Time to revisit the latest happenings in personal search engines, prompted by a couple of things that have recently passed through my mailbox and feedreader.
First up is Mojeek Personal Search, which recalls Yahoo! search builder, Rollyo and my own deliSearch, pagesearch and searchfeedr tools in certain respects.
Mojeek Personal Search - which you can see demoed by Citenik, a search engine vertical search tool - offers users the opportunity to:
# Create your own personal or topical search engine. # Add and remove unlimited number of domains (Free Version up to 1000). # Remove domains from the main Mojeek Search Results. # Publishable links available to help share your engine and provide the service to your site's visitors (of course you can also keep it secret!). # Your own Mojeek Personal Search home page (hidden or publicly available). # Retrieve your personal search results in xml format. # Add your own logo. # Add your own header and footer. # Style the results to the exact look and feel of your own site.
(Just by the by, another search engine specific news site opened up a week or two ago - Battelle's SearchMob.)
Mojeek Personal Search is actually just an add on to the Mojeek search engine, which is being developed here in the UK (by a lone developer), (and which perhaps explains why UK only search is already available!).
I had a quick chat with Marc, the Mojeek developer, and he also filled me in on a few other features:
At the moment sites need to be already listed in Mojeek to be added to your personal search, for this reason the "Edit Listed Sites" find box acts like an add url function and sites not indexed will be soon. ... The other advantage is, as I have control over the search index and crawling I can choose to crawl these sites more often and deeper.
The biggest attraction for me, though, is that Mojeek Personal Search (MPS) lets users limit the number of search domains to 1000, significantly more thean the 25 I can get out of Yahoo! for the deliSeatch, et al. (Rollyo works under a similar constraint.) The only thing is, as yet, the lack of a way of me actually feeding my own limits in to MPS...
The other site that came back to my attention this week is social search engine Wink, which has just gone into Beta 2, apparently.
The things (for me) to takeaway from the announcement were:
Search - You can use Wink just like Google or Yahoo! But Wink results are selected by people as well as machines. When you like a result, click the thumbs up. When you don't, click the thumbs down. If you see a result that just doesn't belong - whether it's spam or just irrelevant, click the 'remove' button and watch it disappear. This feedback is used to constantly refine Wink search results. And Wink includes Google search results so the best Web site can be found even if no one's bookmarked it yet.Collections - Wink Collections are a cool way for you to organize and share the best links on any topic. A collection can be about anything - funny videos, your favorite band, the best restaurants in your area, or research on a new gadget - you name it. You create a collection and add links to it and it shows up in search results. Others can add links to the Collection - a great way for people to share what they know and improve search.
Social Bookmarking - Using Wink's social bookmarking tool, you can save favorite Web pages and add "tags" - terms that describe the page. You can bookmark any page you visit by placing the "Add to Wink" button in your browser, or bookmark right from the Wink result by clicking on a star. You can add tags and comments to help you remember the site later. It will also help others find the site. Users of the popular del.icio.us bookmark service can sync their bookmarks between Wink and del.icio.us.
One thing that jumped out at me about the collections was that feeds of collection items are available... Hmm - another searchfeedr source, methinks...?! ;-)
And hence - the searchfeedr Greasemonkey script - now adds searchfeedr search boxes to Wink, as well as delicious, Technorati, and, prompted b y the Wink collections, H2O playlists too...
Posted by ajh59 at September 21, 2006 02:27 PM