Blekko is a search engine which uses both algorithms and human interaction for producing high quality search results. Currently serving more than 3 billion pages, Blekko sorts through spam, content farms, and sites containing malware in order to offer only real information to the end-user.
Yahoo! BOSS, the Build Your Own Search Service, has seen a series of upheavals in the last two years. When Yahoo! announced its Search partnership with Microsoft, it looked that Yahoo! BOSS might not survive for long. However, that was not the case. Yahoo! BOSS has come back strongly this year with paid version V2 and major updates to the BOSS API. In a sign that it is alive and kicking, it has announced a new home for Search BOSS and three new product offerings under the BOSS umbrella along with API updates.
If you subscribe to a lot of RSS feeds, you may find yourself wanting to view only a subset of the content. You can organize by folder, but sometimes searching the feeds is the quickest way to get at what you seek. A new service from Q-Sensei is now bringing that feed search power to your applications via its Q-Sensei FeedBooster API.
If there’s a new dawn in the age of search, Datafiniti is the sun. They are the first to take a new and profound approach to search in years. Most search engines return a list of links to web pages, but Datafiniti has much bigger plans. Instead of links, they return a set of data. A search for a burrito in Texas would give you a list of restaurants complete with goodies like reviews in addition to the important bits like name and address. The dataset itself has been out there for years, but its the aggregartion and presentation that’s different. With the Datafiniti API, it is now possible for developers to easily integrate that data into web applications.
Organizations are continuously engaged in mining the large amounts of information that is generated daily on social networks. As is natural, they would like to understand trends and any mentions in real time. Topsy, a realtime search engine has been indexing Twitter data on a daily basis and providing the Topsy API, to sift through that information. It has now added another feather in its cap by adding public Google Plus posts to its index.
It’s been a long year since Yahoo’s major search API changes. One of its popular offerings, the Yahoo BOSS API, was marked for transition to a paid service after integrating search results from Microsoft Bing. In April of this year, Yahoo BOSS V2 was released with pricing details, OAuth support and optional Advertising. Users have reacted positively to the changes and Yahoo has responded back with updates to BOSS V2 and a very short timeline to upgrade apps from V1.
TigerLogic, the company behind the yolink API, released a WordPress plugin that allows WordPress users to get a lot more done while searching within a WordPress blog. As many WordPress users know all too well, the existing search functionality of WordPress is subpar. Yolink changes that, offering faster results, and more relevant ones.
You probably have a ton of stuff on the Internet, all contained within your “digital life stream”, spread across a seemingly unending list of web services and social networks. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a way to search through all of that, Google style? Enter Greplin, almost certainly named after the Unix grep command, taking the many service inputs and piping them to its search tool.
It looked like Yahoo BOSS was dead 18 months ago, when the Microsoft search deal was announced. Behind the scenes, Yahoo has been re-tooling its Yahoo BOSS API, which lets developers Build their Own Search Service. With a re-launch coming next month, it has released technical documentation, which includes changes to authentication, the option to use ads from the service, as well as introductory prices for the service.
During the past four months we’ve seen not one but two well known real-time search engines disappear. First there was OneRiot, which in October 2010 decided to focus on advertising. More recently, Collecta closed it’s real-time search engine and API to focus on alternative real-time products. Digging further into real-time search offerings you will also discover that crowdeye has also decided to pull its real-time search engine. This now appears to leave Topsy, and of course Google as the main players focusing on building a real-time search destination. Does this trend signal the end for all real-time search engines or just that their focus has been wrong?
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