Category Archives: Search Engines

Take That Google! Yahoo and IBM to Offer Free Enterprise Search

How can you differentiate from a competitor in order to gain more market share? Sometimes, a company can take a pricing decision that can boost its sales but also generate a positive response amongst their customers.

A good example is Yahoo and IBM who just announced that they teamed up in order to provide a free enterprise search tool.  Their goal was to develop an enterprise search tool for companies that don’t have the budget to buy a solution such as Google’s Enterprise Solutions (with Mini for small businesses, and Google Search Appliance for medium and large ones), Fast, or any other paid search tool.

Besides being free, Yahoo and IBM solution, called IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition has got some excellent features:

• Indexes up to 500,000 documents and over 200 file types in 30 different languages.

• Customizable search results interface

• Add new synonyms.

• Create your own featured links.

You couldn’t even get those features for $1995 with Google Mini 🙂 More information about IMB Omnifind Yahoo! Edition (maybe they should get a shorter name…) can be found here.

Research Beyond Google

Many people don’t really realize it, but only a small part of the world information is indexed in Google. Furthermore, people start realizing that some of the results displayed in the search engines’ results do not always satisfy them.

For those of you who want to go deeper when searching, the Online Education Database (OEDb) has gathered a list of 119 of specialty search engines to search Art, Businesses, Jobs, Politics, Science or Health information. The list includes useful and comprehensive resources that you might have used in the past but that you stopped using since Google came up.

AOL Shuts Down Research Department

According to Greg Linden, AOL Research has been shutdown after the massive search data leak and the user privacy concern that it presented.

After only a month of existence, the AOL Research website has been closed.

The site had a nice list of publications and was aimed to allow researchers to share their ideas with others and help people understand search engines better. Too bad it didn’t last long…

Study Buddy: AOL’s search engine built only for homework

If you have children and ever tried to use a search engine with them in order to find help for their homework, you probably realized that it wasn’t always easy to find relevant results.

AOL recently released StudyBuddy.com a search engine that helps schoolchildren find useful resources and information.

Note that the domain is actually homework-help.aol.com: AOL’s trying to avoid the sandbox by using a subdomain and also keywords in the url 🙂

In this article from Seattle PI, you can read:

June Herold, AOL’s vice president for education and consumer services, said StudyBuddy was a response to complaints that because regular search engines have to cater to so many needs, results aren’t as useful for homework.

Because the results are pre-screened by teachers and librarians, Study Buddy provides only useful videos, articles, links to websites, or even games.

It’s a really nice move from AOL, I believe this is the only search engine of that kind on the web.

Kosmix launched 4 new vertical search engines

A few months ago, Kosmix launched a vertical search engine dedicated to Health. I first discovered this search engine  in February and blogged about it. Like I said in this previous post, the guys who are behind this search engine are Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan , two guys who both studied at Stanford university, at the same time as Lary Page and Sergey Brin.

Here’s what you can read on their About page:

“At Kosmix, we’re passionate about building a world class search engine that lets people search less, and discover more great stuff. There are billions of pages on the web that are useful, but never see the light of day through a standard search engine. We want to help you find those great pages, and make it easy and fun to do in the process.

Right now we’re in the early stages of Kosmix, and at this point only cover a handful of categories. Our list is growing fast, so check back with us to see what’s new.”

I have checked their website today and realized that they have launched four other vertical search engines: Video Games, Finance, Travel and U.S Politics.  According to this article, they recently raised $18.3 million in funding.

It provides really interesting results. For example, if you search for “debt free” with the Finance search engine, you can choose to see results related to Finance News, Magazines, Retirement, or Taxes. Since it’s debt related, it also gives you links such as calculators, scholarships articles, etc.

It’s still too early to judge it, but I think they’re doing a great job so far. What do you think about it?