Searching the net

Searching the net is an essential component of one’s online life and a variety
oftools meant for it are in place.The distinct feature of the search tools arena
is the incessant inflow of new tools. Before settling down with a tool, one
finds another one
appearing on the scene. Even savvy netizens find it challenging to keep up
with the

This edition of NetSpeak provides a brief description of the latest products
in this genre.SearchMash .Anyone dealing with websearch products has to make
sure that any new offerings from Google are explored. One will never be
disappointed.Google has recently launched
(http://www.searchmash.com/about/privacy.html) a test search service called
SearchMash(http://www.searchmash.com/).

Alongside the usual searchoutput (results are similar to those of Google, but
each is numbered), the service provides options to get searchoutput from blog,
image and video sites as well.
An advantage of Search- Mash is the ‘More Results’option available at the
bottom of the output page forshowing the next set of results
in the same page.Another notable feature is ‘Hide Details,’ which lets you
hide the details displayed along with each web page –thus helping you to view
more results per page. Google Notebook search Google Notebook helps us easily
clip web content, add notes or comments and store\it online. Also, one can make
her notebook public and share the contents with others.

Now, Google has started a search service for finding information
available on publicnotebooks.With Google Notebook search service
(http://www.google.com/notebook/search), you may find lots of valuable
information.However, this search service has generated some controversy as many
people store private information on notebooks and share it without realising the
implications.Decipho (http://decipho.com/) is another search service explored by
this author.Besides the normal web search, this service has additional features
contributed byits users.

When you invoke a search,you can specify whether it is for shopping or
research or both. Another feature is the subject-specific clustering of the
results. For instance, if you start a search on statistics,the service presents
you categories such as ‘Statistics
online,’ ‘Glossary of statistics,’ ‘Stats’ and ‘Math Statistics.’
The search engine Hakia(http://www.hakia.com/),scheduled to activate its full
operation sometime in 2007, seems to be a promising search tool. The beta
version is available for testing its potential.One distinction of this service
relates to question/answer
facility. By framing good questions, you could obtain appropriate answers.
In this regard, you can use the service along with other question/answer
services such as Brainboost. Also, for certainqueries, Hakia
providescategorised results.
CometQuery (http://www.cometquery.com/) is yet another addition to the search
tool landscape.With each of the links in the output, the service displays its
screenshot as well.Open source journals As mentioned in the past,lots of open
access repositories on a range of subjects that include Science,
Medicine,Engineering and Business are in place.An open access repository permits
anyone to access and use its content for free. Open- DOAR, the Directory of Open
Access Repositories-(http://www.opendoar.org/index.html) is a good place to
locate several such open content sources.To help you access the content stored
on various repositories available on its list, OpenDOAR has recently assembled a
search service using Google’s new search tool,
Google CSE.For more details: http://www.opendoar.org/search.php.