SMDC Library

Wednesday, 4 July 2012

Monday, 18 June 2012

Vertical Search Engines

A vertical search engine searches a specific industry, topic, type of content (e.g., travel, movies, images, blogs, live events), piece of data, geographical location, and so on. It may help to think of vertical search as a search for a particular niche. Some of this content cannot be found, or is difficult to find, on general search engines. For this reason, the topic of vertical search is closely related to that of the deep Web. Be sure to visit the tutorial on The Deep Web for a fuller discussion of this topic.
To find a vertical search engine, you can use a general search engine and try to find a search site dedicated to a particular type of content, for example medical search, job search, and so on.

When to use a vertical search engine

When your topic is focused on a specific topic, industry, content type, geographical location, language, etc.
When you're having difficulty locating what you want on general, meta, or concept categorizing search engines

A few examples of vertical search engines

There are so many example out there on so many topics - it's endless! This page will list just a very few. Notice how some cover broad topics while others are of narrower interest.
Topical search engines

~ MedNar and PubMed
~ ScienceResearch.com and World Wide Science

Industry search engines

~ BizNar, the world of business
~ Industry Search, a search for industrial supplies limited to Australia and New Zealand
~ PaperPundit, searching the pulp and paper industry created with Google Custom Search
~ Stock Screener from Yahoo!

Image search engines

~ Picsearch
~ Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Online Catalog
tip! A good source for more of these tools can be found in a 2008 posting on the ReadWriteWeb blog, Digital Image Resources on the Deep Web.

News search engines

~ Alltop
~ NewsNow

Blog search engines

~ Google Blog Search
~ Technorati

Full text books and articles

~ Google Book Search
~ Google Scholar
~ The Online Books Page
~ Project Gutenberg

Social Web real time search

~ Twitter Search and Twitscoop for Twitter content
~ FriendFeed Search for social networking activities

Concept Categorizing Search Engines

A concept categorizing search engine organizes results into topical categories or concepts. These concepts are derived from the contents of your search results. This arrangement may be thought of as a horizontal layout of results, in contrast to a single, vertical list of results that you find on such search engines as Google. Most concept processing engines also offer a vertical list of results. The concept categories are an added bonus.
When you encounter concept categories, you can first review them to determine if the results are relevant to your search. If not, you can try another search. Or perhaps your results are fine, but the categories themselves could be better! If the categories look useful, you can select the ones of interest and examine their contents. Concept categories can also help you learn about your topic.
There aren't as many concept categorizing search engines as there once were. This is a shame, because this type of search engine can be very helpful to your research.

When to use a concept categorizing search engine

When your search is a general one and you want to learn about the component concepts of your topic
When you know very little about your topic and want help in identifying its scope and content
When your topic is obscure
When you are having trouble finding what you want when scanning a single list of search results

Examples of a concept categorizing search engine

Here is an example of concepts retrieved from a Quintura search on "global warming" on Quintura. The concepts are laid out in a tag cloud, very popular on the Web these days.

Thursday, 14 June 2012

Subject Directories & Encyclopedias

http://www.internettutorials.net/subject.asp

Meta Search Engines

43 Marks - offers separate searches of Google, Yahoo!, Bing and Wikipedia with a one-click toggle between search results; also serves as a personal home page for collecting bookmarks
Browsys - offers Search Assistant for searching numerous sources including the social and the deep Web; Virtual Folders allow users to create, save and bookmark custom folders containing up to 12 favorite sites
Cacti Search - search Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask, and retrive a collated results list with an option to view results from each engine separately
Dogpile - search numerous search engines and presented collated results; also presents concept clusters for viewing results organized by keywords or topics
iBoogie - offers searches of the Web and multimedia, and supplies real-time concept clustering of results
Ixquick - ranks results based on top ten rankings from the source search engines; offers substantial privacy protection to searchers
Mamma - retrieve results from numerous sources; also offers search suggestions related to your search
MetaCrawler - retrieve results from Google, Yahoo!, Bing and Ask; also offers search suggestions related to your search
Searchzooka - offers advanced search options on Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Ask, Digg and Technorati with a single mouse click; users can save searches for future use, organize the searches into folders, and clone new searches from existing ones
Virtual Learning Resources Center - searches several high quality directories; also offers its own directory
ZapMeta - searches a handful of sources, and offers concept clusters for organizing search results
Zuula - searches the Web, images, news, blogs and jobs postings, and returns results from multiple search tools in configurable separate tabs