ResearchBuzz

TechTarget has announced new tech-specific Web site (its 45th), this one covering VMware. It’s available at http://searchvmware.techtarget.com/ .

The front page has links to articles, topics, and site features relevant to VMware. The search engine’s at the top of the page. You can do a simple keyword search, but an advanced search allows you to search in different sections of the site (expert advice, news, white papers, etc.) or in different sections of a document (title, URL.)

I would stick to the site and vendor part of the search results. When I did a search for enterprise, I got 16 very targeted results for the Web site itself (”Paravirtualized Ubuntu shows early performance promise”), more general but still tech content from the 2300+ vendor results (”Benefits of Web 2.0 in the Enterprise : Learn about: Application Security, Business Process”) and a dog’s breakfast of results from the Google search, including Enterprise Rent-A-Car and Star Trek Web sites.

This shouldn’t be too surprising. Search Engine College has announced Search Engine Wiki, which is dedicated to search engines and search engine marketing. It’s in beta at http://www.searchenginewiki.com .

If you can get past the annoying librarian stereotype on the front page, you’ll find several resources here, including a list of search engines for over 200 countries (admittedly many of the countries only have one engine — some engine descriptions here wouldn’t come amiss), a glossary of terms used in SEO, PPM, and related fields (I admit freely I had no idea what CamelCase meant), a list of search engine marketing blog (including ResearchBuzz, which I don’t really consider to be an SEO blog. Just an SE blog) and a list of search industry conferences and events.

There isn’t much commenting going on, and while there’s a lot of information gathered here it suffers from a lack of extensive description. And dude(s), if you’re going to have a list of search engine news sources why don’t you include headlines from their RSS feeds? I’m not sure what software this wiki is running, but maybe SimplePie is an option?

Or should that be “yet another search engine for video content”? It’s all good. We’re playing in a very big swimming pool. Anyway, Lumerias, at http://www.lumerias.com, seems to be searching the biggies like YouTube and DailyMotion, but also to be crawling the Web in general for video content. (Read the search engine’s about page — it’s exceptionally literate.)

Searching is simple keyword. I did a search for commentary and got about 1190 results. That’s not the weird part, though. The weird part is that I got to see summaries on all 1190 of the results. Google will only let you see 1000 results at a time. You Go Lumerias!

Search results include screenshot (not very useful), title, description and tags (seems often to be more description than tag), video type, URL, and source. There is also a link to download the video but when I tried to use that a couple of times it didn’t work. I didn’t know if that was me or Lumerias (I’m using FireFox.)

I liked how many results I was getting, and I liked that I could see those results. I did have some questions though about what I was seeing. Like: how are search results being sorted? Can I exclude results based on language? Is there any way to see all the non-webcrawl sources? Can I filter based on video size? Is there any way to get more information about video length and file size in the search result?

It’s a very good start, but it’s such a good start I want more…

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