Wednesday, March 1, 2006

SES: What’s New for Searchers?

Mark Malseed is the coauthor of The Google Story, a best-selling account of the company’s rise, which is being published in 17 languages worldwide. He writes about technology and politics from Washington, DC, and travels giving lectures and coaching seminars on search.

Trolling the expo hall on Day 2 of the Search Engine Strategies conference, I spotted a few new and updated services worth a test-drive.

• Trexy.com, a search startup from the U.K. that launched Tuesday, is the youngest and most interesting. Claiming inspiration from Vannevar Bush’s visionary article “As We May Think,” Trexy offers a way to keep track of your search queries and the trail of pages you visit from those searches. It’s a cool mix of personal search history and social search which unlike the services offered by Google and Yahoo, lets you search on whatever search engine you prefer – about 3,000 in all.

  

  When you turn on the “trailblazing” feature, Trexy saves all your search trails for future reference. If you return to topics you’ve searched before, the engine defaults to your own trails; otherwise, it looks for trails that other users have shared. Co-founder Megan Hamilton noted that Trexy achieves benefits of social search without the need for tagging, which is fallible and takes time. As for privacy, she said they’ve designed the system so that trailblazers are anonymous – you can see the search trails that others have opted to share, but not their identity.

• News aggregator Topix.net is making news of its own as it expands in the oft-overlooked space of local community news. Topix crawls 50,000 stories a day from thousands of mainstream news sources and blogs, covering every city and town in the U.S., with plans for expansion internationally. It recently launched a comment system that adds a community journalism flavor to the site. While the interface isn’t as polished as Yahoo’s or even Google’s news site, it has RSS, email alerts and other features that make it useful for following the locales or industries you care about.

• True to its name, the new health portal at health.info.com, provides an abundance of information, most licensed from Healthline.com, but I’m not sure it achieves the goal of making it easier to navigate. I do like Info’s airline search, powered by (and also available at) Kayak, which has sliders and buttons that let you instantly refresh flight options like times, airports, and prices.

SES: What’s New for Searc ... by Mark Malseed | Comments (2)

>> More posts

Advertisement