Search 2.0 Summary

Original Address: Search 2.0 round-up

Original Author: Richard MacManus

At Read/WriteWeb, I published two articles written by Ebrahim Ezzy on the topic of "Search 2.0" or what could be called the third generation of social search. Below is a summary of all these Search 2.0 companies as outlined by Ebrahim.

Part One features the following companies:

Swicki is a community-driven search engine that allows users to create highly focused searches for a specific term. 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 tool. Users can create and publish their own personal search engines by deciding which URLs should be included in their "SearchRoll."

Clusty is a clustering engine that groups similar items together—organizing search results into folders. It goes beyond simple search and integrates meta-search (i.e., search of searches) with clustering power, providing a rich and flexible search experience. Like creating organic web results, Clusty also searches for shopping information, yellow page 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 concise answers in a dynamic page format directly to users instead of just finding pages where answers are located. By utilizing the hierarchy and related meanings of words, it focuses more on language processing rather than symbol processing.

Part Two 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 operating through a browser toolbar or button. It searches based on user bookmarks and relevant sites from the user’s social network. Essentially, it bridges the gap between social networking and search.

Krugle is a search engine designed for developers. It can conveniently search for technical information, source code, and answer code-related technical questions. Code samples can be found in open-source repositories, archives, mailing lists, blogs, and web pages. 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 multi-language interface. It features Flash-based visualizations and employs a mind-mapping mode. It is indeed a recommendation engine because its purpose is to discover similar music and movies. If you're looking for new music or films, this might be useful.

Qube is a desktop application that provides one-click search results 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 other enhanced search features. 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. If you choose to become their customer, you can also enjoy social networking tools.

Summary

As Ebrahim wrote:

"Traditional search engines are becoming more accurate and extensive, but they cannot surpass human intelligence. They can only match words, not the true meaning of the ideas people discuss. However, emerging Search 2.0 technologies can make search more meaningful, objective, and task-based."

"Traditional search engines are only good for finding information; Search 2.0 is better at quickly discovering new information."

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?

(Translated by StephenZhai, welcome to visit onlyshare)