Searching beyond Google

Here are three Google alternatives that are refreshingly different from Google. Try them and see if they work better for you:

Vivisimo (www.vivisimo.com):

This is a “metasearch” engine, offering simultaneous results from several search engines. It is fast, has a clean user interface, and presents information in “clusters” that narrow down your search results. Key in ‘Diwali’, for example, and you’ll get subfolders like ‘History of Diwali’, ‘Diwali gifts and cards’ and ‘Diwali Recipes’. Vivisimo also lets you restrict searches to publications such as Reuters, CNN and such.

Grokker (www.grokker.com):

This search engine touts visual search as its selling point. Here again you’d find you search results sorted in clusters of the topic, but instead of presenting them in subfolders, Grokker separates them into a ‘Map view’ that you can zook into. It’s easier to relate to and visually more appealing.

Rollyo (www.rollyo.com):

This isn’t a separate search engine; it’s a tool that lets you create your own domain-specific search engine on the fly. What it basically does is, run on top of Yahoo! search and let your “roll your own” searches. So, any individual can set up a custom ‘searchroll’ such as ‘Medicine’ or ‘News’, which searches within anywhere from one to 25 different sites.

This basically means that instead of sorting through thousands of sites, you could narrow your search to sites you already know and trust.

Topix (www.topix.net):

The service takes a crawl-and-index approach to a vast array of internet news sources, such as news sites and blog sites. Topix then runs the resultant data through an engine that tags every news story with location and topic.
It then builds more than 180,000 subject- and location-specific pages, pages
that reside comfortably between the bulk of your search results. However, Topix won’t dump the results all in one place.

For instance, it is not interested in every web result that might be rendered for a search on “news Mumbai”. Instead, it searches a limited set of web pages—in this case thousands of news sites and blogs. It then generates something of an ‘encyclopedia page’ for Mumbai, putting together news, weather, advertising, politics—making your own personal local newspaper in real time.

Source: Times Of India

Microsoft forges ties with open source maker Zend

Microsoft Corp. and open source software maker Zend, whose products create programs that compete with ones built for Windows, said on Tuesday the two companies have struck a long-term partnership.

Twelve-year-old PHP runs on more than 22 million Web sites and is used inside 15,000 companies.

Source: Reuters