Oh My God – another alternative search engine

Given the plethora of new search engines that emerge I’ve tried to cover only those that offer genuinely new tools or points of emphasis that are seriously useful. For those reasons I’m impressed with Omgili – a search engine with a serious difference in that it compiles its results from millions of online discussions worldwide using around 100,000 boards, forums and other discussion based resources. Use it when you’re looking for opinions about something – not facts.
The search tool comes with a variety of options including ‘buzz’ which gives an overview of the most popular recent discussions. ‘Health’ lets you find answers discussions and communities on health topics; ‘Reviews’ is focused on consumer reviews; and, ‘Graphs’ lets you examine how often a range of terms crop up in results over a period of time. In the graph below I compared the terms ‘fred goodwin’ ‘RBS’ and ‘HBOS’.

I’ve used Omgili for a few days and found it draws results from a reassuringly wide range of sources, furthermore, included in those are results from worthwhile discussions that you might otherwise visit individually; discussions from MoneySavingExpert.com, Channel4 and No2ID for example.

Juice – the intelligent Firefox plugin

As outlined in my presentation on the semantic web, a few tools are giving us a glimpse of how intelligent applications are changing search tools allowing us to move away from the ‘search term’ engine model of research. I described the Firefox plugin ClearForest Gnosis and Headupas two examples. Another recent launch demonstrates the power of these intelligent search tools that let you access linked content without you having to navigate away from the pages you are viewing. Juice is a Firefox plugin that allows you to access information linked to a term you are interested in. Juice searchers for reference material, movies, news and pictures and presents the content clearly in a separate Firefox column. All you have to do is highlight your term and drag into the column. You can switch Juice on or off easily by using a simple button on your browser bar. I accessed suprisingly relevant content by testing Juice using two potentially tricky terms – ‘Sirius Star’ and ‘Antony Gormley’.
While Gnosis indicates how intelligent search using language processing can work, Juice takes the concept to the next level. For a quick introduction see the Juice webcast:

Juice’s rocking webcast from Linkool Labs on Vimeo.