Category: Online search tools and services

Google adds link to selected automatically translated search results in Non-English versions of the search engine.

Last week we told you about how Google had added book search to their Search Options feature. This week they added more options.

My favorite among the many alternatives to Google these days is semantic search engine Duck Duck Go. And this great little search engine just got better — it now offers quick and useful previews of the sites in the search results, so you don’t have to click through to know if you’ve found what you are looking for.

Google has made a few interesting tweaks to its web search offering and adds “deep links” directly to subsections of result pages.

Yahoo! (NSDQ:YHOO) will abandon its own search engine in favor of Microsoft’s Bing next year (unless the deal is stopped by the US government). That doesn’t stop Yahoo! from improving the search interface, however. Yahoo! does not have to present results in the same way as Bing. This week Yahoo! announced the new Yahoo! Search.

This week Google launched Sidewiki, a browser sidebar that lets you contribute and read information alongside any web page. This tool has some interesting uses. It also has some serious implications that have web masters worried.

Real time indexing has become the new holy grail in the search engine business. Pandia takes a look at how Google is doing.

Google Book Search, Google’s ambitious project to scan all books in existance, has caused a lot of controversy. The most common argument is that Google could get a monopoly on accedd to a large part of our common cultural heritage. Another problem is that indexing books and making them available online — even as excerpts — could be construed as copyright enfringement.

If you are a librarian, if you are interested in intellectual propety rights or if you just have a keen interest in books, you might want to dig deeper to make up your own mind about this. Google Book Search Bibliography is a good place to start.

The launch of Wolfram|Alpha in May was preceded by a huge amount of hype. Wolfram|Alpha was hailed as a potential Google killer and an entirely new kind of search engine. After a couple of months of being used by real searchers for real life queries it is clear that it is neither.

Wolfram|Alpha is not a Google killer. This is eminently clear if you take a look at the numbers. Andy Beal reports that Wolfram|Alpha’s Traffic Drops 82% Since Launch.

But the verdict is supported by more than numbers. Wolfram|Alpha is in fact not a search engine at all. It’s a fact engine. Most of the queries you take to Google, Yahoo or Bing makes no sense to Wolfram|Alpha.