Every time a new search engine is launched the quality of the results is compared with Google, Yahoo, etc. its human to do that as 80% of the search users are used to Googling rather than Binging!

For this purpose Michael Kordahi has come up with a service which shows results from Yahoo, Google and Bing but does not show the name of the search engine, he called it Blind Search [link]. The page lets you vote for the best results after which it shows the name of the search engine.

This way the brand of the search engine does not make a difference as users don’t get to see which search engine they are voting for and trust me most often than not it’s a close call!

Blind Search initially showed the voting results however the developer took the results off as few users figured out a way to game the system.

From the last updates on the results, Google was leading with 43%, Bing 32% and Yahoo trailing with 25% votes.

I think Bing did pretty good for itself. Microsoft now has a good platform they can call "Search Engine", I hope to see them build on the existing technology.

Click here to visit Blind Search.

Users can now choose to filter results based on the origin or nature of the content or simply by when it was created. For example running a search on “Indian Food” and filtering results to get to what I really want or sometimes even when I don’t know what I want “Options” will really help you narrow down the results get to the right content.

Search for anything and click on “Show Options” to see a lot more features to narrow down the results you are currently seeing on the page.

For example, following results are filtered to show the reviews of "indian food" written in the last 24hrs.

What I like the most from the new options are Forums and Reviews filter, Related Searches and Wonder Wheel from the views and obviously the Time filter.

Time filter is not new, it earlier existed in the “Advanced Search” panel but now it’s more accessible from the “Show Options” panel.

Following video from Google’s announcement shows how to use these filters effectively.

As services like Twitter is being seen as a threat to Google in someways, innovation is even more important for the search giant and thats exactly what its doing.

We all know that almost everyday a new web 2.0 company/site sprouts on the Internet farm, and the service that I am going to bring to your kind attention is one of them namely Viewzi. We all or should I say at least I am addicted to using Google as my search engine, especially when I know the power of using it with operators and query modifiers and don’t pay much attention to new search technology. Not that I don’t write about them or stay updated with them, (Abbas wrote about Cuil.com and I did a post on on TinEye not a long time back) but the very fact that I hardly use many of them on a regular basis proves my slavery to Google.

Viewzi claims to be

new and highly visual way to search that brings all your favorite stuff together in one place. Oh, and it’s bolder, richer, and more fun.

Let’s quickly look at various features that this very promising search service has to offer. The home page is much of delight to the eyes and is very basic with just one single search box and small image to the video site offered by the same service. Once you search for something it gives you 17 small flash based screenshots and moving film strip like flash gallery to search for that term under various categories like album, shopping, weather and so on . This is quite good features except for the fact that it ain’t smart. It’s not smart because it doesn’t decide categories based on the search query. Let’s say I search for viagra, it still gave me the category for recipe and weather which is quite irrelevant. However, there were no results under those categories and rightly so. But these categories could have been excluded. Following is how the resultant search page looks like:

Good thing is that the most relevant category is the first in the filmstrip. Try searching for some celebrity and you’ll get celebrity photo view as the first category and as the service boasts about the effects are quite visual in a good way! I tried signing up for the service a few days back and haven’t heard from them for an invite. I hope you’ll enjoy playing with it.

Meet the founders:

Tom Costello, CEO and Founder
Tom specializes in Search engine architecture and relevance methods. His research in search engine field goes back to his Stanford days in 1999 when he launched Xift, a search engine that discovered page analysis and clustering.

Anna Patterson, President and Founder
Anna joined Google in 2004 after developing and selling Recall, the biggest search engine at that time with 12 billion pages.
While at Google, she helped the search engine to grow its search index by designing and launching TeraGoogle in early 2006. She also lead and managed groups specializing in Ranking and Google’s Ad relevance technology.

Russell Power, VP of Engineering and Founder
Russel lead the serving part of TeraGoogle, he also spend a major chunk of his time at Google working on Ranking and Spam detection systems.

They already claim to be the world’s biggest search engine.

“Welcome to Cuil—the world’s biggest search engine. The Internet has grown. We think it’s time search did too.”

This would have been true until recently until Google claimed the 1 Trillion pages indexed milestone. Cuil has crawled about 186 billion pages out of which they just have about 120 billion pages indexed and rest of the pages were removed as SPAM, etc.

Beating Google at its own game is certainly not Cuil’s management team certainly has a plan. Let’s wait and watch. Cuil offers features like Categorization/Drilldown, Roll-over definitions, Tabs and Navigation suggestion. Click here to know more about the features.

I am certainly expecting Cuil to do a lot better than other search engines we have seen in recent time which claim to be a threat to Google. Cuil was in works since a long time now and it kept people waiting for its launch. The downtime of cuil’s servers show how much people were waiting for a Google alternative. At the time of writing this article we noticed that the search engine was down with a message saying

"We’ll be back soon…

Due to overwhelming interest, our Cuil servers are running a bit hot right now. The search engine is momentarily unavailable as we add more capacity.

Thanks for your patience."

We can only hope that it does something which everyone in the industry is expecting it to do, "Search Better!"

Visit Cuil.com

Stacks, I liked this feature. It can come in real handy when you are researching on a topic or collecting sites writing about a particular topic. It can be a great help for bloggers who read a lot and like to organize their searches and information so that they can visit later and pickup from where they left off. Stacks also lets you share your collection of webpages, videos and images with your friends through e-mail, facebook, blog, etc…

Media Search, This feature is not any different from the Image search on Google. In addition users can also search for videos on SearchMe, though the videos currently come only from Youtube, however, we can expect to see content from more video sites coming in. The best part of Video search is the categorization.

Media search from SearchMe reminds me of PicLens media search plugin, though they cannot be compared, I like PicLens better for media search though, I hope they include categorization soon.

Watch the following videos to see the new features on SearchMe in action.

Stacks

Media Search

I used SearchMe for a while, I wont beat around the bushes, I didn’t like the service much. I still did not understand the purpose of the new Search Engine. The way I look at it, it clearly does not address any issue in the search arena.

My Observations and Suggestions:
Lets start with positives…

• I love the categorization of the results
• The UI looks nice and clean
• Offers both Image and text results

Improvements and Suggestions:

• Image rendering is slower when compared with the text based search engines
• It would be better if users are able to read the text on the snapshots otherwise what’s the purpose of the snapshots?
• SPAM is one of the biggest issues hitting all the major search engines. I noticed 3 spam sites in the first 10 results.
• SearchMe should offer full text search mode as well

Personally, I wont use SearchMe as much as I use Google or any other search engine I use.

A new day brings a new “Me too” search engine which strongly believes that search engine market is big enough for everyone to survive (Only time will tell). SearchMe offers new revolutionary technology which delivers search results in site snapshots instead of text.

If you have ever used iTunes to browse through your tracks using Cover Flow 3D graphical interface you will know how SearchMe works. Following image shows what the search results look like

Reasons why I think SearchMe might not be a success

• SearchMe is not clearly solving any problem
• Its easier and quicker to browse through text than images specially when you are looking for text based information.
• Image search engines require more clicks and add more steps involved in the process of searching and reaching the destination site.
• Rendering images require more resources than showing text based results thus shooting the maintenance and infrastructure cost through the roof.
• Business model? Advertising can only be successful if there are enough users searching on SearchMe..

Being that said, it will be interesting to see how SearchMe attracts users and keep them coming back to search more.

SearchMe is not open for users yet, however, you can signup for a beta tester.

Watch the following video to see what SearchMe looks like.

These are my initial reactions, I will write more about SearchMe once I get to use it. Till then feel free to tell us what you think.

Click here to subscribe to Google India Trends feed.

I think one feature that this product should have is the date range to see the top queries over a period of time.

Today’s top 10 queries are:
1. star ananda
2. starananda
3. india vs srilanka
4. 24 ghanta
5. kolkata tv
6. bangla bandh
7. kolkata news
8. tcs layoff
9. tara news
10. etv bangla

How can I be a ChaCha Search Guide? The only way you can be a ChaCha Search Guide is to get an invite by an existing (master) Guide. Click here to read more about Search Guides

This certainly is an interesting concept and growing fast, but is it good enough to beat the traditional search engines? Let’s wait and watch.