Recently few search engines destined to provide results for students and scholars were launched. Most spectacular one is Middlespot, which was bulit around the idea ‘where search meets research’. Its interface was designed to make easier advanced research, conducted simultanously on many websites. We can browse results in classic text form, and we can watch their screen shots (with option to zoom in and out). But it is not all. We can add particular pages to the bar name workpad, which in fact is a sort of notebook, with bookmarks. We have possibility to add coments, email chosen sites to friend or publish it with option to embed it or get URL. We can also use few workpads at the same time, so it enables to conduct multidiemensional research.

Second engine is RefSeek, which is a combo of vertical and horizontal search. We can choos between these two options. In vertical search we can browse the databases gathered in categories like almanacs, encyclopedias, mathematics or news. Unfortunately number of links inside categories is strongly limited, mainly to Japanese, German, British, French and American sites. However the horizontal search is much more effective. We can refine our search with chossing appropriate keywords suggested by the engine or try our query in Ask, Google, Live or Yahoo engines. RefSeek gives also refferences to the pages that particular result comes from, but only when the site is one of most popular, like for example Wikipedia.

Third engine is named Tegedu, as we can guess it by its name it offers us searching by chosing tags. It works on similar basis as CloudTuner, about which I wrote about few posts ago. We can choose up to 7 tags to narrow our search. Tagedu is, just as its logotype, typically web 2.0 project. It bases on community - users add tags to browsed pages, contributing to the number of pages indexed by the engine. Unfortunately right now there are not many pages indexed by tagedu users. But the idea itself has got some potential.

-mw