coop search

Why are search engines so different

2007-07-29T18:57:00.000-07:00

The Jux2 Meta Search engine which provides results based on the results of google,yahoo and MSN provides a rather surprising statistic showing how much these major search engines differ in the top queries results.

Is it because the indexing method is different for these search engines? Or just a result of the type of use by the users of the searchers! I mean, do some results move up due to that being clicked upon by many users.

The rate of re-indexing will also be different, which can lead to the differences in the results. All this aside, the algorithms used by these engines should be different leading to these differences.

Coop search is now on yubnub

2007-07-18T03:37:00.000-07:00

Using the Yubnub command line, the required search engine can be found. To find a coop search just type"fcop query"

So to find music CSE's just type fcop music and it will show u the list of all music CSE's.Try it by clicking on fcop music.If you have not tried Yubnub, give it a try, its useful and so much like the Unix shell, u don't need to learn anything new.

Yubnub has got a huge collection of commands and u can add ur own too.

Veronica-a search engine for gopher protocol

2007-07-08T06:59:00.000-07:00

The Gopher protocol is now used very rarely if at all. But Veronica was one of the first indexing engines. The latest version known as(Dont click on this link with internet explorer-use firefox or other browsers that support the Gopher protocol) Veronica-2 is still active. It is of interest as it does not index the contents of the files.

If you click on Search Veronica-2, a dialog box will appear where you can provide your query. The list of gopher servers that have the word(s) will be listed.Try using "SRS" as the query. It refers to the the servers with protein and nucleic acid sequences.

The latest addition to the search engines is VISHNU(Search VISHNU (experimental)), it arranges the results based on the folders in which the files are stored. It also shows the number of files in that folder. To begin with the indexing engine should have these basic features. Better features can be added later.

Asian Cinema Search engine

2007-06-30T18:10:00.000-07:00

Search engine Topics:Asian Cinema

Contribution: [Volunteer to contribute]

Results hosted at:Google

What's Interesting:Its claim to fame "Asian Cinema Search includes sites with coverage of East Asian cinema. Whenever possible, sub-sections of individual sites are included with separate tags to make search refinements as focused as humanly possible.".

You get a large number of result refinements. Refine results for doom:
Reviews	News	Trailers	Forums
Blogs	Wikis	Databases	Links
Distributors	Official Sites	Interviews	Articles

You can compare the results from the Japanese Cinema CSE with google.

Try it:Asian cinema search

Reviving the meta tags

2007-06-23T07:29:00.000-07:00

Meta tags have been used for describing a website and its content. But the use of meta tags has declined so much so that they are considered dead. Very few sites seem to have retained the meta tags on their sites.

The new buzz word is bookmarking. So why not use meta tag data for bookmarking?

The main argument against meta tag content was that it included more keywords than the data contained in the site. The idea of bookmarking is that the user makes sure that the site actually contains that data. The user has to type in all the tags before bookmarking. Here is a greasymonkey script to find meta keywords and description and provide a simpy this link on top of the page.

Simpy this meta data

The user can choose which keywords are appropriate and which are not. And the user is spared the burden of having to type in the tags and description.

Google results with a time line

2007-06-04T19:17:00.000-07:00

Google has introduced a new experimental method to list results using a time line. The results such as this one on "nanotechnology"will show the results based on the word and the date it is related to.

The idea works fine with the examples they have given, but for some of the newer words created post google, they better use the information as to when it was cached. If the cache is not backed up, its hight time they started recording the dates on which new words were found by the google bot. This has many advantages to the casual linguist and also provide a more reliable time line for the future.

I wonder whether the site map can have data which can be used to build the time line. The map view is more of a browser version of google earth.

Mahalo-human powered search

2007-06-02T09:04:00.000-07:00

Recently a search engine "Mahalo" was launched in alpha version. Its claim to fame "Mahalo is the world's first human-powered search engine"

It makes use of "Guides" who are human to sort through content and remove spam. I came across a guide by name "Nicole Gustas" who has created as many as 227 results!! Converting that into google coop's will mean nearly 227 search engines.

The results are marked as "Warnings , Guide's Choice , and What is? icons". Although google coop does not allow for showing warnings sites can be excluded. "What is" seems to be an equivalent of the answer.com results shown in Google, may be slightly better.

The rules for selection are rather stringent..They don't want any sites that have too many advertisements, sites which are younger than one year and so on.You can find details at their FAQ.

I compared the result for the word "Advertorial" from Mahalo with that from google . Although the first result is from wikipedia in both, which reminded me of Search engine nightmare. The search refinements in Mahalo are rather unique, the refinements provided by google dont recognize the context as well as mahalo as they are "not human crafted". May be a better algorithm would do the job for google.

But how do they plan to generate money from this endure? by selling the search results to search engines or by ads or the other means?

I almost forgot you can create an account and add sites, suggest sites to be included for a particular result.A lot of similarity between mahalo and google coop.

Christian Bible Study search engine

2007-04-30T09:08:00.000-07:00

Search engine Topics:Christian Bible

Contribution: Does not accept volunteers

Results hosted at:Google

What's Interesting:Searches a whopping 2342 sites.Compared to the " Biblical Studies Search" which searches just 95 sites. The plus point of this CSE is the guide that can be found at the corresponding blog.
You can try the query "heb" in Bible study search and Google.The refinements are given as below

Refine results for Heb:
commentaries	sermons	books	articles_essays
quick reference	texts	bible studies	web pages
video	audio	people	summaries
places	word studies	Q & A's	basic theology

Try it:Christian Bible Study search engine

Add to blogspot button-widget creation and add button

2007-03-20T07:30:00.000-07:00

With the new blogger you can allow fellow bloggers to add widgets that you have created onto their blogs. You can see the help pages at blogger help.

In this post i explain how i made a button to add the custom search engine search to your blog. The widget therefore is the search engine itself.The title i gave is "Coop search". If you are here to see what coop search is--It is a search engine to find other search engines. You can ind search engines built and customized for any topic.If there is known available you can make your own as well.

The widget is safe to use as far as my knowledge. It simply adds the code that google coop gives. You don't need to know any html or javascript to do this. Just keep clicking the buttons. And you are done. If you still have problems just comment below and i will get back to you.

Indonesian blog search engine

2007-03-20T07:12:00.000-07:00

Search engine Topics:Indonesian blogs

Contribution: They seem to have 20 contributors and cant add more.

Results hosted at:Google

What's Interesting:I came across a add to blogspot button, that seems good. You can add the CSE directly to your blog. It takes the HTML code as a widget. So you can add the custom search engine even if you have no idea about html.I added a add to blogspot button myself.I will explain more about how i created the widget to add to blogspot in the next post.

You can try the query "jakarta" in Indonesian blog search and Google.The refinements are given as below

komputer		belajar		ngeblog		jakarta
jogja

More about the search engine can be found at -->DoIT - Denny on IT: Launching Indonesian Blog Search Engine

Try it:Indonesian blog search

Java Search engine

2007-03-19T02:54:00.000-07:00

Search engine Topics:Java

Contribution: [Volunteer to contribute]

Results hosted at:Google

What's Interesting:The best Java search engine in terms of the number of sites it will search.
You can try the query "package" in Java search and Google.The refinements are given as below

Tools		Forums & User Groups		Tutorials & Articles		Database & Persistence
Security

The refinements seem to do a lot to help.

Try it:Java search

Indian Classical music search engine

2007-03-19T02:41:00.000-07:00

Search engine Topics:Indian classical music(Hindustani,carnatic)

Contribution:[Volunteer to contribute]

Results hosted at:Google

What's Interesting:Search as many as 49 different sites on Indian classical music. Try the query "Vatapi" in Indain classical music search engine and compare it with Google.The search refinements are given as below for "Vatapi"...vatapi ganapahti

Hindustani		Carnatic		Musical Instruments		Artistes
Concerts		Theory		Introduction		Blogs

A good help if you are doing some research work on music as well.

Try it:Indian Classical music search

Add your search query to the list

2007-03-17T11:01:00.000-07:00

With the new add your search query feature, anybody can add a query they like to the blog. Just scroll down the sidebar and there you have text boxes to add your name and query.

As soon as you add the name and query the search query will appear in the recent query list along with your name. I hope to link these queries to coop search. Once this is done it will also be added to the Google module or gadget as they call it now.

The cse search page will also have this option soon enough. Although custom search queries should add the recent queries, i don't see it happening in the near future at least. To do that i would need to host the search at my own site and make changes as well.

The coop search blog now has the first position for the query coop search blog.And in the coming days may be anyone can add a search engine directly to coop search without having to mail or comment about it.

Google through the ages-from 1998 to 2007

2007-03-08T18:51:00.000-08:00

The Google search engine started sometime in 1998. The page format has not changed much! since that time. Although Google homepage is controversially the worlds costliest piece of real estate, it still remains simple and elegant. In this post i track the changing views of the homepage using the waybackmachine

The first page dates back to November 11th 1998. It has links to Google Search Engine Prototype
and
Might-work-some-of-the-time-prototype that is much more up to date.

Google search engine alpha version.
The first ever screen shot of Google would look something like the one below:

I wonder why the "!" is used so frequently. May it is some other character. But the interesting part is that way back then, they had people subscribing to to Google updates. And even custom search engines on Linux and Stanford.The I am feeling lucky button was there alright. A huge link to about Google.

The beta version had more links and looked as below:
Thats colorful. And a lot more links than the previous version.And making Google as your default was much more complicated than just clicking on a link.I will probably track Google further throught the years in my next post.

Search the future-not black magic

2007-03-01T17:54:00.000-08:00

No this is not black magic, it is the wonder of feed powered search. Rather than indexing the sites, the feed is indexed. With the "search the future" feature of bloglines you can get feeds for a keyword you subscribe to.

you can subscribe for the same at the following url, but you need to have a blog lines account for that.

http://www.bloglines.com/sub?mode=3

In their own words -"Want to know when someone posts something you're interested in? Enter a search query below, and be instantly notified when a blog entry that matches it becomes available to you"

This apart it would be useful to get alerts when somebody starts using a new word. The service should filter out typo's and show only folksonomies. (Words created due to a need for that word)

Ranking your links-show how good a web page is

2007-02-25T17:48:00.000-08:00

Google recently started to take int consideration ,the rel=no follow link. In their post in the Official Google Blog: Preventing comment spam they detail some of the reasons for implementing the no follow attribute. You can also find numerous articles that describe why it should or should not be done.

To put it in simple terms--When you link to a web page, you are giving it a score of 1 in terms of search engine score.But when you use the "no follow" tag, the score becomes zero. So spammers wont get the benefit of increasing thier search engine ranking. Since, the web site publisher gets the choice to give a value of 'zero' or 'one', it is but natural for him to have the ability to rank his link as well.

By ranking a link, i mean to say that you canprovide a numerical value specifying how good or bad a particular web page is. Yes even bad pages should be capable of being ranked. As of now no search engines honour the ranking of links. But inthe course of time it should become a default feature not only with search enginesbut also web publishing tools. Since we are addingit to the "rel" tag, the scoring should be doenas follows:

rel="score=2" for a positive score of 2

rel="score=-3"for a negative score of 3 etc...

Arguments as to the effectiveness of this are plenty. The rank tag will become more useful as we enter the era of personalised search. Your blog, mail,social network...etc..will be indexed to provide you with personalised search. When this happens, the use of scores will not affect the overall ranking of a website,just the ranking with respect to a particular person.

Other attributes may be added as time progresses. The process of ranking links can be automated to provide ranks to pages based on the domain name of the page. The various bookmarking sites like delicious are involved in collecting the opinion of different people on a particular web page, the use of scoring is hidden in these sites. Although different people have different scores on their tagged pages, it is hidden and is calculated based on various criteria. The idea of scoring web pages, is open in google coop. In the customized search engines, you can directly provide scores to sites. Thus, it is useful to score web pages directly in the links.

Google stops indexing live search

2007-02-24T02:08:00.000-08:00

It is rather a surprise that finally google has stopped indexing Live search. In an earlier post about search engine indexing search engine, i had shown a screen shot to prove my point. Now the live search page does not appear as a result anymore.

Take a look at the googleoop - Google Search to see for yourself.

What is the reason for this sudden change? Is it only the algorithm kicking in late or something else? But they continue to index the various other things such as the ice rocket search engine, technorati etc..

They also index the various tagging services and aggregators. Is it too difficult to make out the difference or are these services faster than the google bot? Yes they are bound to be faster. After all its the wisdom of the crowds!!

That apart, the content stealors are better at the job as they generally parse through the XML only. It is indeed very difficult to index the web. The considerable size of the internet is to blame. The net is growing at a tremendous rate, propelled especially by the social networking sites that are exploding.

One piece of good news is that Orkut is not being indexed. But myspace is being indexed. So these social networks are having an impact on the search engines. Lets not forget bloggers here. The bloggeres are producing all sorts of search engine crap. The list could be endless..search engine link bombs, new word generation etc..

Google result filter-filter irrelevant sites

2007-02-22T17:34:00.000-08:00

The google result filter will see which queries have results on the google search engine and which do not. Using the google filter website you can remove sites from the search results.

So if you feel a site is nothing but spam, just add that to your list of sites to be excluded. You can take a look at the translated version here.
Translated version of http://www.google-filter.com/

They make use of the google API to provide a personalized site filter. With the google coop search, this can be done effectively. It is a pity that the personalised search does not have the same feature. You can bookmark something to be excluded.

Why is it a search engine?

2007-02-15T22:41:00.000-08:00

Yes why should it be a search engine? why not just a search tool or search app.

Wikipedia defines an engine as,"An engine is something that produces an effect from a given input. " So just because a search engine works based on a input is a good criteria to call it an engine.

Then why dont we call a mailing sytem as a mail engine. It has no wikipedia refrence. Is it just that the word became popular due to repeated use or is their any significance associated with it?To find the significance we need to find who used the two words together. Google does not provide an option to sort results by date.

A search for the oldest search engine returns http://www.aliweb.com/ as the first result. It claims to have been established in 1993. So assuming thats correct we need to find a reference that is older than that. Wikipedia refers to "wanderer" as the first search engine. So when did the word search engine catch on? rather difficult to track the history of a word on the internet. Hopefully wikitionary will make it easier to track words.

What could be more appropriate?
Rather than "search engine", one could use search 'anything else'. things like search spider, search agent etc.. Like all other engines, the search engine has revolutionized the web. The steam engine, increased the speed at which people moved from one location to another on the planet. The search engine speeded up the movement on the web.

Just Google it

2007-02-11T23:55:00.000-08:00

I was searching for search results for http://www.google.com/search and stumbled upon something rather intresting.

The sites claim to fame is "Someone thinks you are an idiot because you were too stupid to check Google before asking a question. They gave you a link to this site as a joke. The fact that you followed it pretty much proves the point. Hope that helps. Have a nice day"

You can take a look at it here.But in case somebody sent that link to you be sure to make them see the search engine nightmare. Google does seem to be least bothered about this situation.

FLADGE the SUGGESTION ENGINE

2007-02-11T22:55:00.000-08:00

Search engine Topics:It will sugggest topics for you.

Contribution: You can try the Suggest.

Results hosted at:Own site

What's Interesting:If you are just wanting to find some random stuff. This is a good one. It suggests a topic randomly. You can even select one of the custom topics. The selected topic is then presented as a google search result.

Its presetly only having an english interface at present.

Try it:Suggestion engine

Portuguese research search engine

2007-02-04T18:07:00.000-08:00

Search engine Topics:Portuguese research search engine

Contribution: You can try the Suggest a site. Or in portuguese Sugerir um Site.

Results hosted at:Own site

What's Interesting:The site provides an option for adertisers to advertise on gooogle using adwords.And as itis becoming standard practice among CSE's to suggest few search queries.

To put in their own words "The ForumPME is a research engine that, through the personalization and management of a catalogue of sites with contents direccionados for Small the e Médias Companies (PME) Portuguese, attributes priority or restricts the research results, using the Google technology." Try the query "emprego" in forumpme and compare it with Google.
Try it:http://www.forumpme.com/

search engine indexing another search engine?

2007-02-03T19:07:00.000-08:00

The experiment i was trying as per my earlier post has paid off. Google will index the search results of live search. The people at live search mostly have not put a robot.txt file to their results. And what do we have. A wonderful result in the form of googleoop.To make it immortal i took a screen shot as well. It is the third result.

Google however will not index its own search results as might be expected. The only page that appears if you do sites restricted search for http://www.google.com/search is the site itself. So no wonder it will not enter a infinite loop. Yahoo seems to be of the results though.

Image SEO-Google images bombing

2007-01-31T21:52:00.000-08:00

Image SEO is the use of search engine optimization tactics to make a particular image rank better in search results. The main methods to follow would be

Naming the image file appropriately. If you want your image to be the first result for say "coop search", name the file "coop-search.jpg". I use the hyphen as space would be interpreted as "%20".

The 'Alt' attribute or tag is used to contain the keywords. So i am putting Alt as "coop-search". Anyway Alt is not highly weighted these days.

Related content-since a image will get a higher ranking when the content is related to the image, i should have better chances. Most of the content here is related to search and search engines.

Longdesc(long description) can be used to give a detailed description of the image in another Html file.

So much for my image promotion. Can somebody google bomb a image? By that i mean to say can sites other than the one which originally hosted the image influence the results for a picture. This would amount to bandwidth theft and can be prevented. So the appearance of Images for a particular query is not actually google bombing as the search bots are unaware of the contents of the image.

Now to put my coop search image using all this info as below.The icon i use is the first image. The next one is the bigger image. May be i will use that as a banner.

Coop Search Firefox Mozilla search plugin

2007-01-27T21:42:00.000-08:00

Coop search works wonderfully in any browser. You can access it using the CSE search or the coop search. However, if you use the Mozilla firefox browser you can add the coop search plugin to your browser.

Coop search can now be used directly to search for other google coop search engines. We made the search plugin for the coop search and pu it up at the mozilla sherlock website.You can get the firefox plugins at the mozilla sherlock website.

It does not have any bugs as far as we have tested. But feel free to let us know if any problems turn up. It should be possible to use it with IE7 onwards as microsoft is supposed to support sherlock search plugins.