Read on to learn how doing a social network search with Google Social Search works and how to use it.

Content from your social circle

Google Social Search adds content that is linked from your friend’s Google profiles to the search results. This content includes websites, blogs, public status updates (like Twitter and FriendFeed), other Google profiles and items from your feeds on Google Reader.

It is an opt-in experiment, so you have to turn it on to make it part of your search results.

Enable social search

Here is how to enable Google Social Search:

• Log in to your Google account (you always have to be logged in for social search to work).
• Go to Google Experimental.
• Click ‘Join this experiment‘ next to ‘Google Social Search‘.

From now on when you search Google it will also do a social network search and integrate results form your social circle at the bottom of the results page (from my experience that only happens when Google is set to display 10 results per page).

Get only social results

Alternatively, you can get only results from your social circle. Once you’ve enabled social search, it becomes one of the search filters available as part of Google’s New Search Features. In the results page, click ‘show options‘ under the Google logo and in the sidebar that opens click ‘Social‘. See an example of the results in the image below.

Asking help from friends

There are two advantages to getting these social results. First, it is somewhat more likely that they would be more relevant, at least in certain topics. For example, if you’re looking for something related to your field of expertise, your friends and people they know might have more relevant information.

Second, you do not only have access to the information you find, but possibly to the KNOWLEDGE the people who created it possess. Since the results include information about your relationship to the person who published the content, it might be easier to contact this person since you know him/her or know someone else who does.

Who’s in your social circle?

Your social circle is made up of your connections in various Google services. First, there are your social network connections, such as Twitter and FriendFeed. You have to list these social networks in your Google Profile for the people in them to be part of your social circle. Next, your circle includes people from your Gmail chat list and some of your Gmail contact groups. Finally, second level relations (friends of friends) are a part of your social circle – providing these relationships are public.

Note that if you do not list your social networks in your Google profile, or if you don’t have a lot of connections in them, you will probably not get too many social results.

On the other side, if you want your content (blog, videos and the like) to show up in your friends’ social search, you should list it in your profile as well.

Have you had the chance to try Google Social network search? Was it useful for you or just too much noise? Tell us in the comments!

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Copyright and DRM issues notwithstanding, downloading music off the net is one of the most popular web trend. As Google says, two of the top 10 queries in the U.S. are music-related. That’s probably the same around the world. So where do you go in search of your music?

Do you carry out a generic search using one of the search engines? Do you use a specific MP3 search engine? Maybe you picked out one from our Free MP3 Downloads: 7 Websites That Make It Really Easy post. Or you just like to stream it over the waves using the online music players. Thank God, there are options galore for the music lover.

Songr is a desktop search software that will not only search out the right song for you but also downloads it for you.

But why a desktop alternative to download songs, I ask?

Music can be downloaded via P2P software too and you can also use MP3 search engines on the web. P2P software to download a single off the cuff track is bit of overkill and MP3 search engines are great but they might have a bad server day. Also, Songr offers some features that bump up its appeal in my ears. Songr has three noteworthy features which make downloading a single click affair.

1. Meta-search with 10 online MP3 search engines

Give Songr a song title in its search box placed on the top right and the software taps into 10 MP3 search engines to get the song. It gathers the results, removes duplicates and displays it all on its frugal interface.

Take your fine-tooth comb and go through the results which can be bracketed according to Duration, Bitrate, Size and Relevance (just click the column heads to arrange). The low bitrate results are grayed out and usually, you will find the songs with a higher relevance on top of the heap. If you choose to buy the tracks, you can check them out at Amazon and Rhapsody using the shortcut from the menu.

The search engines used by Songr are displayed in the screenshot below taken from the Songr features page.

2. YouTube audio extraction

Songr plucks out audio tracks as MP3 from YouTube videos using some sort of a FFmpeg converter. Songr uses JusthearIt.com’s engine to tap into YouTube’s resources. You can see it in the results as a little video icon. You get two options with a right click – Play it as a video directly on YouTube or download it as an MP3 audio track, an AVI video or a MPEG video to your computer.

You also get to choose between the HQ version and the slower but better HD version (if available).

3. Search by lyrics

Songr uses Bing as a search service to get you the songs when you type in a few words from the songs. According to the software’s FAQ – Songr searches the words you typed in Bing plus adding “lyrics” to the query, reads the titles of the results, filters those using heuristic techniques and tries to restore the original case.

Well as long as I get the results! I got some hits and misses with this one. I guess it boils down to Bing’s penetration and the lyrics with the song’s search engine indexed existence.

If I could add a number four, it would be its simple ad-free interface. That’s what I liked – no glitz, no glamour but just focused on the job. There isn’t anything by way of settings. It uses the system’s default music player to play the track. Such basic software should be light on resources, which it is – consuming about 3.5MB of memory at its peak YouTube conversion job.

We had covered a desktop app for searching MP3 ditties before too. You might like to try out Clickster and look at it against Songr’s performance.

Does this simple software deserve an encore?

Songr (v1.2) is a measly 452KB download and it plays along with Windows XP, Vista and 7. It only asks for the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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Image search engines sift through the web searching by type of image, by license or by tags and keywords. There are of course, standalone photo reservoirs like Flickr, Stock.xchng, Photobucket, Morguefile et.al; but your kind of image may just be tucked away in some other obscure corner of the web. Google Image Search is powerful but it always pays to have a few more options up your browser.

This is where these five image search engines come into the picture.

Cyclo.ps

In Greek mythology, it’s a giant with a single eye. As a stock photography search engine, it keeps both eyes on sites like BigStockPhoto, Flickr, Fotolia, Cutcaster, StockVault, Photos.com, ShutterStock and stockx.xchng. The search interface is typically simple and you can search by selecting specific stock photo sites or all of them in one go. A horizontal menu and also a dropdown let you view results by respective site. Clicking on the thumbnail previews takes you to the source where you can see the details attached with the photo.

Cyclo.ps gives the user a Lightbox account where he can save (by clicking the little plus icon), tag, share, and print (only the thumbnail) his selected photos. Visitors can also add comments to your shared images.

Pixsy

Type in your query and you can get what you are searching for amidst millions of images and videos. This search platform delivers both. The web app looks into the RSS feed of variety of news sites and content providers like Yahoo and extracts the image previews. Clicking on the thumbnail preview takes you directly to the source. The source webpage opens in a two frame layout with a Pixsy brief on top and the source page below. You can filter the search by content type (image or video), category and source (BBC, MSNBC, Rolling Stone, Webshots, Yahoo etc).

The site is very neat and uncluttered.

Spffy (Beta)

Ferret out the image or video you want using Spffy’s multiple searches. Spffy checks out a cross-section of sources like stock photo sites, web sources like Flickr, public domain sites and videos from YouTube. You can tune your stock search with settings for royalty-free, rights-managed and news/archival. Web search on Flickr can also be similarly configured for relevance.

Incogna

The Canada-based search engine company looks at the visual shape rather than the meta-data. This gives rather interesting results which are distinct from the others profiled here. The image search is fast though the number of results is not plentiful. You enter a keyword and then select an image from the results to do a similarity search. A moving slider to control the number of images per page is the only preference tool to set.

PicSearch

Picsearch indexes the web for images and is probably the best of the lot. The About Page of the site says that its unique search algorithm is due for a patent. The search engine has indexed more than 3,000,000,000 images. You can set a few preferences like an interface language.

Advanced search options give you several image factors like color or black and white, animation or image, portrait or landscape and more importantly the ability to search by image size. You can also use normal search operators to fine-tune your search. The site also comes with a family filter to keep out you-know-those kind of images away from the mix.

There are two things I really liked about the site. Firstly, its speed; and secondly, the Image Directory which is a vast collection of subject specific images. Oh yes, there’s a third thing to like too – it comes with a Firefox extension.

In listing these five sites, I have tried to go beyond the omnipresent searches provided by the regulars like Google, Yahoo and Bing. When it comes to search, often a single tool does the job; but there are also times when many need to be pushed into action. Along with these five, you can check out two others we have profiled before –

• PicFindr
• Everystockphoto

Do remember that although these search engines may give you the right image – using the image itself is subject to copyright. So do check the sources before you click on save. If unable to do so, what are search engines for…hunt out a few more.

Which is your image search engine of choice? Does your image search go beyond the biggies? Let us into the picture.

Image Credit: Playingwithbrushes

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The new options help to refine your search to show results in various types and sources (video, blogs, forums, reviews); narrow the time range to show results published within the last few seconds (i.e. real time) or longer time periods; exclude or include pages you’ve already visited; and play around with the way the results are display to show images, more text, plot them on a timeline, and more.

Get started

To see the new Google search options, click ‘show options‘ under the Google logo.

A sidebar, called the option panel will open up next to the result. Let’s see what it offers.

Filter by type

The first group of options lets you refine the search results to show only certain types and sources of results.

Videos: The Videos filter returns only video results. Alongside each result there’s a preview thumbnail. The option panel changes to display video related options, such duration, publication date, quality, and only closed caption (i.e. with subtitles).

Blogs: choosing blogs will return only blog posts. At the bottom of each search result there is a link to other posts by the same blog (not necessarily related to your search) and a link to pages that link back to the search result page, if such exists.

Forums: Next, you can get only results from discussion groups by choosing Forums. This will be handy when you have a specific question, because you can ask for further elaboration form the people who’ve already related to the subject.

Reviews: This filter will show results from reviews sites. In addition to the usual results display, you’ll see other aspects of the review, such as rating or a quote of the review about the product or service.

Time frame and previously visited sites

The next option group lets you set the time frame for the results. You can choose recent results, which will return real time results. Longer predefined time ranges are also available – one hour, 24 hours, a week, and one year. You can also choose a specific date range.

Below that group you can choose whether to get back only Visited pages or Not yet visited pages.

Refine and extend your search

The third group enables you to expand your search or narrow it down by offering related search terms or using alternate displays for the search terms and search results.

Related searches: Adds keywords and search terms that can help you refine your query. These show up as links above the search results.

Wonder wheel: This might be the most extraordinary new feature. The Wonder wheel is an actual wheel that shows up next to the search results. It helps you to extend your search by displaying associated search terms. When you click a term, it immediately suggests more related terms and display related results.

Timeline: The Timeline view adds a graph that illustrates the results over time. This view also groups the results by date. Use it to find information about an event or other historical venue or person in which the time aspect is important.

Images, shopping and more text

Finally, you can alter how the results look like and choose whether to get more or less shopping sites.

Images from the page: This display is helpful to understand the search results with a single glance. It displays an image or two from each page, allowing you to visually comprehend the results without having to read each of them.

Fewer shopping sites/More shopping sites: According to your underlying purpose, you can choose whether to get more or less results from shopping sites. If you choose more shopping sites, Google will display items and prices directly in the search result page.

More text: In the standard mode, Google returns 130 characters of description for each search result (about 20-30 words). Choosing More text overrides this limitation and returns much more text for every search result, making it easier to find the right one.

What do you think of Googles new search features? Are they useful?

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Zakta differs from traditional search engines in these key areas:

• Personalize and edit your search results
• Automatically save your search results
• Share your saved search results as a social network search with others as Guides
• Collaborate on a search with family or colleagues, just like you do on shared documents

If you are searching for quick factoids of information, you are better served by traditional search engines. However, if you’re planning a vacation or trip, researching a health ailment, exploring the best affordable university to get a degree, or similar broad topics, Zakta shines by beating the thousands of irrelevant links you get in Google or Bing.

The How Zakta Can Help page details the different benefits of Zakta for teachers, students, travelers, entrepreneurs, bloggers, etc. You can use Zakta as a casual surfer, but to get access to all the features, you need to register.

Ready? Let’s take Zakta for a spin and explore its features.

Organized Search Results

A search for “swine flu” quickly led me to choose the “2009 flu pandemic” organized set of results discarding the “1976 swine flu outbreak”. The search results are organized into sections, listed on the left. In this case, we see Reference, Web Sites, Books and Articles, etc. for swine flu. Observe that we also see sections of Symptoms, Prevention, and Treatment, as if Zakta “knows” that this is a medical condition.

Zakta “knows” about 3 million such informational topics already, so you will find sections meaningful to your search for every search term.

Personalized Search: Editing Results

There are many useful things you can do with the search results. Roll over your mouse over any result to get a mini-toolbar of actions you can perform on that result.

Delete results you don’t want to see again, use drag and drop to reorder results, and annotate or recommend a result. The personal ClipPad is your clipboard that remembers clipped results across related searches.

Share your results as a Guide

You can share your personalized results to create and publish a Zakta Guide. You can choose the sections to include, apply predefined templates, and include related searches as you wish. Once you create a guide, you can easily link to it, share it over email or on any social network. Your guide is shown to other Zakta users, who can recommend it. You can also invite your trusted friends or colleagues to collaborate on a Guide. Finally, a widget lets you embed your guide on your website or blog. You can also create a guide from scratch using the Guide Creator.

While Zakta is still in Beta, hundreds of Guides have already been developed by its users. From the Guides page, you can see popular guides, recently updated guides, or browse through them by subject, title, etc. Published Guides are even accessible from within Facebook with the Zakta Guides for Facebook app.

Zakta Tools: Search Packs and Firefox Plugin

The Zakta Firefox plugin allows you to clip anything from any web page directly to your Zakta ClipPad or Guide. Zakta SearchPacks give you access to a plethora of web search engines in tabs for different types of searches. SearchPacks are available for Web, News, Blogs, Discussions, Images, Videos and Health. For example, the Web SearchPack gives you access to Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask, etc.

There are social networking search features built into Zakta as well, if you wish to build a trusted network of friends and keep yourself up-to-date with new search results or guides in your areas of interest.

Will you try out Zakta? Do you find it better for researching topics? We would love to hear your feedback in the comments!

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But I would just like to sit on the ropes with all this because I am just an average user…more interested in getting the results I seek without getting into the algorithm of it all.

Although as an average user, I can say that both search engines deliver different kinds of results. You must have seen it with your search queries. Different query terms gave me different degrees of relevancy in both search engines.

For instance, using the query “makeuseof.com” gave me more pointed results in Google. You can do one of your own and find out.

But there have been results which have come out as more useful for me in Bing as well. It has given me a lot of pleasant vibes with its performance. That just goes to show that we are left to our own choice as far as these two search engines go. I can say that for a lot of us, our sixth sense in the Google vs Bing decision is not exactly working.

Even as the bouts go on, a lot of websites are cropping up around the Google vs Bing preoccupation. They are simple single-function website letting us compare Google and Bing results side by side.

This isn’t a Top to Bottom list but merely a listing of all the addresses that will allow you to do a comparison search of Google vs Bing.

1. Googawho

   Side by side searching with this plain Jane tool. Enter the search term and you get the search results from Google and a random search engine. The engines come from Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Ask, InfoSpace, AltaVista, Lycos and Dogpile. Click on any of the names to get the results in the dual pane. The Tabulizer button opens results from all search engines in individual tabs.

2. Bing & Google

   Simulataneous dual paned results from both Bing and Google helps you to compare search results easily.

3. Mixxr

   This search tool covers Google, Yahoo, Bing and Twitter on the same page. The number of frames on the page will depend on the search engines selected.

4. Stringy

   Along with the Bing and Google comparer, they have their own ‘version’ of Bing which promises to deliver optimized Bing results.

5. Search3 (beta)

   It starts with a nice interface and the premise that three search engines are better than one. The others include – Twitter, eBay and Yahoo. It also allows for browser integration (Firefox, IE7, Google Chrome, Flock, and Opera).

6. AskBoth (beta)

   The search tool comes with a neat interface and browser integration. AskBoth also gives you search and translate add-ons for supported browsers. Read our previous post on AskBoth.

7. Bing Vs Google

   We have covered it before in this post. It gives the same facility and browser integration with Firefox and IE to boot.

8. Ranks.nl

   In a rank departure from the clean-cut looks of the ones before, this web tool looks like a webmaster’s scalpel. It actually is, with its dropdown menus letting you compare search engines and their different language variants. You can compare Google vs Bing by choosing the engines from the dropdowns. Control the framesets between horizontal or vertical orientation.

9. Bingle

   Bingle gives you a single window (but dual framed) access to both Google and Bing. You can also easily add it to your browser (IE and Firefox) as its default search engine with a single click.

10. Furia
    If a webpage can be called as artless, then this is it. Just a search query box and nothing else. Type in your query and the page splits in two to display results from Google and Bing.

In this list we have seen tools that swing from the Web 2.0 look to those that resemble a weekend project done in a jiffy. Does it look like too many cooks for a single broth? But then having options never harmed anybody.

In the end it’s about getting results that are on the button. Using two popular search engines does help to cancel out the inaccuracies of both. Somebody did mention that two heads are better than one.

Which is your preferred search engine among Google and Bing? When it comes to search, do you have the patience to sift through the results from multiple search engines or would you rather use just one?

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In this article, let us look at 4 Visual Search Engines that provide a unique and enjoyable search experience.

Bing Visual Search Engine

Bing has introduced a new approach to its visual search by letting you browse topic-specific galleries and narrow the field of your search by selecting filters.

In this approach, you do not need to type anything to start searching. To use the Bing Visual Search Engine, you should have installed Silverlight and set your country to US. From the home page, you can see a set of featured galleries, or choose from different categories like Entertainment, Famous People, Reference, Shopping and Sports.

When you select a gallery, you get an eye-popping display of choices, which you can filter using categories on the left. For example, if I choose Popular Books, I get a nice array of books like in a real bookstore. I can sort books by Title, Author, Sales, or even Length. On the left, I can narrow the results by choosing a sub-category or filter. In this case, subcategories for books are Newest, or the Top pre-order/fiction/non-fiction/paperback lists.

I can also use filters to narrow the results for what I might find suitable for my taste: the subject, author, format (hardcover, etc.), and length in pages. Some of the galleries, like the top iPhone apps gallery for example, are especially useful and offer a unique experience. Once you use it for a while, you might think that this new feature distinguishes Bing from Google to a limited extent, as a decision-making engine.

Spezify

After using Spezify, I felt we do injustice to the web by using an exclusive textual interface to search the rich multimedia of the web. Spezify works like a generic search engine, except that the results are a visual collage of media drawn from different kinds of media sources – textual links from web pages, informative links from Wikipedia, pictures from across the web, tweets with the search term, videos from YouTube, books from Amazon, and so on. You need Flash to use Spezify.

You can browse through the results matrix in both vertical and horizontal directions, and look at the pictures as well as the videos from within the search results page. The links within the tweets will take you directly to the page about that topic. Articles from the web are displayed along with the number of Diggs, which show that Spezify uses Digg to show you popular content. Terms related to the topic are displayed at the top if you wish to explore or narrow your search.

Viewzi

Viewzi, which runs using Flash, is the most customizable and multi-faceted visual search engine. For any search term, it offers up to 19 different ways to view the search results, and you can make any one of them your default. The types of views cover everything under the sun – web screenshots, simple text, photos, music, news, celebrity gossip, recipes, weather, etc.

Videos are fetched from Joost, YouTube, and Viddler, but cannot be played back within the results page. However, the best view is the photo tag view, in which you can explore Flickr photos of related tags just by clicking on them. You can drag the tags around whichever way you want, and the interface is quite remarkable.

Spacetime

We had covered SpaceTime on MakeUseOf back when it was a 3D browser. SpaceTime is now a visual search engine using Flash, which shows search results in cover-flow style. You can choose results from Google or Wikipedia, or search Images, or videos from YouTube. Again, the videos can’t be played back within the search results, however the image search does look very pretty.

While you may not use these visual search engines for routine search queries, they do offer an attractive, unique experience. They can be a great way to introduce children to the richness of the web, or to encourage their curiosity in a certain topic. Even for us, they are a refreshing way to explore the web in a different way.

Last year, we also profiled TinEye which is another possibility – but this one is termed by the site as “reverse search“.   You upload an image to them and they will search for similarities.

Are there any of your other favorite visual search engines we missed? Do tell us in the comments!

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Controlling the Google search engine top rankings for what comes up on a search page may seem out of reach, but with a few easy steps, you can take charge of the results to improve upon your name and personal brand. Whether you’re disappointed with what appears or nothing comes up at all, remember that results will vary, literally, depending on a number of factors like how common or unique your name is and its current presence on the Web.

With employers and basically everyone who knows you potentially Googling your name to find out about you, it’s becoming increasingly important that you have at least some kind of grasp of your online identity and reputation and that you understand how to take better control of the search engine top ranked sites that mention your name (in a positive light). It’s relatively easy, and best of all, it doesn’t have to cost you a dime.

Privacy and Security

First things first. Dealing with and using your real name online can be risky business. It shouldn’t, however, be a problem as long as you do it wisely and correctly. It’s vital that you never publish personal information that you don’t want anyone to get a hold of. Stuff like your home address or phone number should be kept to yourself.

Some of the things Google simply doesn’t tolerate on its search pages include your social security or government ID number, your bank account or credit card number, or an image of your handwritten signature.

If such content is published on the Web somewhere, you can request its removal from Google search results. Learn more about how to remove false information about yourself on the Internet.

On social networking websites, be sure to check out your privacy settings so that you can specify who gets to view your profile.

Create Your Own Google Profile

Google created profiles to give you greater control over what people find when they search for your name. Profile results are displayed at the bottom of search pages.

First, you’ll need to make a profile with your name and a little information about yourself. You can also write a short bio and add links to some of your public pages if you have any, like online photo albums, social network profiles, and personal websites.

You then have the option of adding contact information, which is not made public and you get to decide who can view it.

From my experience, the more information you add to your profile, the higher it’s ranked, so keep that in mind.

2. Join Social Networks

Take advantage of the popularity of social networking websites and services. Profiles on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Classmates, and LinkedIn are musts. These websites have significant PageRank, meaning your profile may be able to achive top search engine rankings - with placement on the first page of Google search results for your name.

Feel free to go the extra mile by making a profile and listening to music on Last.fm, putting up videos on YouTube, or sharing photos on Flickr. Just be sure to enter your real name as the profile’s username only if you’re comfortable with doing so.

3. Start Your Own Blog

Another thing you may want to try if you have the time is to start your own blog. Websites like Blogger and WordPress allow you to publish your very own blog for free.

I highly recomment you check out recent MakeUseOf article on How To Easily Create a Blog with Tumblr.

Ideally, the subdomain should include your real name (yourname.blogspot.com or yourname.wordpress.com) when you register.

4. Get a Domain Name

If all else fails or you want to try to go for the very top of Google’s search listings, buying your own domain name may be the answer. Check to see if your first and last name together is available for a .com domain name registration.

As far as the content for your websites goes, it doesn’t have to be the best. Just writing in a little bit about yourself or posting your resume should do.

Getting your own domain is probably the best way to grab that top spot in Google search results for your name. However, the downside is that it’ll cost you to purchase the domain name and have your website hosted.

For the obsessive, you can actually set up Google Alerts to track any mentions of your name on the Web.

We have done some similar articles on online reputation management and controlling your online name in the past. Here’s three of them :

- How to Maintain a Professional Reputation Online
- 15 Websites to Find People On The Internet
- Manage Your Various Online Identities With Chi.mp
- Cool ‘Identity Search’ Tools for Social Web

What pops up when you Google yourself? Let us know in the comments.

Image Credit : Techprodigy

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The search engines below are really great at finding some of those useful forum posts. Some of them are even more relevant than Google in displaying results (for those that don’t know you can search probably over 90% of forums via Google by adding the inurl:forum operator.) All of these engines can search by post date, post number and other factors. Google can’t (currently).

Without further ado, let’s start. I have listed them by the value I think they provide. The best is at the top, the worst at the bottom.

Omgili

What is it about? : You probably know you can search forums by the post title. Let’s take a look at Omgili’s advanced search page. What’s interesting there is you can choose to search for discussions in 35 languages, sort by date when the topic is created and also sort by minimum number of replies or unique users that posted on that topic. Very interesting.

Some great free services offered by Omgili are:

- Google@Omgili: it returns Google results. Next to each result, you have one number which displays how many times that result is mentioned on different forum topics. You can also view those topics. This is very useful if, for example, you want to see what people say about a specific website or company.

- Omgili Q&A: I honestly haven’t found a better Q&A search engine than this which returns more relevant results. The bad thing is that Yahoo Answers is not included there (maybe they did this for a reason.) but overall it is very valuable web application.

Boardreader

What is it about? : Same basic functionality like Omgili. Difference in returning relevant results – Boardreader includes Yahoo Answers in its results. This makes them sometimes have a better relevance than Omgili in displaying some results. You can enter a site in their engine and it will display the forums linking to that site which is good if you’re a webmaster.

The thing I don’t like about Boardreader is that they try to be all in one – video search, microblogs search, they even search images! Not cool. I wonder what would have happened with Google if at the beginning (with a still undeveloped general search engine) they started spreading themselves around like this.

Boardreader should focus more on developing their forum search engines than add some (pretty basic) other types of engines on their site.

BoardTracker

What is it about? : The guys at BoardTracker are typical old school marketers. When you come on their site you’ll see messages that remind me of: ‘We have the latest technology!!!’, ‘New! New! New!’, ‘Our product is THE BEST!’ Is it?

I guess it was either me or their site is at times very slow (not to talk about their NEW! BoardTracker version 2.0 that’s a pain in the…you know what). I’ve decided to include them in this list only for their excellent relevant results. They did their job as expected.

Overall, the 3 search engines above are pretty good in doing their job. Omgili is the best by far. They offer the biggest database and most relevant results. Boardreader includes many sources in its results and BoardTracker…well…it does its job as required and I believe they can do way more. Forums are still not dead and they are very useful so I hope these sites will come very useful to you.

Can you recommend a better forum search engine? If so, please do tell us about it.

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• A Quick Guide To Google’s New Search Features (15)
• 5 Ways To Do A Site-Specific Search Using Search Engines (13)
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But in our quest for the right data, how many times have we come across a website which lacks a search engine of its own? There have been sites which I could have loved more but alas for a search box of its own. Then there are sites which do have a search box but you aren’t quite getting what you want. So it’s worth a second try with some deep digging of your own.

So for such crunch times, here are some workarounds to do an internal search on a specific website or blog.

1. Google Site Search Query

The ol’ favorite reminds us the value of memorizing advanced Google search operators. Google indexes most sites on the web and so the ‘site:’ search query helps to limit your search within a website. For instance, the query antivirus site:makeuseof.com will return results for the keyword antivirus but only from MakeUseof.com. (Their shouldn’t be a space between the colon and the domain name).



The site: operator can also be used to restrict searches within one top domain. For instance, keyword site:net or keyword site:edu. This works on Yahoo and Bing too.

According to a little poll we had some while back, it is the third most liked Google operator.

2. Search Engines and Advanced Search Options

Most search engines have this feature as an option but you just have to go into the advanced search page. Here’s where you get it in these two popular (one upcoming) search engines.

For Google




For Yahoo



For Bing




3. Use a Firefox Add-on

Search Site is an experimental Firefox add-on which makes site-specific searches very easy. The local search can be done either by selecting a word on a webpage and using the right-click context menu (Search site for selection).



Or by clicking the Search Site green icon on the search bar. You can use the search engine of your choice to do the site-specific search.



Also check out the use of Firefox smart keywords mentioned by Ann in her post on 8 Tips to Make Firefox Search Friendly.

4. Use a web service

Though the interface is plain, the Newtechusa.com search interface does the job intended using the Google search engine. Specify the domain URL in the first field and then use the second step to query the specific domain.



5. Create your own site searcher using Rollyo

Rollyo lets you roll on with your search by providing an easy non-geeky way to create a customized search engines for sites you want – rather than the whole worldwide web. Pick the sites you want to search, and Rollyo creates a custom search engine for it.

You can create a search engine for one specific site or a max of 25 sites. You can also browse, use, modify and share Searchrolls (the created search engines) created by the community of users on Rollyo. Any Rollyo Searchroll can be added to Firefox for one click access. For a quick single site setup, you can use the Rollyo Bookmarklet which not only lets you do a local search but also you can add sites to your Searchrolls on the fly.



Kaly’s post on creating your own search engines with Rollyo looks into in with more detail.

Sometimes we miss the trees because of the forest. A single site in itself instead of the whole wide web could be the source of all our information needs. So, it helps to dig deep into its coffers with specific searches.

What do you do if you come across a site which lacks a search box? Do you browse merrily away or you fall back on a utility like Google for advanced searching?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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• A Quick Guide To Google’s New Search Features (15)
• 4 Awesome Visual Search Engines to Transform Your Search (9)
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• Yolink – A Search Accelerator for Deep Internet Research (7)

We used to say that about the rest of the Internet, but social networking has lead many of us to talk as if the rest of the blogosphere and Web has become some antiquated dinosaur of information sharing.

The truth, however, is that the rest of the Web is still ridiculously fast as a source for information – if you know where to look. All those tweets and Facebook updates? They tend to come from stories or notices on the rest of the Web. But for breaking news in more than a couple of sentences, the Web is the dominant presence by far.

That’s what OneRiot, a real-time search for the whole Web, is taking advantage of. Instead of tracking what people are saying, as Twitter search engines like Scoopler do, it tracks what they’re talking about.

The OneRiot team describes what they’re trying to do quite well

When you search for a popular subject using other realtime search engines, your search results will show you a stream of chatter happening around that subject. Essentially, those search results are saying, “Your query is a hot term! Lots of people are talking about it!” However, what can be hard to find there is the actual source of the chatter – the news stories, blog posts or Web pages that started it all. If you were to search for that same popular subject using OneRiot, you’d find the actual content people are talking about – search results that say, “Check out this page, or blog, or video! Lots of people are talking about it!

OneRiot isn’t a traditional search engine, nor does it pretend to be. It’s not a place to find static information, or look up something interesting; it’s a place to find out who won the big game, or who got voted off of American Idol (not that I love that show or anything…). Information is sorted by timeliness as much as relevance, meaning newer material, even if it’s not the most complete source of information on a given topic, rises to the top.

You use OneRiot like you would any other search engine: go to the site and enter a search term. You can search either Web or Video (which is smart, because videos tend to be more viral than any other medium), and pick almost any topic. Underneath the search bar, there’s a list of “Trending Topics,” which tracks some of the most popular stories at the moment.

Once you’ve searched, you’ll see a list of results, formatted to help you figure out what to see. The results page gives you a headline, a snippet of the page, as well as a few useful “real-time” tips: who shared it first, when it was most recently shared, and how many people have shared it. OneRiot gets these numbers from Twitter and Digg, as well as a number of popular OneRiot apps, like the Shareaholic plugin for Firefox. You can see, at a glance, how many people are talking about a story, and even expand the window to see what they’re saying.

You can see the results truly in real-time, or choose to see the “Pulse,” which lends more importance to popular stories, by clicking at the right side of the top of the results. Either see things as they’re coming in, or see what’s hot (and still pretty brand-new). On the right side of the page is the “Most Shared Today” list, sort of like the Digg frontpage. It’s got five hot stories, and is itself a great way to figure out what’s going on.

As events unfold and stories develop, it can often be hard to track what people are talking about, and what is being said about important issues. OneRiot sifts through it for you, and lets you tap into the whole popular Web to see what’s really breaking news.

How do you find what’s popular and breaking on the Web?

Photo: Ben Sutherland

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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So, we might just have to find other methods of searching for and downloading files like television shows or movies from the interweb. I have been using a website called www.RapidShare.com for a while now to trade files with friends who don’t know what FTP is. Now, I found a neat search engine that will let you search what other people are uploading!

In the past, I’ve shown you a Rapidshare search engine but this new one is even better. It’s called RapidShare123 and is located at http://www.RapidShare123.com. RapidShare123 collects Rapid Share downloads from sites, forums, blogs and portals. Don’t have something to search for? Come on, all you need to search is a little bit of imagination – and if you don’t have any of that, RapidShare123 lists the most recent search terms on their homepage.

In the past, we have showed you how to make use of your Rapidshare account with some free Rapidshare tools that you should definitely check out if you haven’t.

Enough shameless promotion, let’s take a look at how RapidShare123 works.

After browsing over to their website, you will see a big old search box followed by a big blue Find button to find rapid share downloads. That’s all there is to it! I decided to type in something that would not bring up copyrighted materials for this article but hey, you can do whatever you want. I tried and I tried but all of my searches kept returning copyrighted information. I won’t download the actual file but I will walk you through how it works.

I settled down with the search term Simpsons and got a lot of results.  Some times RAR files are broken into multiple files. This is denoted by the “part01″ before the file extension. Using this search, I try to stay away from them but your results may vary. I hit the link 7 items down for The Simpsons Season 19 Episode 10.

That took me to another page that returned this information:

It has the actual Rapid share download link as well as its file size. Click the link to start the download. Below, it lists the most recently downloaded files through their service. The site was just recently released so this info should improve over time. Long story short, RapidShare123 is awesome and can be used to kill some time searching for keywords and then watch what you get. It is almost like looking through someone else’s files.

Do you use a RapidShare search engine? Is yours better? Then, you should definitely share it with us in the comments!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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Looking for Work? Spread Around Your Efforts

The most important thing that any job seeker can do to improve their chances of landing a job is using multiple resources in their job hunting efforts. This means posting your resume online, as Mahendra described in Top 5 Free Resume Hosting Websites, or using social networks as Charnita described in 8 Sites For Beating The Job Hunting Blues. However, the core of your efforts should be focused on websites that bring all of the world’s jobs to your doorstep.

1. Monster.com – The Monster of Online Job Hunting

Whenever anyone needs access to job markets across the world, Monster is an obvious place to start. Monster has grown into the largest job search site on the Internet, and serves just about every community across the world.

What makes the Monster of job search sites so useful is that the "International Search" will net you a pretty nice catch of job opportunities all across the globe. Of course, Monster also offers a free "home page", a place for you to post your resume, and an entire section of some pretty cool "career tools" to help you research every step of the job hunting process.

2. Job.com - An Obvious Choice Among Job Search Websites 

I guess when it comes to finding a job, visiting a website like Job.com makes sense. Like Monster, it is one of the few job search websites that offers the ability to search Internationally.

Under "Additional Search Options", you can search from general areas of the globe, such as Middle East, United Kingdom or Pacific Rim. The site boasts over 700,000 listings, and they all seem fairly current. It also has the ability to publish your resume so that employers can view it.

3. HotJobs - When You Can’t Get Enough of Job Hunting 

Yahoo! Hotjobs is definitely Monster’s greatest competition. One of the things that Yahoo is very good at is providing content, and job seekers who visit Hotjobs are going to get exactly that.

The site itself has the same "look and feel" of other Yahoo pages, and it has lots of articles and widgets from tools like Yahoo Answers. Aside from all that bonus content, it offers a powerful job search engine that includes many thousands of listings from all throughout the world.

4. Net Temps - Full or Part Time Jobs

Net-Temps is primarily a website devoted to temporary workers who were looking for the "next gig.". However, it is not a whole lot difference than the rest of the job search websites, except for the fact that it allows job hunters to filter search results by temp or full-time work.

For most folks looking for a job, the difference is irrelevant – they need a job to pay the bills. But for freelancers who work for themselves, temp jobs give them the flexibility of a short term client contract, so that afterwards the freelancer can move on to the next job in their schedule. 

5. Indeed  - Simple and Effective

This site is quite a job search engine indeed! Sick of sifting through dozens of individual job search sites? Indeed is a job meta-search engine which means that employers don’t actually have to list jobs with Indeed. Much like how Dogpile provides results from multiple search engines like Google and Yahoo, Indeed offers you job listings from not only sites like Hotjobs and CareerBuilder, but even the individual employer websites – now that’s cool. 

6. CareerBuilder – The Name Says It All

There’s little question that CareerBuilder is one of the "big boys" of the job search websites. Like Monster and Hotjobs, you’ll find a resume posting section, the ability to find jobs by company or industry, and a very cool "job alerts" feature. What sets CareerBuilder apart from the others? Not a lot. But if you need another source that may have job listings the others don’t – it’s best to check it out, as there are quite a library of job listings stored there.

7. All Job Search – It Really Does Search Them All

AllJobSearch’s claim to fame is it’s ability, like Indeed, to search through multiple sources. The service covers the U.S., Canada and the UK. It boasts the ability to search over 200 websites, over 500 newspapers and over 300 newsgroups. Impressive.

Unfortunately, you’re provided a list of links to outside sources like an online newspaper or Monster, and if you click the link, AllJobSearch will automatically search that engine with your job search terms. While it probably saves time searching for the many job sources around the Net, it doesn’t exactly provide the search results as you’d normally expect.

8. Simply Hired – You’re Hired!

I have to say, of all of the job listings sites that you’ll find on the web, SimplyHired takes the cake simply for the sites "tools" section, where you’ll find some of the coolest widgets, like email alerts, trend research and salary information broken down by location and occupation. If you haven’t yet decided what you want to be when you grow up – this is the first site you should visit.

9. USA.gov – It’s Good Enough for Gov’ment Work

One of the world’s wealthiest countries in the world is also one of the world’s largest employers. The U.S. Federal government has its own giant online job database that you can search under whatever industry or discipline you’re interested in.

These jobs are worldwide, and the U.S. government isn’t shy about listing the actual salary ranges right there in the listing. Some of those salaries aren’t too shabby either.

10. College Recruiter – Not Only for Students

Over the years, employers got into the habit of going to college career centers to advertise their entry level positions. In fact, sometimes those are the only places they’ll advertise those openings. The CollegeRecruiter search engine is networked with 11,000 career sites around the country including college, university and military offices. Yes, these are entry level positions, but when you want to get your foot in the door, taking an entry level position is often the best way to go.

Have you ever found a job through an online job search site? Do you have other job hunting resources that you prefer? Share them in the comments section below.

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By submitting your website to a search engine, you are making sure they include you in their indexing of the web. It can’t be a bad idea to get this done quickly and while the site is still getting its act together.

How To Submit Website to Bing

First things first, just like all Microsoft products, if you want to interact with it you will need a Windows Live ID. Then, you will need to visit this site:

http://www.bing.com/webmaster/WebmasterAddSitesPage.aspx

All you need to do is fill out your website’s complete URL in this format: http://www.asktheadmin.com and if you have a sitemap, you can insert its URL in second line. Next, you need to input your contact email address and select if you want news updates for webmasters.

That’s it! It is as simple as that. While you are in there, you can have Bing verify that your Robots.txt file is being read properly as well as a website verifier and keyword research tool.

After you have submitted your site, you will apparently see an influx of traffic from Bing in as little as 48 hours! If and when you do submit your site, come back and let us know in the comments, how it has improved your site’s traffic.

How To Submit Website to Google

The process is almost identical to Google, as we will see now. To submit your site or blog to Google, you would visit this website:

www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

There, you will need to log in with your Google ID.

Once you are logged in, you can type in your site’s address and click on Add Site like you see below:

You may also add a site map and get it verified. Verification involves adding some code to your Index.html so that Google can crawl it and make sure you are who you say you are!

Have you submitted your blog or website to these or other search engines? Which has brought you the best results? Share them with us in the comments!

Tried Bing? Not sure it’s better than Google? Find out by reading my post on Bing vs Google.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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• Google Position Checker – An Essential Tool for Webmasters (12)
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At first glance, Google Squared looks much like the plain vanilla Google home page. Clicking an example search or typing in your own yields some interesting results. Basically, you give Google Squared a set of people, places, or things, and Google Squared will return a small chart of related information.

Take this example search for “2009 movies.”

Besides the titles of the films, Google Squared is smart enough to find release and director information for each movie. You may add or remove rows and columns to fill out your query. Now, the guesswork that Google Squared performs doesn’t always return perfect results. Observe the search results for albums by one of my favorite “bands”.

While ICP and Twiztid are label-mates, that last line in the list doesn’t belong in that set. Google Squared is not flawless, and clearly needs a little work (that’s why it’s still in the lab). Now, if you come across some info which is incorrect, it will often have alternate results for you to select. Please observe:

That price of $0.99 for an album can’t be right, so you may click on the box to select from alternate values, to which Google assigns confidence values. Clearly, this needs a little more work as well, as the price for a Limp Bizkit album shows up among the possible values. It’s reasonable, however, that those two albums would share an approximate price point. It’s worth noting that you can edit many values to go along with your research, and that Google Account holders can save their “squares” for later editing and printing.

How does Google Squared compare with the recently-launched Wolfram Alpha? Google Squared seems to rely more on Web sources outside of Google itself, while WolframAlpha tends to lean on its own internal cache of facts and figures. I believe that using both together could speed up research significantly.

Feel free to play with Google Squared for a bit and see what types of data you can come up with. How will this new tool help you out? Let us know (or just ridicule my musical taste) in the comments.

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I guess you would have to be under a rock not to. Bing really wants to steal the search engine market away from the big G and they realized that the only way to do this would be to build an awesome search engine. And guess what, they did!

Google is already a pretty awesome search engine and all Microsoft really did was get its results on par with Google and add some new features like making decisions for you.

Let’s use a little utility I found called Google-Bing Search. I like to call it Google Vs. Bing (as this is what the “search” button says). It was created by Blackdog SEO. What it does is compare search results from both engines side by side. Let’s take a look at how it works.

We can type in our search terms and hit the button that says Google Versus Bing. It will compare the results side by side in your browser.

Editor’s note: The screenshots below have been separated. You will have to visit the site to get the proper representation of how this app works.

VS.

Well, while we are here, I guess we should test out some searches and see what we get. Let’s start with a simple search for MakeUseOf.com + Karl Gechlik and have a look at the results.

The results returned by Google are as follows:

And here are Bing’s results:

I am pretty impressed. They both returned valid results and in this case, very different results. And this means that I have another resource for searching now. How about one more search? I decided to search for AskTheAdmin and see what I get:

From Google:

And From Bing:

I am really digging this tool and I will be doing a bunch more tests. It will definitely come in handy when comparing these two search engines to have a different set of results every time. Feel free to surf on over do your own comparisons and let us know your findings in the comments!

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• 10 Sites to Compare Google vs Bing Results Side By Side (10)
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Different versions of Bing

Depending on your location, you will be served different versions of the Bing homepage. The one that provides the most interactive features is the USA English site. This is an interesting, yet confusing at the same time; but when you realize that this is just another Microsoft product, it is not surprising. I am not sure if Microsoft will implement the same interactivity in all the different versions in the future, but for now, we will be dealing mainly with the USA English site.

To access the US English site, you just have to change your country to USA in the top right hand corner.

Interactive Homepage

Unlike Google, you will find a nice interactive image (that changes everyday) to greet you. The image contains several regions which when you hover your mouse above it, it will popup a small window showing some historical fact about the image. It is not too much use if your main purpose is to execute a search, but it is fun to learn a new random fact every now and then.

Web search

Bing comes with plenty of user interactivity. When you perform a search, you can hover your mouse over the orange orb at the right side of the search results to see a quick preview. On the left, there is a related-search column that shows a list of the popular searches similar to your search terms. This is a good way to expand your search without having to enter another search term.

Images search

When it comes to images search, Bing does a great job in displaying the images and minimize the effort required to view all the images. Instead of arranging the images in pages, Bing now loads the images on the fly. As you scroll down the page, Bing will fetch the images from its database and display on the screen. There are also plenty of options to customize the search results, such as size, layout, color, style and people.

As you hover your mouse above the image, a larger preview thumbnail of the images will pop up, and with some of its details.

Video search

For people outside of USA and are not able to watch Hulu TV, Bing video search allows you to watch a short preview of the video. Simply hover your mouse over the video and it will start to play a short clip of the video.

When you click on the video link, instead of bringing you to the video site, Bing will load the video as a frame within the search result page. Once you are done watching the video, simply close it and continue your search from there.

Shopping and Travel

Microsoft seems to have put in great effort to integrate the shopping and travel components into Bing. When you perform a search in the Shopping section, it will return results showing the product image, user ratings, price and Bing cashback percentages. Bing cashback is the new feature introduced in Bing that allows you to redeem a percentage of the product’s cost back as a discount (aka cashback). This is a new feature not found in any other search engines.

Bing also allows you to search for cheap flights and hotel stay.

Web slices

If you are using IE 8, Bing can automatically create web slices from news page or stocks chart so that you can refer to them quickly and easily.

Conclusion

Will Bing be the next Google killer? In my opinion, probably not, at least for the time being. Nevertheless, I have no doubt that Microsoft has come up with plenty of new and useful features in Bing that could ruffle some of Google’s feathers. As more and more companies introduce innovative and interactive features, the mass public (people like you and me) are definitely the ones who are going to benefit. What do you think? Let’s hear it in the comments.

Similarly, you can also check out Wolfram Alpha for a brand new kind of search experience.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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The power of search engines helps us wade through the universe of the web. This vehicle today is also being used as the agent of action to change the way we look at our planet. The environment should concern us all directly, so here are ten search engine services we can use with a click of the mouse to give back to our planet :

Forestle – Save An Acre Of Rainforest

Forestle, powered by Yahoo’s search technology, helps to save 0.1 square meters (0.11 yd²) of rain forest per search.

The ad-revenue generated from the web search goes to The Nature Conservancy which uses it to further the cause of rain forest protection. The company has estimated that an average user does about 1000 searches per year which translates into 100 square meters of conserved rain forest. The realization of your efforts is posted as monthly reports which details the area of rain forests saved.

Znout – The Google Way

If Yahoo is not your scene check out Znout from the same company but with Google behind the search tech. Znout is a Co2 neutral Internet search engine. No, the search engine does not spew out Co2 – Znout uses the ad-revenue to buy renewable energy certificates which balances out the carbon footprint caused by Znout.

Green Planet Search – Green & Slick

Green Planet Search is a website designed for your eco-habits. The Flash-driven green website is pleasing to the eye and the scruples as its home made search engine is strictly for eco-search. The website is devoted to environmentally-relevant content – educational, original news, events, blogs, products and reviews.

EcoWho – Towards Eco-Friendliness

EcoWho search indexes nearly 3 million ecologically relevant webpages. Value added offerings include an eco-news section, an ecological glossary, a blog section and an emerging article directory. The website is still under development but the search feature is sound enough.

GreenLinkCentral – Human Edited Green Search

GreenLinkCentral aims to be a one stop information source for everything that is environmental. The websites and links are vetted by the GreenLinkCentral team to ensure significance and quality. On top of the search box you will find three more useful links – Top Searches (for search suggestions), Articles (arranged in blog style categories) and Website Reviews (listing green websites).

Relying on human inputs rather than bots has the disadvantage of moderate results but a cursory glance through them revealed them to be closer to home.

Truevert – Focused On The Environment

Truevert is still in beta but it works well. Powered by Yahoo!’s open search web services platform – Yahoo BOSS, it delivers targeted environmental results. The front page draws in feeds from the popular green sites and blogs. Results are displayed beneath the query box along with a Preview icon. An Interesting Phrases icon lists the interesting phrases for the document. Search results can be narrowed down by using Themes on the left which acts like a filter for a particular keyword.

Ecocho – You Search. We Grow Trees

Ecocho offers a simplistic interface but a noble intent. It donates its revenues from advertising to afforestation programs. For every 1000 searches, Ecocho sponsors five trees.

Powered by Yahoo, searches on Ecocho allow the company to buy enough carbon offset credits to remove 1 ton of CO2 from the atmosphere. Results can also be filtered by Region, Language and Document Format.

ClimateGift – A Portal & A Search Engine

ClimateGift is not only a well developed search engine but an ecological portal too. The website partners with other environmental organizations and passes on advertising revenue from user searches to these partners.

When the page loads, the web user can pick any of the organizations on display to be the beneficiary. From this point on, ClimateGift donates 50 percent of the ad-revenue to this non-profit entity every quarter. The website features news, articles and a Tools tab with a few applications loaded.

A logged in user can personalize his homepage with things such as news, weather, sports, entertainment, photos, videos, music, email and even a calculator. For a normal search a log-in is not required.

GreenMaven – Gateway To The Green Web

GreenMaven is a web service which uses Google’s custom search service to collate green news and links from the worldwide web. The search service claims to have mapped over 10,000 websites. It also has a business directory with nearly 4000 listings.

What I liked about the site was its capable search and the ability to delve directly into Digg-ed green articles.

EcoSeek – For Things Green

EcoSeek is a bit different from the other search engines listed. It is tuned specifically towards eco-friendly and green products. The service strives to educate all consumers about eco-friendly products, manufacturers and local earth-conscious retailers.  A user can search through 13,000 Earth friendly products from 790 retailers.

Searches can be made by category. Though the search feature has a commercial slant, it helps the consumer make informed decisions about a green lifestyle. A free membership allows a user to take part in ‘green auctions’ for some of the products listed on the site.

What do you think of these green initiatives? Do you share the optimism that such web services can preserve a corner of the only place we can call home?

You might also like to read this post by Ann on 10 Websites to Keep You Updated on Green News.

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People share thoughts, exchange opinions and reviews every single second. It is really hard to keep track of those conversations and sometimes you just need to.

Would you like to know what people are saying about the recent product or track your business reviews? This time I am listing most useful online tools that might help you to search multiple social media sites from one place (and sometimes with one click).

Spy

Spy (see MakeUseOf review of Spy) is fun to use. It updates in real time and if you are tired of working, you can just sit back and read the updates.

The tool also shows recent trends (as well as hashtags) and allows you to change the page background color:

SamePoint

SamePoint offers to search plenty of social networks. It has a handy interface allowing you to click through the tabs to get more targeted results: social media, microblogging, networks, images, etc. You can also subscribe to any search by RSS to track any changes.

It also offers real time tracking mode:

SocialMention

SocialMention (see MakeUseOf review of SocialMention) offers to search through blogs (Wordpress.com, Google Blog Search, Live.com, Technorati.com, Wikio.com), bookmarks (Diigo, Clipmarks, StumbleUpon), micro-blogs, comments (BackType), images (Flickr, Picasaweb, Photobucket), news (Digg, Reddit, Mixx), video (Youtube, Truveo.com, Pixsy.com), etc:

It also scores each query based on its social media presence:

WhosTalkin

WhosTalkin is the most comprehensive of all. It is divided into sections that includes blogs, news, networks, videos, images, and forums. Each of the sections has numerous options to click through.

The site also offers to install their Google gadget to bring the power of the social media search to your Google home page.

Of course, there are more social media search tools. I’ve only mentioned those that appeared useful to me.  Which tools are you using and would like to recommend?

Post image by striatic

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However, please allow me to present some multi-engine search engines which you should consider to take the place of your current home page.

Search Hacker (NSFW!)

SearchHacker hosts 15 different custom search engines from its homepage: Real Estate, Baby Names, Webcams, Audio Files, Jobs, Video, Wallpaper, Free Stuff, Questions & Answers, Product Prices, File Search (with filetype filter), Passwords, and BitTorrent.

Unfortunately, the first of the engines listed is an adult image search, featured prominently on the homepage alongside a troubling image of a Disney Princess character (!), so I cannot suggest using this site from work, unless your IT department as well as your coworkers are liberally tolerant of such things (Hint: Most are not).

Yahoo! Glue

Yahoo’s Glue returns multiple types of search results, such as videos, news, images, and biography, on one page. The odd thing is that many of these results come from non-Yahoo sites like YouTube and Last.FM. There’s no plain-vanilla Web search with Glue, but there is a handy Yahoo search box in the upper right.

Serchilo

Serchilo can be thought of as a command-line interface for Web search. For example, type “g keyword” for a Google search, or “g! keyword” for an “I’m Feeling Lucky” search. If you’re shopping, try “a keyword” for Amazon or “e keyword” for eBay.

Once you’ve memorized the commands, a search plugin is available for your browser. If you register, you can create your own commands.

Katapulco

Katapulco wins the multi-search game hands-down because of its quick and simple interface and availabilty of over 90 search engines from a single command line. It uses a shortcut system much like Serchilo, but allows for its users to create custom commands without signing up for an account. Use of more than one shortcut at a time is possible, and such results appear in a tabbed interface.

Katapulco will be my new home page for a while, but I’m sure that I’ve missed some great ones, so please share your favorites in the comments.

Honorable Mentions: The original multi-search, Dogpile, Dogpile’s cousins, as well as Twingine (Google + Yahoo).

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Yup, you can now search for what you want and download it. I have used Google to find Rapidshare download links before but this site called RapidStack is just oh so much better!

Rapidshare does not maintain a directory of the files it hosts. It relies on users trading URL’s and bloggers posting them. But now this amazing site does what was impossible before.

(Just a FYI, I was not able to get to it using www.RapidStack.com due to some DNS issues but http://RapidStack.com works just fine!).

Let’s check it out. I will start off by saying there is no logging in, signing up or fancy options. But it does its job VERY well. I mean there is nothing else you need to do other than have a set of keywords that you want to search for. If you know the file name that you want, that will make it even easier.

You navigate your browser on any platform over to the site and type in a keyword just like any other search engine. I typed in Simpsons. I was looking for Sundays first High Definition Simpsons episode. I hit enter and got back this screen:

It took me about 40 seconds to get to 30% and about 2 minutes to get my full listings. But in all fairness their servers are getting bombarded by traffic from all the people catching on! You can jump in as soon as you see the first listing appear. Next to the title you will see how many Rapidshare links it found and in smaller text where they were snatched from.

Hit that “Extract Links” button.

You will then get a list of Rapidshare links to get each of your files. In this case the 6 files all make up a spanned rar archive that when combined and extracted – it will give me what I want!

You can copy and paste those links into your browser one at a time or even into a word editor that makes active web links from URL’s. Or, better use Linkrr to convert list of texh URLs to clickable links with a single click.

I have used a multiple file downloader for inputting long lists of URLs and it returns a page with clickable links. But when I went to grab the link for the site my Firefox told me that they have hosted malware in the past 90 days so I will not be sharing that link with you now.

Let us know what you use to search and find your Rapidshare downloads!

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Fortunately we will never have that problem, because if we did, the American recession, along with every other recession across the world would be double what it is today.

The problem is that although Google is essentially the answer to every website’s search difficulties, it’s not perfect for individual sites. You’re forced to browse to whatever particular site that you are looking for, type in your search term(s), and browse through your results. Although this typically isn’t a big deal to most people, it would be nice if you could collectively have all of the engines in one central depot. This is what Sputtr does for you.

Sputtr brings together a majority of the top websites across the web, and links quick access to each of their respective search engines. The screenshot below gives you a better idea of what I’m talking about.

After entering any particular search term, you simply select whichever search engine you would like to use and it redirects you to that site’s engine automatically. It takes a different approach at meta-searching.

It’s free, but not required, to sign-up for an account, and once you do you can customize your Sputtr page, however you like. There are 48 default engines, and hundreds of additional options to add yourself.

If your particular site isn’t listed already, you can even manually add your own. I’ve done this for MakeUseOf here.

In the end, this search engine tool is just another in the large collection for the ‘web lazy’. It eliminates browsing to an individual site search, and does so with a very clean, very fast and very easy-to-use interface.

Check it out, and see if it can become your new alternative to searching your favorite and most popular web sites.

Know of any similar alternatives to Sputtr? Is something like this worth switching over to?

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We have seen a few FREE people search tools online but none of them compares to Pipl. Pipl makes it easy to find a lost love, friend or relative without much effort. After trying it out I was amazed at the amount of information that is freely available.

I should start by saying when I first came around to the Internet, I had no problem with putting personal information into my profiles but in the last 5 years or so I put that to an end.

So the first person I searched for was yours truly as you can see below:

Just simply fill in whatever information you have about your victim subject and hit search. It really could not be any simpler. After hitting search you will get the customary waiting/loading screen.

And then you are greeted by your results categorized in a no-nonsense kind of way. Separating different types of data so you can hone in on what you are looking for.

This search pulled in images of me from all over the web, (and some NOT of me like the one of PodCasting Jason above and some other random dude on the bottom.) It had my PHYSICAL address from about 7 years ago and an address of a company I worked for. I was impressed. All of this could definitely be used to track my ass down!

I scrolled down for some more Karl information:

This app found a hell of a lot of my online profiles and even a link to a comment on Lifehacker Australia praising me. I see an ICQ account I haven’t used in years and a Flickr album I forgot about. Nifty nifty.

Now you can also use the links at the top of the home page to search for phone numbers or online usernames. These both worked out a little better than I would like – and i WILL NOT be showing you these screenies No, it’s not that I don’t love all of our MakeUseOf readers, it’s just that I don’t want to talk to all of you on my cell phone!

Do you have a tool that you use to track people down? Have you had a great success story? Maybe someone managed to find a lost love using a similar tool? Care to share it with us? Then hit us up in the comments and happy tracking!

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But that certainly doesn’t mean that other search engines can’t do a decent, if not better, job and this list has been compiled for just this reason.

So check out this catalog of awesome alternative search engines that are certain to help you search faster and more efficiently on that World Wide Web.

Music & Video

MP3Realm

If you’re one of the countless people today who gets their music digitally, then MP3Realm is for you. The site features a basic search for MP3’s as well as song lyrics.

MP3s can be streamed, added to playlists and of course downloaded. The advanced search option also lets users browse MP3’s by genre (a ton to choose from) or by artist.

TuneFind

I’m sure that some part of all of our lives has been spent in front of the television and I always manage to find a song that catches my fancy no matter what I’m watching. That’s where TuneFind comes in; the site is dedicated to providing users with the names of artists/song titles that have appeared on their favorite television shows, and even movies.

You can even reverse look up artists, to see which films and shows their music has been featured on.

MuviBee

A site dedicated to the best of both worlds, MuviBee lets users search for music and music videos (via YouTube) that might be associated with the song. The site proves to be versatile and certainly unique, providing users with Top 10 Charts from iTunes, the US, UK and Germany as well as direct links to Amazon and iTunes if you should decide to purchase music you like.

ClipBlast

ClipBlast features short videos from a variety of mainstream sources, including Hulu, TBS, BBC etc. The site is easy to use and loaded with enough content to keep you busy for hours.

Blinkx

Blinkx is another quality video search engine that collects results from hundreds of video/television providers and incorporates them into your search. The site also lets you browse videos from a myriad of topics.

If, by the way, you’re having trouble with videos that are limited to region, like Hulu, then try out some of the neat solutions we’ve covered here at MUO.

Files & Others

Rapidshare1

Rapidshare has become a premium site for uploading and serving content for hungry web users. It’s natural then to expect a site devoted to searching for files on Rapidshare, and Rapidshare1 is it. The site is dead simple and all you need to get going is something to look for.

Filestube

Filestube takes Rapidshare1 to another level by aggregating its searches to include several other networks including MegaUpload, YouSendIt, Filefront etc. Searches can also be filtered by file type which adds more convenience to the engine.

FileSnatcher

Another good site, FileSnatcher lets you look for files on a few different file sharing networks, including Badongo, Mediafire and 4shared.

Recipes & Cooking

Cookstr

As the name implies, Cookstr is for the wannabe-chef in all of us. The site is clean and intuitive and searching is simple. What I like best about Cookstr is the wide range of search filters that they offer, some of which include searching for recipes based on chef, author, skill level, holiday, course, cost and much more.

Keep in mind that the site is still in beta and Cookstr will be adding a “menu-search” feature as well as helpful tips/techniques as the site develops.

RecipeZaar

RecipeZaar is another excellent website for searching up quality recipes for your next meal. Users can also search for ‘cookbooks’ which are a collection of another user’s recipes. Also, recipe results feature ratings and nutritional information.

Fun

Tickex

Trying to buy tickets online? Well then check out Tickex, the site that collects search results from multiple ticket providers for concerts, sporting events and theatre. Searches can be made by venue, country, event, city etc. The site also provides direct links to retailers to simplify your experience even further.

Quotiki

Looking for something clever to say in your next argument? Try out Quotiki, a quotation search engine that has collected some of the wisest and shrewd idioms the world over.

WhatsOpen

WhatsOpen is a young site, but its concept is awesome. They let users see what stores, malls and shops are currently open in their neighborhood and how long they’ll be open. As I’ve mentioned, the site is rather new and the working locations are still limited to a few key cities in the US of A, but rest assured new locations are being added as the site grows.

So there you have it readers, 13 awesome search engines for you to play with. Questions, comments, suggestions? Then drop us a line in the comments and share your thoughts with fellow MUO followers.

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So much so that there is an overwhelming number of torrent search engines that only search torrent files. Here are some of the top torrent search engines and sites which every BitTorrent User must know about:

The Pirate Bay

Think about torrents and the first name that comes to your mind is “The Pirate Bay”. The Pirate Bay is the grand daddy of all torrent search engines and trackers. The guys are facing legal threats, they are been condemned, but they have a mission, a message, and boy do they kick some ass! We all like TPB, don’t we?

The Pirate Bay tracks the largest number of torrents (I won’t even bother mentioning a number here, because it is going to be miles off in a month). Not only they have a huge collection of torrents, TPB is also concerned about your privacy and constantly makes tracking users difficult.

They also have a sort of user Karma. There are VIP users, trusted users so that you can find out which of the users are trusted and you can download the files with ease and peace of mind.

Mininova

Like “The Pirate Bay”, Mininova tracks torrents and has a large collection of them. It is believed that if you can’t find the torrent you are looking for on either The Pirate Bay or Mininova then there is a good chance that the torrent doesn’t exist.

A peculiar fact about Mininova is that the site doesn’t index adult torrents. Moreover the site is clean and I don’t think I have seen “aggressive (as in family content)” advertisements to this day on Mininova. So if you are at work and want to search some torrents to remotely trigger downloads at your home computer, better check it out.

Vertor

Although not exactly a top torrent search engine, Vertor is a nice site to have in your repertoire if you are an avid torrent user. Vertor servers constantly downloads torrents and checks them for viruses, passwords, DRM etc. The site then provides you snippets that can help you identify if the torrent actually has the content you were looking for. You will get screenshots for video files, sound previews for audio files and so on.

Demonoid

Demonoid is definately up there among the best. However to download torrent files indexed by Demonoid, you are required to have an account. The account, although free to create, is not owned by everyone out there. The registrations are open only for some time and you require an invitation to get into Demonoid. If you manage to get an account you will see why this is one of the best.

Meta Search Engines

A meta search engine specializes (or is supposed to specialize) in searching a number of torrent sites. You give it a query and it will search the most popular torrent sites and return you the results. Recently, there has been a flood of such meta search engines for torrents. So which one is the best? Well it comes down to personal preference, but here are some of the better ones:

While researching for this story, I asked all the MakeUseOf geeks which one is their favorite and Torrentz came out on top with a healthy margin. What I like about the site is the simple and clean interface. You instantly get an idea what is where and it works like a charm.

BtDig and Nowtorrents are also worth checking out. The killer features: you can sort by size, seeders, leechers and health. You can also set preferences such as which sites to search and which ones to exclude etc.

Some Specialized Torrent Search Engines

• Legal Torrents – With all the hype about BitTorrent and copyright laws, you never know what is legit and what’s not. If you want to stay out of trouble check out Legit Torrents and Legal Torrents which only list legal torrents.
• Public Domain Torrents – Lists torrents for downloading classic long forgotten movies in the Public Domain.
• Linux Distributions – Linux Tracker and TuxDistro are good for finding torrents of Linux Distributions.

The list is by no means exhaustive, there are so many BitTorrent sites out there on the web, that it is only logical that I may have missed one of your favorites. So why not share with us what BitTorrent sites do you like the most and why?

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Also included in this realm, but not within this post are Google Video, Pictures, News and Blogs which most users will already be familiar with so we have not included them in the list below.

Google Patent Search

Its amazing that a database like this exists, but most people don’t even know about it.   Google has taken it upon themselves to fully index and cross-reference over 7 million patents of past and present.   Complete with drawings, cross references and similarities to other patents, there are many lifetimes of explorations to be had.

For example, you can see Albert Einstein’s patent application for a blouse or John Logie Baird’s application for the device which would later go on to become the world’s first television set.   There are many more.

Google Scholar

Google Scholar is an interesting experiment with mixed results as it can bring you information about books and academic articles related to your topic of deep query.  However sometimes the results that it finds will either be behind an academic password/pay wall or be a link to a book which is not available online. Nevertheless it is a great research point for deep interest on a subject.

Google Books

Already known to many, Google Books has taken the liberty to scan and partially make available online thousands of books.   Their system is very interesting as they allow you to view certain pages of a book at any one time (usually about 20% of the book).

However if you really want to see the book and not buy it through one of Google’s affiliate links then you can reload the page from a different IP address and different sections of the book will show up.   Keep doing this until you get the whole work.   Also note that they have quite the database of magazines as well under similar terms.

Google Catalogs

Yes they are mad information monsters.  Google has went ahead and scanned almost every print catalog they can find.   Need to check that Sears Catalog and don’t have your copy handy?  Don’t worry Google has it all ready for you online.

Google Products

Yes, Google has a price comparison engine as well.   Enter any product that you are looking for and Google will show you hundreds of places to buy it and the lowest price.  They just want the whole pie.

Google University Search

Not as much as a custom database as the others, but more of a help for students and faculty.  Google University Search allows easy filtering and searching of resources from various US Universities.

US Government Search

Not of much use to our friends overseas, though don’t worry, I am sure they are indexing as we speak.  Google has a specially filtered US Government search engine to help you find that information you need without all the noise.

What sources do you use (can be non-Google) to research and find specialty information?   Do you use a source that does the job better than the engines mentioned above?    If so please leave it in the comment section.

Google picture by Gonzalo Fernández

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Most webmasters and bloggers naturally follow the money trail and add a Google Adsense search engine but if you don’t want to do that, there are some decent free alternatives out there.

The Google Adsense option

Let’s first look at the Adsense option since that’s the most popular route that people take. I have an Adsense search engine on my own blog so I am very familiar with it.

I am very happy with the Adsense engine as it pulls in some decent money on a monthly basis.   Nothing to get hyper-excited about but it funds my tea and chocolate chip cookie addiction! Basically, whenever someone uses your Adsense search engine to make search queries on your website, you get a small payment from Google. If you get enough regular visitors to your site using your search engine, that can add up to quite a nice payment at the end of the month, especially if they are using the other aspects of Adsense as well such as clicking on the adverts (but no money gets paid out until you reach a minimum $100).

After being approved by Google for an Adsense account, just click on “Adsense Setup” then “Adsense For Search” :

You’ll then be asked to fill in details such as your site URL, your site language, site location and you can customize the look and feel of the search engine. You can also customize the search results page such as being able to put your logo on the page. Then you will receive the HTML code to put the search engine on your webpage. This is what mine looks like:

The free options

But what if you don’t want Adsense on your site? What if making money from search is not your thing? Well it would make you a unique and remarkable person to turn down cash but OK, there are free and decent alternatives out there. Let’s take a look at four of them:

Google Custom Search

As well as Adsense, Google also offers a free Custom Search engine that is really easy to set up.  The free version requires you to accept adverts on the search results page though.

Yahoo Search

This is a basic search box but it does its job and searches your website and you can also choose to search Yahoo Search as well.

Windows Live Search

Again a basic search box which you can either configure to search your site or search the web. I don’t think you can have a search box that does both. Pesky Steve Ballmer!

Freefind

Freefind has been around for years and I used it on my many websites before I moved onto Google Adsense. It was (and still is to my knowledge) absolutely great.  Here are some of the things I liked about it :

• Daily re-indexing
• Emailed search reports with the search terms your visitors put into your search engine.
• Schedule when you want the search indexes spidered – as often or as little as you want.
• Adobe PDF file indexing – the spiders don’t ignore them!
• Specify exactly what pages you want the spiders to ignore and they get ignored.
• Other formats such as Word and Powerpoint are recognised and indexed.
• A sitemap is automatically generated for you.

So these are just four alternative options for adding search engine to your website if Adsense is not something you want to get involved in, but at the same time, you would like to have some kind of search function on your website.

Do you have any other preferred search engine for your website? If so, let us know in the comments!

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Search Color Schemes (Use Words)

Picking out a color scheme for your website? Not sure how to describe the actual colors you need? Try out ‘Instant Color Schemes’.

This excellent free service makes it easy for anyone to find an entire matching color scheme simply by typing in a word. For example, just search for ’sunset’, and color schemes related to ’sunset’ will be made available on the spot.

“Instant Color Schemes” makes full use of Yahoo’s image search API. How it works is that they take 5 related images from Yahoo Image Search and then show the most prominent 6 colors from each image and then find related colors to come up with the color schemes.

After some testing, it does work out pretty well in most cases. It did give me abnormal results once in a while (along with yellow and orange, pink and grey colors were displayed to me when I searched for ‘curry’!), but it looks to be a good product overall.

Search Color Schemes (Use Images)

Lost for words? If you are, you can let your favorite image do the talking. Sometimes words don’t cut it. This is especially true when you’re trying to pick colors to match certain objects, a painting or a statue for instance. Just upload a picture to Color Palette Generator and it will break down the key colors from within that photo and allow you to obtain a color scheme from that image.

Also of note is the fact that the source code for this project is available for free which means you can grab it, change and modify the code and put it to good use as well.

So there you go, two tools which will help you make the right decision about colors – all the time.

You might also want to check out The Best 3 Tools to Search for Images Online by Color by Ann.

How do you pick color schemes? I would love to hear your thoughts.

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Let’s search the web for an autumn-like palette (yellow, red, brown) using the following 3 services. Let’s see how the search results are like.

1. PicItUp

PicItUp is a visual image search engine that combines word-based with color based search.

Test it: search for [autumn] and choose any color from the left column (I chose yellow). Now let’s look at the results:

Impressive, isn’t it?

What the tool lacks: you can’t combine several colors to refine your search (for example you can’t search for a yellow-red palette) – you are only able to search for one color.

2. Multicolr

Unlike the above one, with the Flickr-based Multicolr (already mentioned at Make Use Of) service you can combine as many colors as you want.

Test it: choose several colors and watch how the image list changes with each color added (I combined red and yellow):

What the tool lacks:you can’t combine word-based and color-based searches with this service. You are limited with playing with colors only.

3. Etsy

Etsy, an online shop of handmade products, has developed color search for their own product database.

Test it: It’s real fun to play with. Just browse your mouse across the screen and watch various colors and same-palette products pop up.

What the tool lacks: here you are unable to either set the color option or the search term. Nonetheless the tool is such fun to use that you definitely need to try it out.

Now, what do you think could be possible practical applications for these tools?

Would you use them on a regular basis or are they just for fun?

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Well now Yahoo is going one step further by introducing the ability for users to listen to full length music tracks inside Yahoo search results. Before you get all excited and sell your iPod on eBay, there is a limit though (as always). You can only listen to 25 free songs per month. Any more than that and you have to sign up for the Rhapsody Service which costs $12.99 a month.

But this is still very useful if you are doing search engine queries for a singer / band and you are wondering if you have the right person or the right song. Or if someone recommends a singer / band to you and you want to listen to a sample of their music. You can now listen to some songs inside the Yahoo search results. If you stay within that 25 songs per month limit, it won’t cost you a thing.

To try it out, just enter the name of a singer or a band into Yahoo. Being a newly introduced feature, it doesn’t have songs for everyone at the moment. They have songs for my favourite band, U2, but not for my girlfriend’s favourite, Runrig. But I entered some big names into the search engine – Tina Turner, Bruce Springsteen, Madonna, and they had songs for them. But surprisingly, there was nothing for Eric Clapton. What a scandal! ) But give Yahoo a bit of time and I’m sure they will eventually have songs for everyone.

If there are songs available, you’ll get a box identical to the one above. If you see the song you want to play, just click on it and a player will open at the bottom of the screen :

Click on the “play” button and the song will start. Easy.

I am constantly amazed at the developments of Search Monkey and at how fast Yahoo Search is developing. If Google doesn’t start changing and developing their search pages for the semantic web, they’re going to get seriously left behind! They should stop making internet browsers (which they’re not really that good at) and instead concentrate on developing their search engine (which they are REALLY good at). What do you think?

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