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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Dandelon is a search engine destined to search thorugh resources of libraries catalogues. It conducts the query by scanning through bibliographic data provided by librarians, OCR thechniques and searching through electronic documents stored at libraries’ servers. Although it is a german project, signed by AGI-Information Management Consultants it is available in 27 languages (mainly european). More than 1,15 million of books, ebooks and articles have already been indexed.

Techniques implemented in these search engine are well known in world of librarians - intelligentCAPTURE is a tool used by Congress Library and British Library. It is used to provide most relevant results by matching query terms with thesauri entries (in these case 27 different languages are used), so its potential is impressive.

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I bet that while searching through Web many times you were trying to get opinions about some products. At the moment it is easier than it was few years ago but still extracting opinions from Web is a hard task. Today we can find opinions about specific categories of products and even about doctors in special services geared towards gathering such data. There is also few search engines designed to provide extraction of opinions published in the Web.

One that kindled lot of buzz was Omgili, vertical search engines that conducts the search only on forums and discussion groups. It offers quite a big number of options of refining the search, like setting the number of replies or unique users taking part in discussion and also setting the time span and language we are interested in. The most efficient search we can conduct with the use of ‘Reviews’ option in top menu. Than we are getting the list of products and variants with the evaluation chart. But Omgili’s problem seems to be number of indexed pages, which in some cases is not enough to provide any result for some products.

Other opinion search engine is OpThink, which is a very simple search engine that scans the Web to provide results containing review links from varied shopping services. The design of these specific search engine is very simple, we can say: ascetic. There is no graphics overload, but in my opinion this service can redirect us to other opinion gathering services from around the world, not only to Amazon. Although its efficiency sometimes it has problems with recognizing the specific product’s name like ‘name-of-company XYZ-serialnumber’. This is visible when we get links to topics of other products of the same company, and the product we’re looking for is just displaed in contextual ads in the sidebar. Than we have to click a little more to find opinions on it.

Swotti is a opinion search engine built on different approach - it doesn’t limit index of pages to forums, opinion gathering services or discussion lists - it  indexes more pages and results are displayed basing on analysing index by searching for name of product and evaluating terms - like ‘good’, ‘worth to recommend’ etc. In addition to products Swotti also provides results for cities and other categories of terms. These search engine, as Omgili provides charts with an avarage opinion, expressed in percents. Unfortunately for its users Swotti can put results connected with totally different topics. For example by entering the city’s name in search box we can get results concerning concert of artist X in that city with opinion “I’d love to see X in City Y in May”. These algorithm basing on searching for evaluation terms is tricky, but sometimes not efficient. Maybe good solution would be implementing semantic technologies that can recognize relations between objects in text and than on this basis try to extract the final opinion.

It’s interesting that any of these search engines doesn’t take into account blogs. Forums and discussion group, so as the reviews (which in shopping services are sort of a comments) are known from so-called old-web or web 1.0. Maybe that is the direction in which opinion search should head to.

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Worio is a new search engine designed to provide search results relevant to keywords typed in search box and information background as weel. Except for traditional search results section in Worio we can find additional sections - with potential web destinations that might be interesting for us. Number of this sections depends on the number of categories that relevant issues can be divided in, but it oscilates around 2-3.

There are two important features that make Worio special among other, it enables using other search engines from home page level - Google, Yahoo and MSN are available. Secondly, all search results are tagged, tags are displayed next to every single result from main results box and in boxes with relevant information as well. IT enables quicker refinement of search experience.

Worio enables creating our own libraries with the results we want to save for future and sharing the results with our friends. Worio approach on search blends in the new trends - prviding background and key words’ ambient, it gives user opportunity not only to get information directly connected with his query but also everything connected with it - what might kept user at the search engine’s site for longer time - bigger possibility of getting increased revenues from displayed ads (note: so far Worio doesn’t show ads, this comment was rather general).

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Duckduckgo is a new search engine that has few interesting features that enhace search experience in quite nice extent. First of all it offers keyboard navigation. There is no option to go for the next page of results, only thing we can do is scrolling down with donw cursor, and subsequent results are displaying onboard.

hat is noticable after few queries the quality of results is quite high. There’s almost no spam, so it is with the ads. In sidebar realted topics and images are displayed, we can switch between columns with left and right cursor. List of related links in the sidebar is also ‘infinite’, just like results.

By typing in single term in our query, the term with general meaning, like i.e. “media”, we get a list of topics acquired from human search engines, so we may always find something interesting. However by typing a term that is more complex and at the same time easier to be defined like i.e. “social bookmarking” we get its definition displayed above search results.

Duckduckgo also enables users to search directly in other search engines, you can do it by typing down ‘!’ and search engine name after it. There is also option check your IP, by entering “ip” in the search box. Duckduckgo is also equiped in calculator and several other option, find full  list here.

Duckduckgo seems to be nice alternative to other search engines, it can gain some small part of market thanks to its improvements on field of “making search more friendly”.

-mw