Web searches: new avenues

SEARCHING THE net is an essential component of one's online life and a variety of tools meant for it are in place. The distinct feature of the search tools arena is the incessant inflow of new tools.

Before settling down with a tool, one finds another one appearing on the scene. Even savvy netizens find it challenging to keep up with the developments in this realm. This edition of NetSpeak provides a brief description of the latest products in this genre.

SearchMash

Anyone dealing with web search products has to make sure that any new offerings from Google are explored. One will never be disappointed.

Google has recently launched (http://www. searchmash.com/about/privacy. html) a test search service called SearchMash (http://www.searchmash. com/).

Alongside the usual search output (results are similar to those of Google, but each is numbered), the service provides options to get search output from blog, image and video sites as well.

An advantage of SearchMash is the `More Results' option available at the bottom of the output page for showing the next set of results in the same page.

Another notable feature is `Hide Details,' which lets you hide the details displayed along with each web page - thus helping you to view more results per page.

Google Notebook search

Google Notebook helps us easily clip web content, add notes or comments and store it online. Also, one can make her notebook public and share the contents with others. Now, Google has started a search service for finding information available on public notebooks.

With Google Notebook search service (http://www.google.com/notebook/search), you may find lots of valuable information.

However, this search service has generated some controversy as many people store private information on notebooks and share it without realising the implications.

Decipho (http://decipho. com/) is another search service explored by this author. Besides the normal web search, this service has additional features contributed by its users.

When you invoke a search, you can specify whether it is for shopping or research or both. Another feature is the subject-specific clustering of the results. For instance, if you start a search on statistics, the service presents you categories such as `Statistics online,' `Glossary of statistics,' `Stats' and `Math Statistics.'

The search engine Hakia (http://www.hakia.com/), scheduled to activate its full operation sometime in 2007, seems to be a promising search tool. The beta version is available for testing its potential.

One distinction of this service relates to question/answer facility. By framing good questions, you could obtain appropriate answers.

In this regard, you can use the service along with other question/answer services such as Brainboost. Also, for certain queries, Hakia provides categorised results.

CometQuery (http://www. cometquery.com/) is yet another addition to the search tool landscape.

With each of the links in the output, the service displays its screenshot as well.

source: Hindu