Ultimate Search 2.0 Showdown

Since the early days of search, with Infoseek, Excite, Hotbot, and others not much has changed. Sure, on the back end, Google created a brilliant algorythm that keeps spam and seo at bay. But, the reality of the matter is that barring infoseek, all the search results you get have always been 3-10 day old stale responses from boolean queries (WHEW!).

Not only are your search results dated, they are linear. You ask - Search Engine answers. Now, Web 2.0 (i know, i hate this nomenclature as much as you do. I'd have used the word monacre but dont know how to spell it) search engine contenders are raising the stakes.

Search engines are now offering richer features now. My favorite are user input driven results, word association based relational searching, revshare, and even ongoing search result updates (so you dont have to keep searching the same query several times a day, you save a query and it streams updates to you in RSS). Let's look at who brings what to the table.

This is who's leading the traffic so far:

HTML Table Search Engine Matrix:

>Backlink Based Algorythm	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y
>Natural Language				Y
>Voting Influenced Algorythm	Y				Y	Y
>Personalized Search Roll	Y	Y
>Ongoing Change Notification						Y
>RSS Results Updates						Y
>eMail Results Updates						Y
>Related Search Clusters			Y	Y

Verdict? Well, if you have a handfull specific of websites that you search on a daily basis use ROLLYO. It lets you create a group of search destination and gang search them all. If you want a natural language website (although I can't imagine why you'd accept inferior quality results instead of just learning a couple of opperators) then use LEXXE.com.

Swicki, Wink, and ZNITCH.com all allow users to vote on the usefulness of a website for rapid ranking changes. While this sounds like a novel idea, Google has been doing this since day one. Google records click through stats and the origin ip addresses. How else do you think they are able to deliver "custom search results?" The way they do it now is raise the google result with the highest ctr based on a top down curve. So the ctr on the 10th listing on a results page gets a heavier weight than the ctr of the #1 spot. This is to say that while voting is clever, it's not new.

For brainstorming and stream of consciousness type of results, I love clusty. It searches the ten results you have onscreen and presents you with other potential search terms that all these websites have in common. Finally, for obvious reasons, if you want your search result updates to stream to you instead of you constantly re-GOOGLING the for the same thing, use Znitch.com - it delivers filtered search results over RSS and email.

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