Search Computing Blog

Google Base is a free service for submiting all kinds of content for Google to host and to make searchable online. It allows content providers to upload structured data to Google, surface it across Google search properties, and syndicate it via apis, gadgets and gadget ads.

Using the Google Base Data API, developers can programmatically access Google Base. Here’s some of the things you can do:

copy right note: The content was cut and paste from http://code.google.com/intl/de-DE/apis/base/ for the only purpose to increase the awarness of Google Base Data API.

Hittery.com lets you create a personal search dashboard. You can simply arrange your favorite search engines on one page. Add, remove, drag and drop searchboxes to your liking. Hittery.com provides two types of search engines: custom search engines and normal search engines.

Custom search engines
These are search engines that only show results from carefully selected websites that publish useful and trustworthy content. For example, the custom searchengine “Health” only searches through 75 trusted medical websites. This way, you will not get results from websites that do not add any value. We have selected and checked over 12.000 websites and added them to relevant search engines. Google provides us with the search technology.

Normal search engines
These are all well known searchengines like YouTube, Google, flickr, digg.com, and eBay. But we also provide you with handy search engines for Jobs, Weather, Traffic conditions, Travelguides, News, Facebook, TV Guides and Stock quotes. And many more.

[Source Hittery]

[Website http://www.hittery.com/]

Have a website or collection of sites you’d like to search over? With Custom Search Engine, you can harness the power of Google to create a search engine tailored to your needs.

[Source Google]

[Website http://www.google.com/coop/cse/]

Yahoo! Search BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) is a Yahoo! Developer Network initiative to provide an open search web services platform.

The main goal and idea of BOSS is to give users, in this case developer’s free access to the Yahoo! Search index. The results can be supplied into the developer’s website or program so that they can manipulate the resources according to their product’s requirements. BOSS allows the results to be returned back in XML, JSON, HTML, text and also allows the comprehensive search feature allowed in Yahoo like pulling the results by pages, searching inside PDF, etc. The ranking of the websites for a search term is same as the Yahoo! Search ranking since both of these are pulling from the same index and same ranking.

[Source Wikipedia]

[Website http://developer.yahoo.com/search/boss/]

Kosmix is a guide to the Web. The site (www.kosmix.com) lets users explore the Web by topic, presenting a dashboard of relevent videos, photos, news, commentary, opinion, communities and links to related topics. Kosmix’s categorization engine organizes the Internet into magazine-style topic pages, enabling people to navigate the Web even if they don’t know exactly what they’re looking for.
Headquartered in Mountain View, California, Kosmix was founded in 2005 by Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman. Harinarayan and Rajaraman were co-founders of Junglee, the first shopping search engine which was acquired by Amazon.com in 1998. They later created Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk.
Kosmix is funded by Accel Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Dag Ventures and Jeff Bezos’ personal investment company, Bezos Expeditions.
Kosmix began as a vertical search engine, initially introducing health site www.RightHealth.com as a proof-of-concept for the Kosmix approach to Web navigation. RightHealth is now the #2 health site on the Web, according to Hitwise. In June 2008, Kosmix expanded its focus from vertical to a complete horizontal play.

[Source CrunchBase]

[Website http://www.kosmix.com/]

Google Answers was an online knowledge market offered by Google that allowed users to post bounties for well researched answers to their queries. Asker-accepted answers cost $2 to $200. Google retained 25% of the researcher’s reward and a 50 cent fee per question. In addition to the Researcher’s fees, a client who was satisfied with the answer could also leave a tip of up to $100. In late November 2006, Google reported that it planned to permanently shut down the service, and it was fully closed to new activity by late December 2006, although its archives remain available.

[Source Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_answers]

[Website http://answers.google.com/answers/]

Yahoo! Answers is a community-driven knowledge market website launched by Yahoo! on December 13, 2005 that allows users to both submit questions to be answered and answer questions asked by other users. The site gives members the chance to earn points as a way to encourage participation and is based on Naver’s Knowledge iN. As of December 2006, it had 60 million users and 65 million answers. On June 11, 2007, Yahoo!’s former questions and answers service, Ask Yahoo!, was formally merged with Yahoo! Answers. Yahoo! Answers has become the second most popular Internet reference site after Wikipedia, according to Comscore.

[Source Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo_answers]

Fast Search & Transfer ASA (recursive acronym FAST) is a Norwegian company based in Oslo. FAST focuses on data search technologies. It also has offices located in Germany, Italy, Sri Lanka, France, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States, Brazil, Mexico and other countries around the world. The company was founded in 1997.

On April 24, 2008, Microsoft closed its acquisition of FAST. FAST is now known as FAST, A Microsoft Subsidiary.

FAST offers an enterprise search product, FAST ESP. ESP is a service-oriented architecture development platform which is geared towards production searchable indexes. It provides a flexible framework for creating ETL applications for efficient indexing of searchable content. Fast also offers a number of search-derivative applications, focused on specific search use cases, including publishing, market intelligence and mobile search. The Search Derivative Applications (SDA) are built upon the Enterprise Search Platform (ESP). The company is developing PHAROS, a new European multimedia search engine. FAST is notable for a major ongoing investigation by the Norwegian police into accounting fraud around the inflation of revenues and profits which has led to police raids on its offices.

[Source Wikipedia ]

[Website http://www.fastsearch.com/]

ChaCha is a mobile answering service which uses a technique known as social searching (a type of web search method that determines the relevance of search results by considering the interactions or contributions of users).

[Website http://www.chacha.com/]

LeapFish is a search aggregator that retrieves results from other portals and search engines, including Google, Yahoo, Live Search, Blogs, Videos etc…. It is a registered trademark of Dotnext Inc.

Leapfish is a type of metasearch site known as a search aggregator. Search aggregators compile and list the results taken from other search engines, in addition to providing their own content (generally in the form of advertising or result positioning based on internal algorithms.

In the case of LeapFish, the top results of any given search can be advertisements, where an individual or company can pay a registration fee to LeapFish to be positioned at the top of the result list in response to certain keyword searches.

[Surce Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leapfish]

[Website http://www.leapfish.com/]