From the Techie - Life beyond Google

So Sheryl, where do you find out about new and cool search engines and web tools? Well, I attend conferences, surf the net, checkout Search Engine Watch, and subscribe to newsletters like the one from Mary Ellen Bates. Here are a couple of interesting finds from Bates Information Services (www.BatesInfo.com/tip.html)
I copied and pasted bits from her past few newsletters.

Searchme.com

"Searchme is an intriguing new attempt to make web research more like how we look for information in (gasp!) print resources. Its search results page is insanely intuitive, highly visual and yet easy for us text-oriented folks to use. Solely in terms of user-friendliness, Searchme is one of the best search engines I’ve seen. It also does a surprisingly good job at clustering results, and it has a nice feature for easily sharing web pages with others.

What is particularly impressive is the search results page. Think of holding a hand of cards – you see one card fully and the other cards in slices. Searchme’s search results page looks somewhat similar.Searchme also supports a page-sharing feature, called a “stack”. If you see a web page you want to save and share with others, simply drag it to the “Stacks” link in the upper right corner of the search results page. You can build multiple stacks; each has its own name and settings. And you can directly add pages to a stack by clicking an icon and typing (or pasting) in a URL, title and description. You can share a stack with others in several ways – emailing the URL of the stack, inserting the URL in a blog entry, or sharing it in Digg, Reddit, del.icio.us, Twitter or MySpace.

Gigablast

Following are a few of the key features of Gigablast that make it worth revisiting, if you haven't used it recently.

• "Freshness dating" -- you can select whether you want to limit your search to web pages that have been added or significantly changed within the last day, week, month or year.


• "Compare our results" -- unlike any other search engine I know of, there is a link at the bottom of every search results page that lets you re-execute your search on Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask.com.
  


• Ability to tweak the relevance ranking -- Gigablast has a very robust collection of search syntax options. One that stands out in my mind lets you search for two key words but specify that you want the results ranked solely by one of the words. So, for example, you can search for web sites that contain both "nanotubes" and "pharmaceuticals", but sort the results based solely on the prominence of "nanotubes".


• Human-built directory search -- Gigablast includes links to categories from its directory, based on the Open Directory Project, for search results that are also listed in the directory. For example, the first few results from a search for "carnivorous plants" include links to the "Shopping: Home and Garden: Plants: Carnivorous Plants" category in the Gigablast directory.
  


• and finally, there are GigaBits. These are words or phrases, displayed on the search results page, identified by Gigablast as being most significant within the search results. Sometimes these can help you refine or narrow your search or, as Gigablast says, "the collection of GigaBits might be the gestalt of your query..." Go zen....