Search Computing Blog

In these times of  social networks and cloud-based productivity platforms, traditional search engines fail in providing tools and services able to collect and organize one’s Web information. Greplin tries to overcome such a limitation by providing a personal search engine for all that data you keep locked away in the cloud.

Greplin can interface with several Web social data service (typically, all those services that provide an API), like Gmail, Google Docs, Facebook, Twitter, and Dropbox. A full list of supported data sources is available here.

At the time, Greplin does not provide a public API to access its search functionality, but it looks like they are working on it.

Here is a presentation video of Greplin.

Greplin Demo from greplin on Vimeo.

As many other Web 2.0 applications Mendeley also has Web API. Check out Read Meter by Dario Taraborelli for a great mash-up built on them.

Apple has recently announced the acquisition of Siri, an application that includes voice recognition and search capabilities.

As some experts suggest (see John Battelle’s blog), Apple could be looking for a search engine for its App Store. As of April 8, 2010, there are at least 185,000 third-party applications available on the App Store.

The engine should not crawl the web and will not be a competitor of Google; it will suggests applications and services to be download/bought, according to the user interaction with the device. continue reading…

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]

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/]