tech

Search Engines In The News

It seems that everyone these days is talking about Google, about how it’s impending IPO will give it a market cap greater than every the market cap of every other company in the world combined (okay, that is not really true), about how its one of the few companies to have its name turned into a verb (you are going out with her on a blind date and you haven’t googled her?!) and how search is the true killer app of the web (how many true killer apps are there anyway?). What isn’t talked about are the other search engines out there – no, not Ask Jeeves or MSN but the small guys, the ones that want to be the next Google. Appropriated from the 3/29/04 edition of Newsweek is this handy list of four cool search engines:

  1. Vivisimo – clusters search results into meaningful categories. eBay uses it to sort auction outcomes.
  2. Topix.net – Credit ex-Netscapers for the ability to automatically build pages around 4,000 online news sources.
  3. Coneteq – A Lebanese project (to be launched later this year) will let you search products by brand, price and location. NOTE: This may get my mother to finally start really using the ‘Net
  4. Feedster – Allows searchs of the thousands of personal web logs (this this one) and ranks results by dates
  5. Grokker – Plugs queries into the major search engins and uses home-cooked algorithms to analyze the pages and organize them into cagegories.

Check them out and post your reviews – I haven’t had time to yet…