New Delhi March 9, 2005
Surajeet Das Gupta
Business Standard
Thank you, Google. After all, you have made searching
on the web for information just a few clicks away.
But we sometimes wish that we were not bombarded with
so much of information, much of it irrelevant. How
wonderful it would be if we could go to a search channel
that your children could use without chancing upon
adult pages. How much more wonderful it would be if
we could pick up relevant stuff from our desktops
or the intranet in the office.
Not to worry, help is at hand. Search engine companies,
including the big boys like MSN and Google, are paying
heed to your need (not because theyre that thoughtful,
but because competition for eyeballs is becoming fiercer).
Search engine companies are introducing new technologies
that are trying to get closer to the key customer
requirement understanding as exactly as possible
what the user is looking for and offering him only
relevant information.
Heres a look at what is on offer for those with
different specialised information needs and at what
you might not know is available in popular search
engines like Google or MSN, both of which have launched
several new search engines in the last few months.
MSN and Google: Microsoft which undertook a study
of search engine users came out with some startling
revelations. Forty per cent of users said they did
not find the material they were searching for; 50
per cent of the information that a user requires is
available either on his desktop or in the office intranet,
but he cannot find it. Last but not least, a majority
of users were using the search engine to look for
one paragraph of factual information.
Says Krishna Prasad, head of programming at MSN
India: The whole effort of MSN is to leverage
the companys software strength to offer relevant
information from various sources.
So MSN has integrated the Encarta encyclopedia with
its search engine. Users can get basic information
by pressing a button. The advantage, Prasad says,
is that users do not have to dig deep, as they have
to in other searches, to get the relevant information.
MSN has also introduced a desktop search engine which
scans all your files and e-mail as well as attachments
and Powerpoint presentations and delivers what you
need at one place. Prasad says the ultimate goal is
to give the search engine the ability to scan a companys
intranet and draw out information. Eventually all
these search engines (desktop and the web) will converge
into one.
If youre looking for an article written a year
ago, you might face a serious problem because you
may have to dig deep in the search list to be able
to discover what you want. To resolve this problem,
MSN offers a feature search builder which
can be customised according to your requirements.
So you can choose from a variety of options on the
search: really latest, really popular, really old,
updated recently, updated long time back, exact matches
and approximate matches. The advantage is clear: the
search results are refined to meet your specific needs.
Also, you can limit the search to a certain language.
On Google, check out Froogle, a new engine for searching
on the web for products. Product search results are
also linked to the sites of participating merchants.
At the moment it is more useful if you are looking
at stuff in the US (searching for products in India
will yield limited results). But remember, this is
just the beta version.
Google has also launched Google Scholar, which scans
research and academic papers across the globe, including
pre prints (a must for the academically oriented,
especially as there is so much information available
on university and academic web sites which are not
tapped properly).
You could also try Google Movies, Google Video (search
for TV programmes this is being tested on only
a few channels) and Google desktop which, like MSN,
searches your desktop for files like Word, Excel,
Powerpoint, Outlook and Internet Explorer.
For photo buffs who want to manage and search for
photo files on their personal computers, Google offers
Picasa 2. Software that has to be downloaded helps
you instantly find, edit and share all the pictures
on your personal computer.
Every time you open Picasa, it automatically locates
all your pictures (even ones you forgot you had) and
sorts them into visual albums organised by date with
folder names you will recognise. You can drag and
drop photographs to arrange your albums and make labels
to create new groups. Picasa makes sure your pictures
are always organised.
Indian search engines: If you are looking at information
only in Indian sites, check out Sifys Khoj.com.
Says Piush Jha of Sify.com: We are number one
and have a significant NRI traffic, with millions
of pages of viewing every month.
Khoj chooses the directories, not by using any automated
machine but by editors who specialise in areas like
education and news. Jha says that this helps in filtering
search sites for users and makes them more relevant
to what a surfer wants. The companys editors
scan over 100,000 sites.
Surfers too suggest new sites that they should look
at (about 100 suggestions come in every day). The
information is also filtered by the fact that only
Indian sites are gone through so that only relevant
material is thrown up. Jha says the company is looking
at also introducing a desktop search in the near future.
Meta search sites: Most surfers will be familiar with
meta search engines. They are the mother of all search
engines, because they scan a whole host of other search
engines and provide you with information. Of these,
the most popular is Dogpile.com. The site uses the
support of a virtual retriever which gets into a bevy
of sites like Yahoo, Google, LookSmart and Find What.
The technology of the engine ensures that you will
not get duplicated results (these are removed from
the search results). The other meta search engine
which is becoming quite the rage is Vivisimo.com.
Founded by three Carnegie Melon University computer
scientists, Vivisimo has launched a new service, Clusty,
which offers an innovative way for users who find
it increasingly difficult to navigate through the
plethora of search results they are bombarded by search
engines.
Clusty breaks down and categorises the search results
into topics or folders which are to be seen on the
left side of the page so that a surfer can pick up
what is relevant from it rather than scanning all
the search pages and wasting time.
So if you search for the Indian Budget 2005, you will
get the searches in various categories like full text,
tax, finance, railways and health. If you want the
full text, or what the Budget has done in the health
sector, you will get the information in a jiffy.
Other meta searches present the search results visually
in a map. For this, go to kartoo.com. The search site
analyses your request and displays the best sites,
placing them in a visual map. When you scroll to the
key words, a brief discription of the site is seen.
You can also refine your search if you want to.
Search engines for children: Using the more common
search engines to get information for children may
not be easy. After all, you can't flood them with
an overload of information and you'll have to ensure
that they are not confronted by pornography when they
use a search engine.
Thankfully, search engines provide some exciting alternatives.
Ajkids.com, a popular children's search engine from
Ask Jeeves.com, provides answers to children's questions.
Children ask questions to get information.
If a child asks questions like "Why does the
earth move?" the search engine provides search
results in categories -- how fast the earth moves,
where you can see a picture of outer space, where
you can find more information on earth and space and
where you can get a daily update on the state of the
planet.
What makes the search engine user friendly is that
it hires specialised editors who scan information
and select sites that are relevant to children. Their
choice is based on relevance, the quality of writing
and whether it is an adult page or not.
Look too at ithakhi.net, the search tool created by
molecular biologist Carla Tirona Farinati. Meant for
children between the ages of 10-12 years, the meta
search engine scans a number of search engines for
children, including Yahooligans, Factmonsters, AOLKids,
KidsClick and Awesome Library.
You could also try Yahooligans, a search site aimed
at seven to 12 year olds. The sites in the search
are hand picked to ensure they are appropriate to
the age that it is targeted. Again, you don't have
to worry about any adult or objectionable material
creeping in.
References books, news: If you are looking for information
from reference books and libraries, you have an array
of choices. Wikipedia.com is a free encyclopaedia
that offers you free content from over 486,000 articles.
You can join the club by editing and putting up information
on the site. Biography.com, on the other hand, offers
you information on over 25,000 popular personalities
across the globe and is worth a try. For those who
are looking for more, try Infoplease.com (part of
the UK's Pearson group) which answers factual questions
by scanning encyclopaedia, almanacs, biographies and
dictionaries.
Then there is lii.org, popularly known as the librarian's
index, which searches over 14,000 resources which
are selected and evaluated by librarians for their
relevance to users of public libraries as well as
librarians.
For news, you have the usual sites that include Google
and Yahoo. But just try out MSN's new offering, newbot.msn.co.
in: you could get hooked to it. It picks up news from
over 4,800 sources and even tells you which are the
most popular headlines which people are reading currently.
What makes it attractive, claims Prasad, is the fact
that the news is updated every 20 minutes. So you
get what is hot.
These are not the only search engines for news. Daypop.com
searches over 59,000 news sites for current events
once a day. The engine also crawls into weblogs to
extract opinions and information on subjects too.
Sites for special interest surfers: Surfers with a
special focus or interest such as golf could usefully
look at golfhelp.com, a search engines that accesses
145,000 golf sites.
If you are a women looking for information from sites
dedicated to women, look at wwwomen.com. For those
who want to download music free from the internet,
check out warez.com. You'll have to download software
which is available free to listen to the music.