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.

-mw

Leapfish is another search resi;ts aggregator, although its creators prefer name “organizer”. Using Leapfish we can get results from G-gle, Y-hoo and MSN. At first glance it might look like something we know and in fact like nothing innovative. But most valuable feature of Leapfish is hidden. There is no ’search’ button. Engine starts the query just after user finish typing. It is probably most time-saving search engine in the world. It is so fast that search results change with every character we type in search box. Really impressive.

Watch video from Leapfish Inc.:

Except for click-free fast delivered information users get also contextual information, matching the query, displayed in left sidebar in different section such as news, videos, images or answers.

-mw

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.

-mw

Google has introduced new feature to its search engine, semantic analysis of query with providing the answer for our question. It is possible to formulate a question and get answer for it at the top of list of results. At the moment number of answerable questions is seriously limited, but still impressive. Semantic analysis can deal just with recognizing geographical names, can distinuish famous people and their relatives, provide dates of birth and death of famous people, but also answers for questions such as “what is XY famous for?”, “who is the author of book X?” or “who is the president of X?”. Data extraction processed from all search results seems to be quite advanced. In addition with each answer we get the refference to its source.

Although it seems to work efficiently, all names have to be given in full versions - like Frederic Chopin insted of Chopin. There are also some problems with names of companies - algrithm does not deal with abbreviations.

So far Google didn’t annouce any official statement or explanation how does it work. It looks like algorithm was based on extracting structural data from RDF and HTML as well. Main improvement is introducing mechanism that analyze the query in order to define relations between objects and if these relations are clear the answer is displayed separately from other results.

It can be a breakthrough in semantic web developement, ability of deriving the meaning from websites content and extracting the data into answer enable to save time by removing the need of crawling through search results. Except for that, these feature seems to be a foundation for further improvements - if we can get answers for simple questions why not try to get answers for logical questions and than why not ask questions in more informal language, not with plain words?

-mw

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).

-mw