Interesting search

Since I am doing research on search, I thought I would create a list of interesting search-based web sites here, with individual blog entries describing each site and why they are interesting. Here is a starting list, which, of course, will be added to as I discover more interesting sites.

Interfaces:

  • Searchme.com – visual search interface reminiscent of iPod Touch album covers (or, rather, the other way around)
  • New York Times – search-based editorial pages (topic pages) (conversational interface)
  • Times of London – search-based editorial pages (topic pages) defined by user (conversational interface)
  • Yahoo Mindset – intent-driven (or rather, intent-revealing) interface for product search. This is no longer available, but this blogpost has an explanation and a graphic of the "intent slider".

Federated search

  • Oodle – federated search for classified ads
  • Globrix – federated search for real estate in UK

Rich media search

  • SnapTell – instant product identification from mobile photo
  • TinEye – image-matching search (great service, but unfortunately the index is rather small)
  • Shazam – music-matching search for mobile phones (not quite query by humming, but close…) See article in CACM.

Regionals

  • Indian search engines: asklaila.com (local search)
  • Chinese search engines: Baidu (a serious competitor to Google)
  • Sesam.no search engine: Specializing in Norwegian content not easily available on Google, such as relationships between people.

Specialists

  • OpenCalais – metadata generator, useful for understanding how machines read your text

… more to come …

By all means – feel free to make suggestions!

4 thoughts on “Interesting search”

  2. RSannes

    Here is one suggestion: Searchme.com – visual presentation of search results, category based search
    Another suggestion: why not create this list and blog entries as a wiki? Crowd sourcing in practice?
    Apropos twitter and other social software: there are a large number of services (applications) that are search-based, but is hiding the search from the user. Some are based directed searches (e.g. real time information on public transportation) while other collect information from a variety of sources (e.g. a google search). And you have geosearch applications like Locly and eartscape on the iPhone.
    Locly is the most interesting service as it makes geosearches for flickr images, local twitters and wikipedia articles in addition to “yellow pages information” about local services. The quality of the service depends, of course, on that content is geo-tagged.

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