The Ixquick search engine results appear normal, but underneath each link description a Proxy link appears. Clicking it gets the website through an anonymous proxy. The page will load slower when viewed through the proxy, but if privacy is important, then you probably won’t mind the wait.
The search results aren’t as good as you would get from the large search engines, but the proxy thing is quick, handy, and just simply cool. The problem I see is that it only displays an artificially small set of results for your search. For example, 64 unique results selected from at least 1,121,619,121 matching results for “intel”. You only get 64 hits — nothing more.
SlideFinder.net offers a search engine powered by Slide Executive, a PowerPoint software and tools company.
Searching “McEachin” in Google I get 37 hits. Doing the same search in SlideFinder, I get one hit. In the Google results, the SlideFinder result appears third from the bottom with a different file name than found by SlideFinder.
According the SlideFinder blog, they concentrate on indexing presentations from university websites as these “will often contain high quality content.” The blog is worth following if you regularly search for PowerPoint presentations.
This thing works very well for finding references to company names and Web sites. The person who prepared the presentation usually knows things that interest me. It’s usually easy to find the person who made the PowerPoint file. Write-out my questions, make a telephone call, get answers, write report, and move on to the next job.
FindThatFile
Previously, I wrote about file searches using OSUN.ORG.
findthatfile.com provides a file search encompassing Web, FTP, Usenet, Metalink and P2P resources (ed2k/emule) including 47 file types and 554+ file extensions including over 167 file upload services. It also offers an alert service sent to your email.
However, not all information in the search database has every property you might be searching for, therefore, you have to explore the different ways to search for the file in the advanced search screen.
In my experience, this is not a good search engine to use to search by a person’s name or a company name. The files are not well indexed in this fashion. One must also be careful to select the “All Files” button in the “Adult Filter” to be sure all the files found appear in the search results.
I usually search by a file name for other versions of a file that I already know about. In some cases, findthatfile.com will give me an understanding of how widely circulated a file may be, or turn-up different versions of the same file.
This excellent article by Lawrence Solomon illustrates why a researcher or investigator must use more than one search engine.
Googlegate: The search engine may be standing up to Chinese censors. What about Google’s own censors?
Search for “Googlegate” on Google and you’ll get a paltry result (my result yesterday was 29,300). Search for “Googlegate” on Bing, Microsoft’s search engine competitor, and the result numbers an eye-popping 72.4 million. If you’re a regular Google user, as opposed to a Bing user, you might not even know that “Googlegate” has been a hot topic for years in the blogosphere — that’s the power that comes of being able to control information.
… Google began to minimize the Climategate scandal by hiding Climategate pages from its users.
Bing, in contrast, didn’t make climategate pages disappear. As you’d expect from a search engine that wasn’t manipulating data, search results on Bing climbed steadily until they peaked at around 51 million…
Searching for specific terms in indexed documents on the Web is something many searchers fail to do. It is amazing what you can find when you go looking for it. I’ve written about searching by file type before. Now I have found a search engine for .pdf, .doc, and .ppt files.
OSUN.ORG
OSUN.ORG provides a simple interface for searching PDF documents, MSWord documents, and PowerPoint files. The large search engines allow one to search more file types and you must search one file type at a time using OSUN.ORG as you do in Google. I don’t know what database this search engine uses, but it doesn’t compare very well with Google. A search for my name in PDF files give 52 results in Google and only 9 in OSUN.ORG. This is not a good performance.
Sometimes it’s really hard to find an alternative to the big three search engines.
DevilFinder
According to the site, DevilFinder began as a project to display results from search engines like Google and Yahoo without setting cookies while presenting fewer pages of results. It does not collect search data from users and no invasive cookies or JavaScript is used.
DevilFinder seems to rank the search results on the search term alone, rather than a combination of relevance and the popularity of the site. This is why relevant results from less popular sites may appear at the top. It is might also be the reason the result set is so small. DevilFinder shows the results arranged 100 per page and I rarely get more than 2 pages.
The Image search works quite well. The images are much larger than other search engines. The Video search only returned hits from Youtube for any search I have done - not exactly useful. To be fair the Video search seems to be a new feature. The News tab is just a crude collection of feeds that aren’t searchable.
Search Strategy
This has become a favorite choice for searching the names of people and companies. The results often provide more useful sites in the first page than Google and I don’t have to go to the last page of results to find out what wasn’t searched, as I do with Google.
For long, complex search statements, I still rely on Google, Bing, and Yahoo!, but for searching names and some other common short search statements, DevilFinder does an excellent job and sometimes a better job than the big guys.
If you enclose your search terms in square brackets, then Yahoo! will only retrieve pages that have your search terms in that order. The search terms may be anywhere on the page, but the first term will appear before the second and the second before the third, etc..
An example would be [crisis planning]. It returns a document that is entitled Planning for a Crisis. It might seem backward but at the end of the quotation near the top of the page you find “Crisis Management:Planning for the Inevitable (1986)“.
If you need to search up to 25 websites with a specific search statement, then Rollyo may be an alternative to Google Custom Search. Rollyo is powered by Yahoo! so it’s acceptable fare on Google-Free Wednesday.
You can create an unlimited amount of search engines, called Searchrolls, on each topic. Each engine can be kept private or made public if you become a “member”. Each topic is limited to 25 urls.
You name your Searchroll, put in the URL’s, then select the named Searchroll on the search page when you enter your search statement.
Phil Bradley’s article on some of the virtues of Exalead is worth reading.
10 reasons why librarians should use Exalead
It’s a search engine for people who like to use search engines, and it’s an engine for librarians. If you’ve not used it, I’d strongly recommend giving it a whirl next ‘Google free Wednesday’.
Exalead Phonetic
The phonetic search option will give results sounding like the word you have entered. This works well when you don’t know how to spell a word, or there is more than one spelling for your search word. This can be done from the advanced search page or using the operator soundslike:type_word_here or soundslike:(type_word_here)
Exalead Approximate Spelling
This also works well when you don’t know how to spell a word for which you wish to search. This can be done from the advanced search page or with the operator, spellslike:type_word_here.
Use Google & Exalead Together
Use the Google Synonym search along with both the Exalead phonetic and approximate spelling searches to find the unknown spellings, similar spellings, incorrect spellings, and synonyms.
Remember, in normal searches, Google also identifies alternate words through stemming, abbreviations, combined and split words, and words with or without accents.
Low Profile Search Engine
Ixquick.com professes to delete its users’ search data (including IP addresses) within 48 hours. Furthermore, Ixquick does not set any uniquely identifying cookies or share your privacy details with 3rd parties.
Meta-Search
Ixquick has the normal syntax options available in most of the large search engines. As a meta-search it searches:
- All the Web
- Ask/Teoma
- CNN Search
- EntireWeb
- Exalead
- Gigablast
- MSN
- NBC
- Open Directory
- Qkport
- Wikipedia
- Winzy
- Yahoo
I didn’t get good results searching for images and telephone numbers using Ixquick as I get in other search engines, but the meta-search works quite well. However, you don’t know how many results are chosen from each search engine to make-up the results you see in Ixquick, but this is true with other meta-search sites.
Google-Free Wednesday
Twing purportedly offers the ability to search many forums more thoroughly than traditional search engines. Forums offer a soap-box to both the worst and best denizens of the Internet.
I won’t be replacing the large search engines with Twing for searching forum posts, but Twing found many items that the large search engines missed or place extremely low in the search results. However, it also failed to find some large forums.
Google-Free Wednesday
I’ve been using meta-search sites much more often over the last few months. Some are good, some aren’t. Here are two clustering meta-search sites that don’t measure up.
KillerInfo
KillerInfo purportedly searches Google, MSN, Yahoo, and Lycos. You can select the engines you want to search on the advanced search page. However, if you only select just Yahoo and Lycos and search Tibet, it will not return any results for those two search engines. You either get a response that says the syntax is unsupported by the search engines or it just says nothing and provides no results. If you go the the search engines and do the same search, then you get a huge list of results. Of course, it provides good results for Google and MSN, but what good is that on Google-Free Wednesday?
Like Clusty, KillerInfo is powered by Vivisimo. Clusty says it searches Ask, Open Directory, Gigablast, and Live. A search using Tibet returns results from all these and more. If Visisimo can get Clusty to work, why not KillerInfo?
I would like to use Clusty and KillerInfo in tandem. This would search the major search engines using a similar interface for both the search input and the results. Too bad KillerInfo can’t even handle a one word search statement in Yahoo and Lycos.
KartOO
This meta-search site bills itself as a “visual meta search engine”. This has some promise but it is difficult to navigate through the results “map”. It is also difficult to eliminate irrelevant results without getting lost and having to start over. When I was trying to figure-out how to use KartOO the Help pages were not found on the server.
Most of the results I got were from Yahoo and MSN so this did not seem to offer any unique coverage.