Newer Search Engines Add Twists to Search
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Not many people outside the search industry notice it, but new search engines are cropping up all the time. After they’ve been around for a while, they start adding new features to compete against the ever-increasing tide of even newer search engines. In this article, I take a quick look at three new kids on the block: Hakia, Enetez and True Knowledge.
Avid readers will recall that I’ve covered Hakia before. But that was almost a year ago. Since then Hakia has added a new feature that gives it more of a social feeling. It’s called Meet Others (MO). First, you ask a query and receive your search results. Then, in the top-right corner of the results, you will see an icon that says “Meet Others who asked the same query.” Clicking on the icon takes you to a room (if it exists) of people who have performed a similar search and decided to leave a message in the room.
Once you’re in the room, you can post a message yourself or contact someone who has already posted a message. All you need to do to post is authenticate your email address. If you want to be contacted, you can choose to receive messages via email (which Hakia masks) or IM (Skype or MSN). There’s also a voting system, which helps determine how long messages stay in the room.
Here’s a screen shot of the room I saw after I clicked on the appropriate button from a query about social search engines:
What the image doesn’t show you is that Hakia also provides links to rooms with similar queries (in this case, “search engine”) and popular rooms. At the time I made the query, these included rooms discussing cancer, New York real estate, and San Francisco computers. And as you’d guess, the system is not immune to spam; the “Search Engine” room included a post from someone apparently advertising their services as an “experienced SEM professional.” You don’t have to be registered in any way to report a particular post as abuse, though; just click the “report abuse” link that appears with every post.
But plenty of posts weren’t just advertising. Some people asked questions, such as which search engine offered the best contextual advertising solution. Others posted links to articles. When I entered the cancer room, I noticed other kinds of posts: book reviews, advice, and more. It had the feeling of a cross between browsing a general forum and one of the groups on Searchles, especially when a conversation gets going around one of the links posted to the latter. Not everybody will want a social element with their searches – but this is an intriguing way to implement it for those who do enjoy it from time to time.
Next: Searching Without a Keyboard >>
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