Amazon Web Services published almost one terabyte of knowledge, databases of different sorts are now available and accessible. Among them we can find US Bureau of Transportation Statistics, DBPedia Knowledge Base, Freebase Data Dump, Wikipedia Extraction and NCBI Genbank. This cloud of information can be processed with ease by creating EBS volume, basing it on the snapshot ID of the data, attaching created volume to a running EC2 instance in the same disk space and adding mount point and mount the EBS volume on the instance. Downloading these inconceivable dataset is not necessary any longer.

This can be found to be the milestone in starting the web cloud computing space. The main use for these cloud will be availing these information for bots, that will process them and support humans with their structured knowledge.

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Faroo is an initiative geared towards merging p2p mechanism and search engine’s nature. By downloading Faroo, user becomes the part of decentralized network of crawlers that create contribute to creating index. With one difference - only visited pages are indexed. It is nothing like searching for UFO screen saver, sharing computer resources. In fact it is a user who is the crawler - visited pages are added to index, so index is a result of browsing history of all Faroo users, not like in traditional search engines, where crawler “goes” from one server to another.

Faroo contains also some interesting mechanism except of offering becoming part of search engine - PageRank mechanism is also built with completely new approach. It does not look like traditional page rank mechanism, in Faroo it is not page owner, who decides about the position in the ranking, by linking pages togather. Faroo offers user-oriented technology - user’s behaviour is being tracked while browsing specific page and it is automatically counted in the ranking. It sounds a little bit enigmous, I imagine that final contribution to Page Rank is a net force of lenght of the stay, number of clicks and the nature of clicks (ads or content), maybe also adding to favourites.

Faroo is an interesting initiative, it is even more curious how it will be developed. At least I am going to stay tuned at their blog.

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Have you ever had this problem that while searching you did not reach satisfying results and you did not know what other words you could use to get more precise results? It  is quite often problem I guess. One of the possible solutions is using different kinds of vocabularies, like synonyms. However there are some tools that you can use with pleasure to inspire yourself while working on specific query.

First one is Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus, created in cooperation with EU. It is a multilingual tool (english, german, duth, italian, spanish and french, although english version is most developed) that enables user to see the hierarchy of words related to searched term. User gets map of related words, brenches, synonyms, definitions and subcategories. It was developed as a language learning tool - that is why except for map of words user gets also a lot of grammatical information, but thanks to its innovativeness and usability of knowledge user can expand his or her knowledge about query that is currently conducted. There is just one drawback of Visual Thesaurus - it is a paid service, without paying user can go only with few queries.

Second tool is a Visuword application, developed by Princeton students and researchers. Main idea is simmilar, but… Visuwords presents the map of associations with complete information on the matter of various associations - by arrows in different colours user can lear if the result means for example: word A “is a member of” word B, A “causes” B etc. In visuwords results are also presented in form of thinkmap, after putting cursor on specific node of net of words user get additional information on this word.

Such tools are useful on stage of planning the query before you really start searching. It helps to organize knowledge for analyzing the data you have already gathered, get fresh ideas by expanding the view on particular topic - there can always exist some aspects you did not take into account.

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Junoba is a head’n’shoulders of search engines - it is a 2 in 1 application. One of its functions is aggregation of social bookmarking services topics and the other one is ability to search through these services. Among them user can find Digg, Yahoo Buzz, Delicious, Reddit, Propeller and Mixx. It does not work on any new algorhtym, but it uses Google Custom Search technology. It is another decent initiative that uses GCS tools - recently I wrote about KidRex that is also based on Google Custom Search.

Idea of searching through web 2.0 services is not new, I bet that everybody interested in SE business can name at least few engines that search through social web services. However searching through bookmarking services is fresh idea. It is a great tool to get information a little bit different to mainstream media news. Junoba can help in reducing the meaning of agenda setting effect - users can learn which opinions are really popular on specific fields.

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Sagoon is a search engine geared towards delivering information from all around the world and segregating it into categories such as: web, news, images, quotes, topics. At first glance there’s nothing special, is it? There are to things that enable to distinguish Sagoon from other SEs. First it is a pleasent, clear, spatial and friendly interface, that encourages to use it.

Second thing is, or rather are search results of high quality. Sagoon bases on its own index and Yahoo BOSS and other companies’ technologies. First thing that surprises is that user gets only 5 search results sites with most relevant links - in searching on some topics it might be not enough, but sufficient to get know what the topic is about.

Sagoon is maybe not a perfect tool for extensive search campaigns, but the links given from it are completely different from these from traditional (most popular search engines). I found many valuable documents in topics I use to monitor with use of Google I didn’t find before - it worth to recommend.

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