Instead of putting the onus on you to choose the best keyword, just-launched semantic search engine Powerset can find the answers you seek on the Wikipedia using natural language. Type things like “what is a life hack” or “paintings by Salvador Dali” and Powerset extracts those answers from Wikipedia and lays them out on an attractive page. CNET reports: Powerset’s natural language search technology is based on patents licensed exclusively from PARC and its own proprietary indexing. Powerset’s engine has read 2.5 million Wikipedia pages and extracted “meaning” from the sentences, creating a navigation and semantic layer on top of the popular Web encyclopaedia.
In my tests, Powerset was slow to respond (no doubt suffering from launch overload), but you can check out a video of Powerset in action after the jump.
Yahoo’s testing out a new kind of search page layout: when you search for broad-reaching terms (like Einstein, and happily, Lifehacker), you may arrive on their beta “Glue Page,” which groups web page results, images, Wikipedia, news, blogs, and video clips into separate areas on the page. See it for yourself.
Let’s face facts—you’re probably Googling yourself on a regular basis, whether for pure ego satisfaction or monitoring of your professional image online. New search aggregator Addict-O-Matic just happens to be great for seeing how you “look” online, as it focuses on returning results from the top social networking sites, Web 2.0 services, and blog-watching services. Of course, it’s also a great tool for monitoring a topic or another person across the web’s wide expanse, but once you add Addict-O-Matic to your Firefox search bar options or just as a bookmark, you know you’ll be heading back to satisfy your online-mirror-checking fix. Addict-O-Matic [via Geeks Are Sexy]
Web site Boolify makes advanced web searches easy through a simple drag-and-drop interface. Intended as an educational tool, Boolify teaches users how to create boolean searches in Google using operators like OR and NOT (-) to get very specific search results. Boolean searching isn’t new by any means, but if you’ve never gotten the hang of it or you just prefer a more visual approach, Boolify is worth a look. If you’re way past this, then our top 10 obscure Google search tricks may be more up your alley. Boolify Project [via About.com]
Before you head out on the town tonight in New York City, find out where to get your thirsty hands on your favourite hard-to-find beer at BeerMenus.com. This menu search site just launched with over 150 beer menus, which include over 1200 beers. Browse by neighbourhood, brew, or bar to get a beer menu that lists price (by bottle and tap), alcohol content, and brewery, plus a map of the location, web site, hours, and phone number. BeerMenus.com is New York only (so far?) and isn’t yet comprehensive in its coverage there, but it’s off to a great start for beer-lovers in the Big Apple.
To be honest, BitTorrent aggregator LookTorrent wouldn’t be much of a competitor for its Ajax-powered counterpart YouTorrent, except that YouTorrent has dropped most of the popular torrent sources in anticipation of a squeaky-clean sale. What LookTorrent does is provide a top frame to search for torrent download links, and links to 25 sources, one of which will likely have even the most obscure files. If nothing else, LookTorrent’s home page is a nice catalog of sites to look through while you’re on the hunt for that special download.
In honour of Earth Day, Yahoo put together a “Free Is Good” web site promoting previously mentioned Freecycle, local mailing lists of folks who give away stuff they don’t need. Pop your city and state into the search engine and get a map back of nearby groups. The Freecycle groups themselves are Yahoo Groups, so you have to join the group using your Yahoo ID to see messages (and often a moderator has to approve the membership request.) From there you can offer stuff you’d throw away anyway to give to your neighbours for free, and take them up on their offers, too.
One of the ways that Google’s search engine looks for rich, comprehensive results is by looking for pages that match a variation of the search terms you’ve entered. The Google Operating System offers some tips for how to refine your search so Google sticks strictly to a search for your keyword – as well as offering a way to make the search even *more* fuzzy. By adding a + before a keyword, you can ensure it won’t be ignored:
“Instead of searching for [blogger profile images] , you’ll use this query: [+blogger profile images] . Alternatively, you could use quotes even for a single keyword: ["blogger" profile images]or add a plus after your keyword: [blogger+ profile images] .
If rather than narrowing your search you want to cast your net wider, you can use the synonymous operator (~). Using this operator, a search for [~images]will also return results containing “imagery”.
Less Approximate Google Searches [Google Operating System]
When it comes to getting help with computer or nearly any other problem, subject-specific forums can be far more helpful than a Google search. Then again, as with Google, you have to know where and how to look. Twing, a multi-forum search site, does a great job of parsing through the results from hundreds of user-driven forums and gives you the tools to winnow down the multitude of results you’re likely to find. You can pull out specific phrases, dates of posting, languages, or only the topics and threads that contain video or pictures, for example, and sign up to be alerted whenever a thread you’re following is updated—saving you the hassle of signing up for the forum itself. There are many forum search aggregators out there, but I’m liking how Twing does its job, and with no mandatory sign-up.
Google has just souped up its ability to ‘teleport’ you to the exact website you want, even if you just type in its generic name without the appropriate .com or .net ending. Now it has added a supplementary search box which will crop up in the search results for the site you’re looking for.
The writeup on the Official Google Blog gives the example of searching for “NASA” when you’re looking for information about the Hubble telescope. The search result for NASA pops up a few NASA specific links, followed by the “search within the site” search box (as pictured above).
This secondary search box won’t appear for every search, however. Google hasn’t said which sites will get the ‘search withiin the site’ box – it’s down to Google’s secret algorithymic sauce, apparently. “This feature will now occur when we detect a high probability that a user wants more refined search results within a specific site,” reads the blog post.
Search within a site – a tale of teleportation [Official Google Blog]
