Why shouldn’t kids get clusters with their own search engines? They’re useful navigation aids, and can help teach vocabulary and concepts. Quintura for Kids, at http://quinturakids.com/ has a useful tag cloud feature. Unfortunately it lacks content.
When I first got to the search engine I tried to do a search for my usual strawberry shortcake. (It’s a good search to do on niche engines to see the spectrum of results you get.) I got no results. So I backed up and tried Strawberry. I still didn’t get any results. So I backed up still further and tried my standby search, cow.
The results screen shows a cluster cloud above the search results, with Web search results below. There were only 12 Web results. the results page says it’s based on Yahoo Kids, but running a search for cow over there gets over 2500 results, so I don’t know what “based on” means in this case. Anyway, you can hold your mouse over an item in the cluster to get another set of clusters based on that term and to add the term to your search. You can also remove words from the cluster and get it to change slightly. The clusters looked good for the terms I tested, specific enough to help the search but not too complicated/specific for a kid.
The cloud reacts to the mouse very quickly and the search results pop right up — but there’s just not a lot here. Narrowing down the “cow” search with the extra term “belted galloway” (supplied by the cluster cloud) gave me just two Web results. I think the technology’s great, but I’d really love to see it applied to a larger pool of data!
Okay, this wins my award as “most specialized search engine” so far this year. SlideFinder, at http://www.slidefinder.net/, helps you find PowerPoint presentations on the Web.
You can do a simple keyword search or try out the advanced search that allows you to search by both presentation detail or by slide (cool!). I did a simple keyword search for social media.
Yow! I got 1000 results. Search results are presented in a grid with a thumbnail of a presentation slide, a link for download, and the domain from which the presentation comes. Click on the thumbnail and you’ll get the all the slides of the presentation (sometimes spread over multiple pages). Hold your mouse over a slide for a larger version in a popup window. On the right nav of a presentation’s page are links to embed it as well as links to similar presentations (though those are not always available.)
This is mostly a search engine, but you can also browse presentations available at universities via http://www.slidefinder.net/University. The front page also allows you to browse the presentations by language, sort of. According to the site, there are 23,596 presentations available in Spanish and 621 available in Hindi. It LOOKS like the search engine is just finding presentations based on the country code of the presentation’s URL; most of the “Hindi” presentations I saw were actually in English.
This is a terrific idea, well executed! I love the advanced search options and the wide variety of results I got. Two additional features would make it almost perfect: RSS feeds for results (aw, c’mon Slideshare!) and more date information for the presentations (some
of this material will not get old, but a lot of it — especially the Internet stuff — will.) I thought that most people doing slide presentations put dates on the front or ending pages, but apparently I was wrong…
My main complaint about metasearches is that advanced searching with them isn’t easy — you tend to end up doing basic keyword searches, which is fine sometimes. But sometimes you want to do something a little more complex. I was very happy to get an e-mail about a site called Searchzooka ( http://searchzooka.com/ ) which allows you to create a complex search and then run it on several different sites.
The front page looks like a cutdown advanced search page. You can include keywords, exclude keywords, sort results by date, limit your search to certain date spans, limit search results to domains or top-level domains, etc. Once you’ve entered a search, you’ll get a second screen that summaries your search and gives you links to launch your search on several different engines, including Google, Bing, Digg, Technorati, and Ask. (There’s also a “Recovery key” so you can restore a search without having to be registered with the site.)
Click on a search engine name and you’ll get the search results open in a new window. Not all search engines can encompass all the search parameters you want to do, though, so sometimes your results will not be quite what you want.
You can organize your searchings into folders, clone your search as the basis for a new search, and add notations (the recovery key makes it possible to do this kind of customizing without registration — the string in the recovery key that I saw was nine characters long but bear in mind that you are using a key to save this data, and not a password-protected account.)
If you’re looking for a quick way to create and launch searches across a variety of resources this fits the bill. My only concern is the choice of search engines — it seems a little basic. How about Twitter, or Facebook’s public search? Worth a look.
