quelle erschien unlängst in AltSearchEngines. Die Bandbreite dieses neuen Meta-Suchinterfaces ist beachtlich! An Themen werden Audio/Musik, Bücher, Bilder, Songtexte, Neuigkeiten, Personen, Rezepte, Suchmaschinen, soziale Bookmarksammlungen, Videos, Anleitungen und anderes kann gesucht werden. Bei jedem dieser Rubriken werden mindestens 5-6 relevante Suchmaschinen in Registerkarten geordnet angeboten, deren Ergebnisse man durch einfaches Anklicken abfragen kann.

Der Wechsel zwischen den Rubriken geht sehr schnell über eine horizontale Auswahl, erst nach Eingabe der Suchbegriffe und Abschicken der Suche erscheinen die Registerkarten mit den einzelnen Suchmaschinen innerhalb der jeweiligen Rubrik.

AltSearchEngines urteilt: “It has a simple user interface and is also very fast in delivering results.” - Search.io ist gut zum schnellen Vergleich!

Search!o revisited – tabbed search

Meta search interfaces are for example trovando.it, Intelways, Zuula or Sputtr. They are smart search instruments, which in contrast to meta search engines (which simultaneously query multiple search engines and show the results together) offer several relevant search engines, mostly organized in tabs, and show the results of the query of individual search engines only side by side. By this manner you can search quickly one search engine after another with the same keywords. That is very helpful if you want to compare the relevance of various search engines. Quite interesting also that the representatives of various types - general search, image search, video search etc. - are listed, so you can try quickly the same key words with even more exotic engines, without must have to search the link to each respective search engine and to load the interface before searching. - And at least these meta search interfaces can also be seen as a link list for remarkable search engines …

With Search.io, now a new representative of this species of search services is online. A review of it appeared recently in AltSearchEngines. The spectrum of this new meta-search interface is remarkable! Topics offered are audio/music, books, pictures, lyrics, news, people, recipes, search engines, social bookmark collections, videos, manuals and other. In each of these sections will be at least 5-6 relevant search engines sorted in tabs, whose results simply by clicking on the tab. The exchange between the topics is very fast with a horizontal selection.

After entering the search terms and sending the search, tabs appear with the various search engines within each category.

As AltSearchEngines writes: “It has a simple user interface and is therefore very fast in delivering results.” - Search.io is good for a quick comparison!

By Juergen Plieninger

I just want to take a moment to thank our current sponsors: Twing, Quintura, Kosmix, and Scour.

I encourage you to visit each of them and see what alternative search engines can really offer!

And we do have space for another sponsor! Just email me at: Charles@AltSearchEngines.com

To RSVP, please email me at Charles@AltSearchEngines.com


Lecture #1 - GoPubMed.org - Dr. Michael R. Alvers

Semantic Search for the Life Sciences and Beyond

Does the world need another search engine? After all, we already have Google. The answer: Absolutely! Although today’s search technology is quite good, web searches are still in their infancy. Traditional search technologies lack completeness and tools to explore the huge result sets. Use of background knowledge e.g. in the form of semantic networks, taxonomies or ontologies is essential to overcome these problems.  GoPubMed.org implements these technologies for searches in the life sciences. The engine helps to save hours of time and guarantees completeness.

 Lecture #2  - Mozilla Labs - Aza Raskin

Ubiquitous Search - How can search be enhanced to provide truly rich interaction inside the browser. Ubiquity is a Mozilla Labs experiment into connecting the Web with language in an attempt to find new user interfaces that could make it possible for everyone to do common Web tasks more quickly and easily.

Lecture #3 - FAROO - Gosia Garbe

FAROO Peer-to-peer - The last stand before the almighty cloud and the future of search

Copy the entire Internet to one system? Strange idea. That’s what search engines try to do. Therefore they require hundreds of thousands of servers and billions of dollars. For more than 10 years search engine technology got stuck with the initial architecture. The collection of the whole, exponentially growing Web on a single central system is not successful on the long run.  The Internet is successful because its core technology and content generation are distributed and a lot of people take part. If search as the widest used internet application would also be built on distributed architecture this provides radical cost advantages, better scaling, less intrusive crawling, democratic ranking, and improved privacy protection.

Lecture #4 - MSearchGroove - Peggy Salz

AltSearchEngines’ Mobile Search Expert

Over at Search Engine Land there is an interesting post over who gets the credit for the origin of the phrase “Search Engine Optimization” and especially the acronym “SEO.”

This led me to wonder, did I coin the term “Alternative Search Engine” in Jan 2007?

Nope.

Here’s the phrase used over at Pandia in 2006.

Top 5 alternative search engines

Google has 50% of the US search engine market, Yahoo! has 28 and Microsoft 13.

But there are several other search engines available. Here are the 5 best.

Posted on Sunday 17 September 2006

So when was the first mention of the phrase?

The reader with the earliest date will receive our prize:

Awesome, I know!

And the winner is…Phil Bradley!

The first ‘alternative search engine’ would appear to be The Text Optimum Retrieval Engine developed by the InterSoft Corporation, way back in May 1995. Take a look at http://www.lib.msu.edu/harris23/red_tape/o&e9502.htm or for simplicities sake:

“If you are tired of using GPO Access (heaven forbid!) to search the Federal Register, or tired of using the menu approach provided by Counterpoint Publishing, try an alternative search engine–The Text Optimum Retrieval Engine–developed by the InterSoft Corporation. In addition to standard searching you can try clicking on various other otions such as proximity, phonetic, spell tolerant, acronym and thesaurus searching, and specify the number of hits you want to look at. Try it out. It’s free.”

-Phil

I’ll need your address if you want that Grand prize…

Actually I had not considered a pre-Google alternative. We may have two winners!

I guess as soon as there was a “search engine,” then there could be an alternative to it!

Charles

Ah well, if you want an alternative to the main search engines, then we’re going to have to limit to post 1999 really. In which case I think we’re looking at a Mr Bernard Poole, who on 19th August 2002 described Northern Light as ‘an alternative search engine’, though I think he was thinking more in terms of alternatives to the main search engines which at the time he wrote I don’t believe he was thinking of Google. His ’safesearch’ page is still online at http://www.pitt.edu/~poole/OtherSearchTools.html (which is a little disturbing itself!).

If you’re looking for a reference that is specific to Google then in that case we’re looking at the easy bake coven. ‘Susan’ says “But if Google suddenly vanished from the internet, what other search engine would you use? I’d like to have an good alternative search engine to use and some that I’ve tried lately, seem to reveal pretty much the same info that Google does. I believe Google is integrated with Yahoo now. I know it’s combined with AOL search. And for independent searching, I no longer am satisfied with such a monopoly as Google anymore.” (I wonder what she’s thinking now!) The URL for this one is at http://easybakecoven.net/2002/09/google-alternative-most-everyone-uses.html

However, you could argue this reference isn’t good enough because she’s asking the question theoretically, rather than stating that there ARE alternative search engines. If that’s the viewpoint you want to take, which is perfectly acceptable then we’re looking at Kathleen McGinn Spring who wrote in October 9, 2002 edition of U.S. 1 Newspaper. She refers to a librarian, Janie Hermann, who uses different search engines and says “Another alternative search engine on which Hermann relies is the Invisible Web Directory.” (This isn’t available on the web any longer; I had to find it in an archival format at http://tinyurl.com/3prvap)

(By the way, I’m doing this as an interesting academic exercise - should I be fortunate enough to win please donate the prize to some charity or the other.)

Phil

So for my money, I think the answer to your question is probably McGinn.

In this post I also share some ideas for improving Google Analytics interface, those could make it even easier to detect some of the discussed patterns.
Finally, I offer some ideas to act upon these patterns for improving future traffic.

1. Right now I’m using the blog URL convention (date) to isolate Information for posts that were posted during the selected duration. E.g. looking at the traffic during September 08 contributed by posts that were only posted during that same month. Today Google Analytics shows traffic for all the posts on this blog for the selected duration and it requires some work to isolate the new posts from the old one in order to see how they contribute to the selected duration traffic. Why is this important? Pattern # 1 progress - does your content gets better? Maybe the traffic is all based on old success. The inverse - same as #1 but for old post s- i.e. show me the traffic for the past month excluding posts posted in the last month. It would be great if Google Analytics can do that for you.
2. I use spreadsheet to separate traffic for “generic” pages only - i.e. the home page, RSS button, page number etc… Why is this important? Each item on the blog other than blog posts has different importance and objective behind it so isolating these can help to fine tune each individually. It is also good to know if people are finding the root folder (i.e. your home page) maybe using bookmarks or blogrolls.  Pattern #2 - are you building a great brand name? The inverse is interesting too -  exclude “generic” pages from the report and allow focusing on blog’s posts impact only. It would be great if Google Analytics can do that for you.
3. Support for blogs with multiple authors or blog with many guest bloggers (not blog network). It will be a great help if you could see who is the blogger, in Google Analytics, next to the blog post traffic info. This could be automated (using a certain standardized way telling Google who wrote this post). Why is this important? Pattern #3 - finding the best bloggers on the team and learning from them. It could be the content, the style, the keywords, the community that these bloggers are building. I’m sure that this is useful in blog network too, yet over there it is easier to isolate bloggers traffic because each has his own domain name.
4. Daily traffic - hourly - higher granularity. Currently if you want to see daily traffic you have to change the date to today. There is no way to see hourly traffic. I wish there was a separate page for daily traffic and the resolution is in hours. Why is this important? Pattern # 4 - timing the post - if you noticed that your recent post is just great, you may want to leave it a little longer on the top of the blog. You may find that one social media site like StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicious, Twitter, FriendFeed and more works better during different hours. It could also help learning when not to post (hint: 5pm eastern time during the work week:)).
5. Pattern #5 - lost opportunities or finding hidden gems - Finding your best historical stuff (not traffic based) from the time that you were less known as a great blogger or with smaller supportive community around you - looking for pages with the highest Time on Page and the smallest Bounce Rate yet low traffic. Just be careful, not to judge too soon. If there was not a lot of traffic the Time On Page number may be high - Google average it, so too small of traffic may keep this number high. Once you find a post that match this pattern try stumbling it.
6. Page view per visit - Google provide this number and you can track it over time. It shows if users stay longer on your web site reading more blog posts or leave quickly to find other more interesting blogs out there. It is important to build links between relevant blog posts on your blog (not excessively though).  For blogs with multiple authors this is a real challenge. How other bloggers can see what to link to? This is when categories helps. If the team has visibility to exiting blog posts in each category, then they can think about how their post should be categorized, and then look for relevant blog posts to link to. Google Analytics can help here too, if it has access to the categorization information then it could show the success of one category over the other. If not then it would be great to annotate blog posts row’s with more info (having custom properties) . Pattern #6 - content type (category) success. It is also important showing blog’s recent and best posts on the sidebar, so the users can easily find them. The blog performance is another factor! People will not hang around slow web-site.
7. Keywords - there is a ton of data out there about this subject so I may repeat other’s finding. My first finding is that people love the word “list”. People love list but they really like this word in the title more than “best” (I think that Google hate this word). I could not resist using the word “list” for this post title:) People like to see the benefit (value) from reading your blog post more than artistic titles, so “hot to” is a great start for a title. Speaking about titles it is important to think about them for the long run too. If you write about a company or product put the name in the title. Why? So, if someone will be looking for this company few month from now, using any search engine, there is a chance to find your blog. Simple, yet I do see the opposite happening even till this day. You’ll see the difference using Google Analytics very quickly. Some SEO experts tells you to optimize titles for the short run and then to modify them for the long run (beware from changing the permalinks) and Google Analytics can help telling you when is the right time to modify the title but I’m not sure if it will truly helps. I don’t think that Google come back to re-crawl this content. Pattern # 7 - keywords timing and tuning. By the way, blogs with multiple authors or blog networks that are providing training and guidelines can bring new bloggers up to speed quickly and avoid such simple mistakes.
8. US vs. the rest of the world - Google Analytics provides regional segmentation’s. You can see where your audience is coming from and how fast that region grows. So you can use this information to keep them engaged. For instance European use Jaiku more than Twitter so post updates from your blog over there and build community on Jaiku if this is your target audience. This is true for other social networks too (e.g. Facebook is very weak in Japan). Write content about local products, news and companies relative to the regional success - pattern # 8.
9. The right traffic source allocation and effort. Google Analytics dissect traffic into three categories: Direct Traffic, Referring sites, and Search Engines. As a blogger most of your impact is in the Referring web sites category. Especially in the beginning. This is where your work, building readers community is the key to your success. Again, Google Analytics shows you where your traffic is coming from and where it lands (landing pages). For blog with multiple authors (or for blogs network) it would be great to see the contribution by author, to reward the ones that expend their readership in this way. pattern #9 - are bloggers on the team growing their community? The Traffic Source percentage allocation can also tell you where you should invest your effort. It is different from case to case though e.g. if your blog talk about products (and sell them or use advertise on your blog for selling them) then SEO using the right keywords is the most important activity and the traffic source allocation should reflect that. For most other cases you should divide your time something like 30% reading other blogs or experimenting with tools, product, services, projects, 30% writing content and devote 30% of your time for community building. I really like to hear some feedback about this suggested allocation.
10. mmmmnm, do I have to come up with the tenth? …OK, Pattern # 10 - what activities are helping you to find new readers? Google Analytics shows you two visitors types - new and returning. Look for what is it that you are doing bringing new users to the site. StumbleUpon is a great option. You can try tagging your blog using different tags. There are numerous places to tag these days: Wordpress, Technorati, StumbleUpon, Delicious to name a few. Check hashtags.org for most popular and recently added hashtags. You can Digg posts under different categories (business vs. technology). You can use TwitterPack and Twellow for finding people from different categories and sub-categories to follow, so they can follow you back, then build new relationships. You can comment on blogs from different categories (using Technorati and recently the revised Google Blog Search). You can use backtype to see where bloggers leave comments and follow their actions. Keep checking Google Analytics to see what works and how the new visitors vs. returning, percentage changes.

There are more capabilities in Google Analytics than described in here; like finding broken links, specific browser and OS optimizations and exit pages to name a few. I have a lot more to learn but I think that what’s in here are some of the more interesting patterns that you could discover using Google Analytics in the first few weeks using it.

Small disclosure: I work for a company that sells web analytics product but I don’t work with that team and I know very little about it.

By Keren Dagan

At the San Francisco AltSearchEngines meeting last April, the general opinion was that without those alternative engines, there would be little innovation in search. No new frontiers would be explored. Those search start-ups come with new algorithms, smart crowd source approaches, and different UI’s. But in the end, aren’t these engines just inspiration for the big guys who can copy the improved ways of searching withing a few months?

If you look at the new Ask.com, you’d say this is true. Although some say it looks like Mahalo, you can also state the engine has adopted several typical alt search engines features like:

* Clustering of results: if you search for Obama, you’ll get a short description, picture, and links to the Official Site, films, music, Wikipedia, and the senatorial site.
* Related Searches. In the case of Obama his running mate, wife, and main rival.
* A collection of thumbnails with Obama’s face

My guess is that this will mark the beginning of a copy trend.

Every successful alt search engine will see its main USP being adopted by the major search engines.

The Call for Participation for Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco will close at midnight PST on Wednesday, October 8th. The Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco runs March 31 - April 1, 2009.

They’re looking for proposals for sessions and workshops in the following tracks:
* Fundamentals
* Development
* Marketing & Community
* Design & User Experience
* Strategy & Business Models
* Security
* Mobility
* Entertainment
* WebOps

Email Charles@AltSearchEngines.com