Google Squared

This tip from Mary Ellen Bates @Bates Information Services Inc.: Google Squared is a search engine that tries to provide answers instead of web sites. It builds a database of answers. For example, type in Blue Dog Democrats and you get pictures, names, birthdates, latest news. Or try one of Google's predefined subjects, such as US presidents or roller coasters.


Some tweaking is still needed - when you add North Carolina to roller coasters, you get Carowinds - good, but also the Miky Way galaxy and the Gemini constellation. Still -- way cool.

update: you can also add to the database yourself!

Clusty Search Engine

A couple of years ago I told you about Vivísimo's clustering search engine. Clusty is its latest version and a whole new way to search the web.
Clusty queries several top search engines, combines the results, and generates an ordered list based on comparative ranking. This "metasearch" approach helps raise the best results to the top and push search engine spam to the bottom.
But what really makes Clusty unique is what happens after you search. Instead of delivering millions of search results in one long list, our search engine groups similar results together into clusters. Clusters help you see your search results by topic so you can zero in on exactly what you’re looking for or discover unexpected relationships between items. When was the last time you went to the third or fourth page of the search results? Rather than scrolling through page after page, the clusters help you find results you may have missed or that were buried deep in the ranked list.

Podcasts Searches

Heard about a great podcast but can't find it? Here are a couple of search engines that searches audio content for keywords. Regular search engines are looking only at the audio metadata such as headlines.

Podzinger
Blinkx