New Search Engines Category Archive

Tried Yandex? Russian Search Engine Available in English

The search engine Yandex is big in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus,Kazakhstan, and Turkey, and an alpha version in English has also been available for awhile. Yandex builds its own search engine databases and currently has a web, images, and video database on the English Yandex site plus web-based email. All versions of Yandex also have a cache copy of pages, which makes it an alternative source for cache copies. On the search results page, the "more" link finds other page matches from that site, and you can do a follow-up search just within that sites. Some sites' icons show up on the left, and unusual among today's search engines, Yandex dares to number the results!

Its advanced search page is, like too many others, not linked on the home page, but it is linked near the top search box on results pages. It not only includes date, site, filetype, and languge limits and a title search option, but it also shows the chosen limits in the grey box at the bottom highlighted in this screenshot. The advanced search page even includes an option for turning off lemmatization (searching all grammatical variants) by clicking the "used in text" option as in "this exact form."

Yandex.com may not yet have much market share, but it is well worth a look for anyone interested in a Google alternative.

A9 Launches OpenSearch

With the slogan "We want OpenSearch to do for search what RSS has done for content," A9 has launched its OpenSearch initiative. With OpenSearch, anyone can create their own search button for A9's options on the right. Some examples already listed on their Add More Columns page include searches for the New York Times, Flickr photos, Wikipedia, ThinkGeek, PubMed, and A9 Top Blogs.

Clusty Adds U.S. Government Database

Clusty, Vivisimo's new clustering meta search engine, has added a new government search available both as a tab and a direct search site. It includes FirstGov, various think tanks, U.S. political news, and some subject-specific collections.

Visual, Virtual Yellow Pages at A9

Amazon and their A9.com has introduced a fascinating "Find it on the Block" ability to browse pictures of business store fronts in select U.S. markets. With millions of photos, this allows users to browse streets in the ten cities currently available. For a searcher, this offer a very different kind of search database. Read more in Chris' extensive review and the company's own description of how they did it.

New Engine: Exalead Beta

From France comes a fascinating new search engine known as Exalead. Gary Price has many details in his SEW Blog post. Key search features include truncation, proximity, and some nice sorting of results. This is one to watch.

Clusty from Vivisimo

Vivisimo has launched a new search site called Clusty which provides another look at Vivisimo's clustering capabilities. A nice, new design, with tabs for Web, News, Images, Shopping, Encyclopedia, and Gossip, the underlying databases are not new or original. What is new is that packaging. For those that like the clustering, meta-search approach, Clusty is well worth a visit.

Amazon Launches A9 Search Engine

Amazon has now launched a search engine known as A9 at A9.com. The Web and Image searches use Google databases. A9 also has some other unique features. It includes access to the Amazon product database, of course, along with movie information from the Internet Movie Database and reference sources from GuruNet. And for those who log in with their Amazon user ID and password, it also keeps track of search histories, has a Diary for keeping notes about Web pages, and offers a bookmarking capability. There is also an A9 toolbar. Their press release notes that "A9.com, Inc., a separately branded and operated subsidiary of Amazon.com, opened its Palo Alto, California office in October 2003 to research and build innovative search technologies." The beta of A9 launched April 15, 2004.

Clush

Clush is a new search engine, with its own small database. It has thumbnail images of the Web pages and provides a variety of clustering options. Its press release mentions that it has a paid inclusion program. It also has the ability for users to rate the search results.

Mooter: A New Clustering Search Engine:

A new search engine from Australia, Mooter Search is available in beta, although the site has gone done a few times recently. Mooter divides results into clusters with a diagram. Clicking the "Moot Quicker!" button gives the clusters on the left and search results on the right. The underlying database is not clearly identified but according to Pandia uses a combination of meta search and some of their own crawling.

New! GigaBlast in Beta

GigaBlast launched in beta today. While much smaller than the recently launched Openfind, it offers some nice advantages. It includes cached copies of the pages it indexes, like Google. It includes an advanced search, date sorting, field searching, and excellent reporting of both the date spidered and the last modified date. It does lack full Boolean, truncation, and other advanced search features. See the Search Engine Showdown review for more on its search features.

OpenFind: New Beta Search Engine

OpenFind is a new search engine in beta. It claims a 3.5 billion record database, but it includes many blanks and duplicates such as www.searchengineshowdown.com and searchengineshowdown.com. Also, while phrase searching sometimes works, it is not dependable. On at least one search, it found my two terms adjacent but in the opposite order. It is very much a beta product with no documentation, but it does have some very interesting features such as sorting by date and size, and a proxy link that highlights search text in the actual page.