Collecta: the new age search engine?

June 21st, 2009

Collecta

The Big G comes up whenever online search is discuessed and every other release is compared to it. What works for the masses might not work for all. Google has always been trying to innovate the ’search’ with new betas coming out from GoogleLab just too often. But, recently there are a few search engines which are trying to push the search dimensions further than where Google has already reached. While Microsoft’s Bing is adding decision making to your search, the newly launched Collecta gives you ‘real time search’.

The data on the web is enormous and just keeps updating every millisecond. The Internet users are also developing a need to have these updates in their search as and when it is added. Google can provide you the search results from various websites very efficiently, but Collecta tracks the latest information about your search query through blogs and social networking websites.

Collecta’s real time search results are fetched from wordpress blogs, news results come from Fox, CNN and Reuters, social network buzz via Flickr, Mixx and Twitter. “There’s a lot more velocity in the creation of news and content today, ” says Collecta CEO Gerry Campbell who believes that real time search would allow users to track their latest news, sports events and latest comments on political, social, cultural and all such issues including the product reviews and news. “The world needs a real-time search engine.” He adds.

While the services like Twitter already has an inbuilt search, its not believed to be much real-time. With realtime search results from various sources, Collecta may just click for the new age internet users. Collecta already has a few competitors, some of whom are from big names that can intimidate Collecta. Many real-time search engines focused on Twitter have already hit the Internet market. Facebook is already testing a new search for its service. Lately, it speculations have also hit the online market that Google is working on a microblog search service with its expressed interest in a search deal with Twitter. Then there is FriendFeed, which updates comments from various feeds as and when they are posted.

While using the Collecta looks quite user friendly. Collecta gives real time search results and keeps updating them as they are posted. A preview screen on the right ensures that you don’t have to go to the result page to get the information. There is a pause button to stop the search if you feel bombarded with too many search results. The search options let you include and exclude stories, comments, updates and photos.

While the real-time search may appeal to a many in the beginning, few added features of the conventional search may give it a Go! Would you try Collecta for up-to-second search results? Or would you just prefer Google for your searches and Twitter’s search for the social updates? Let us know in the comments.

via [BusinessWeek]

Categories: First look, Tech Industry News | Tags: , , , | 1 Comment

After iPhone, Android gets Voice search from Google

February 4th, 2009

voice-search-on-android

Mobile industry was surprised with the support Google gave with its services to the iPhone. But hey, here comes the same for the Android aswell. After the brillant Google Mobile App and loads of other customizations for the iPhone; Google has announced the Voice search facility to Android aswell. This would initially be for G1 users in US, but we can expect it to be integrated in all future Androids ;)

Via Unwired View

Categories: Android, First look, Tech Industry News | Tags: , , , , , | 1 Comment

Cuil a failure? or just a beginning

December 30th, 2008

Earlier this year Cuil (pronounced ‘Cool’) was believed to be a Google killer. A new search engine started by some industry veterans and well funded. I was personally amazed to see the amount of PR and buzz it managed to create early on. Though the day it launched we were disappointed (it didn’t index us), the quality was not upto the mark. And eventually, few months down the line it seems to have hit a dead end with no real traffic.

So what really caused this crash? Is Cuil really that bad? Maybe not

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Google modifies Image-Search results page

December 5th, 2008

Google has updated the image search. The thumbnail that we see along with a frame displaying the webpage now has a search bar on the top. This really saves time for someone like me who opens up many thumbnails in differnet windows/tabs at once and then gets frustrated when he wants to go back and search a new image.

(more…)

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Weird Google Suggestions

November 5th, 2008

Some of them might look weird, but then the system reflects what people search for + What is published on the internet …

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Google now indexed Text from Images – Uses OCR

November 1st, 2008

Google leads the search business, and every passing they they convince me that no one is even getting close to them. Just recently they announced that they can now crawl and understand text in Flash animations, they now have something even better! Apparently now Google uses a OCR technology to read scanned documents / images (within PDF files).

This Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology lets us convert a picture (of a thousand words) into a thousand words — words that can be searched and indexed, so that these valuable documents are more easily found. This is a small but important step forward in our mission of making all the world’s information accessible and useful. [Google Blog]

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Categories: Concept / Educative, First look, Tech Industry News | Tags: , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Pagerank competitor from Miscrosoft: BrowseRank

July 26th, 2008

Microsoft BrowseRank
An important factor in Google Search success was the PageRank (PR). PageRank gives importance to the pages depending on the number and quality of incoming links they have. Microsoft’s new technology BrowseRank intends to capitalize on PR’s shotcomings. Apparently Google PR is somewhat easy to Game with a technique called Link Farms and  it doesn’t take into consideration the amount of time a user spends on a given webpage.

“Experimental results show that BrowseRank can achieve better performance than existing methods, including PageRank…in important page finding, spam page fighting, and relevance ranking…”

But one thing is for sure, a single innovation won’t help Microsoft. Being the market leader takes constant innovation. PageRank isn’t the only thing that Goolge has innovated it. Their search results are influenced by over 200 factors. Google has tools like Google Trends, Google Analytics and Adsense, the data from all these together would provide better quality of results IMO.

So Browse Rank is just another new technology that Microsoft is playing with to compete on the web. And TechCrunch adds some spice to it. A recent post at TechCrunch suggested that Google’s claim of having  ‘the most comprehensive index of any search engine’ might not stand true next week! Some big announcement coming up? Wait and watch! Ok it seems to be a new search engine Cuil.

Via Cnet

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Classified Ad on the internet gone wrong

July 24th, 2008

Recently a friend of mine started to receive weird calls on his office number asking for Call Girls. At first we thought that someone is playing a prank, but as the number of calls started to increase we decided to investigate. So we held up a few callers and inquired where he got the number from. Based on what the callers told us they got the phone number while searching GOOGLE! By this time we were sure that someone has played mischief. So while tracing the keywords given by one of the caller we managed to get the source.

Call Girl Goof Up

This friend of mine had actually placed an Ad on a classifieds site “Required: Girl candidate As office assistant …”, the listing also mentioned his office phone no for contact. Now it so happened that Google picked up a page from this classifieds site for the keywords “call girl mumbai”, and unfortunately the snippet on the Goolge search page showed his numbers (see screenshots). Though the page on the classifieds site is unavailable, anyone who searched for call girl mumbai got his number from the google search page snippet itself! LOL

Call Girl Mumbai Goofup

Categories: Weird or not? | Tags: , , , , | No Comments

Adobe helping search engines crawl FLASH content!

July 1st, 2008

Having a full Flash based website is a taboo for most webmasters, It would mean a SEO disaster. For years WWW consultants have been advising corporates to avoid a full Flash based website. But things are about to change!

Techspot is reporting that Adobe is assisting google and yahoo search engines to crawl and index flash content (SWF) on the web. Apparently Adobe has provided Google and Yahoo an optimized version of the Flash Player that scans the content inside the SWF files. Google already has this system live and Yahoo plans to integrate it soon.

The word from Google is that they are currently able to scan “textual content in Flash files” but not Video and other animation (images etc).

Source

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