Omgili: a New Spin on a Web 2.0 Search Engine - Completing the Search and Omgili Buzz
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Way at the bottom of my results, and not in the image in the previous section, I saw a couple of interesting items. The first was a list of searches related to my query. These included a few I wouldn't have thought of, and one of those is highly relevant to me: "What is the best laptop for a home user."
Unfortunately, Omgili does no better than other search engines at tackling natural language use. The top results it returns include a discussion of laptop security for employees who work at home, a person asking for recommendations for a laptop on which to do work away from home, a query about the best way to add a laptop to a domain...you get the idea. One example that seems to illustrate Omgili's confusion contains the topic heading "New Dell laptop slow to boot Vista Home Premium" with "laptop" and "Home" in bold.
But the other cool thing Omgili returned at the bottom of its results is a buzz graph for my topic. Here it is:
The buzz graph for a specific query lets you know how much talk there's been about that particular topic. If you're more interested in simply finding out what's popular in general, you can go to Omgili's Buzz page. There's a link to it from the home page.
Omgili looks at particular time frames (past 24 hours, past week, past month, and "all time") and analyzes the discussions it has crawled. It then reveals with charts, graphs, lists, and word clouds what items are popular in particular topics: the most popular videos, headlines, movies, general topics, and products (the editor in me feels obligated to point out that Omgili misspelled this as "Popular Prodcuts" when I checked the page; they may have fixed it by now). You can change the time frame displayed; each area defaults to 24 hours, and Omgili updates results every hour.
I took some screen shots to show you what I mean. Here's a Buzz graph:
Here's a topic cloud:
And here's a list:
Omgili displays six of these scrolling items on its Buzz page.
Next: Other Omgili Features >>
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