On Read/WriteWeb, I published two articles by Ebrahim Ezzy about the topic of "Search 2.0" or what could also be called third-generation social search. Below is Ebrahim's summary of all these Search 2.0 companies.
The first part features the following companies:
Swicki is a community-driven search engine that allows users to create deep and focused searches for specific terms. The search results returned by Swicki can automatically learn and adapt based on the community's search behavior.
Rollyo is a theme-based, socially driven search. Users can create and publish their own personal search engines by deciding which URLs to include in their "SearchRoll".
Clusty is a clustering engine that groups similar items into clusters — organizing search results into folders. It goes beyond simple search and integrates metasearch (i.e., search of searches) with clustering power, allowing it to provide a rich and flexible search experience. Like organic web results, Clusty also searches shopping information, yellow pages data, news, blog posts, and images.
Wink lets users tag their favorite results, block irrelevant spam, and display the best sites manually curated by other users.
Lexxe does what traditional search engines (TSEs) do but more efficiently. Lexxe aims to return dynamic pages with concise answers extracted directly to users, instead of just finding pages where answers are located. By leveraging word hierarchy and related meanings, it focuses more on language processing than symbol processing.
The second part includes these companies:
Gravee attempts to change the economics of search by sharing advertising revenue with content owners and compensating them for making search results possible.
Jooster is another community-driven social search tool, mainly operated through a browser toolbar or button. It searches based on user bookmarks within the user’s social network and other relevant sites that interest other users. Essentially, it bridges social networking and search.
Krugle is a search engine designed for developers. It can easily search for technical information, source code, and answer code-related technical questions. Code samples can be searched from open-source repositories, archives, mailing lists, blogs, and websites. It supports tagging, shared code, and collections of search results.
LivePlasma is a visual music and movie discovery engine covering bands, artists, films, actors, directors, etc., with a multilingual interface. It features Flash-based visualization and employs mind mapping. It is indeed a recommendation engine as its purpose is to discover similar music and movies. If you're searching for new music or movies, this might be useful.
Qube is a desktop application that provides instant search results with just one click, without needing a browser, switching programs, or even entering keywords. It instantly searches any text already on the screen (or manually entered) and quickly returns results while offering real-time spell checking, history logs, dictionary results, and more to enhance the search function. All this happens without any performance degradation.
ZoomInfo searches the web for people and their contact information (company websites, press releases, electronic news services, SEC filings, and other online public information). It compiles concise summaries about individuals and companies and publishes them in an organized format. Social networking tools are available if you choose to become their customer.
Summary
As Ebrahim wrote:
“Traditional search engines are becoming more accurate and comprehensive, but they cannot surpass human intelligence. They only match words, not the true meaning behind the ideas people discuss. However, emerging Search 2.0 technologies make search more meaningful, objective, and task-based.”“Traditional search engines are good for finding information; Search 2.0 is better at discovering new information quickly.”
I am interested in how ZDNet readers think about social search engines. Have you used all the search engines mentioned above? If so, do you think they can compete with large search engines like Google and Yahoo?
Original address: Search 2.0 round-upAuthor: Richard MacManus