Soople et al
All Googled out? How about trying one of the many alternatives to the world’s most-used search engine?
Of course, you might say “Why bother?” After all, if Google is the world’s most used search engine, doesn’t it stand to reason that it must be the best at its job?
There’s no denying the fact that the software experts at Google are riding a massive popularity wave, a wave that is sweeping up much more than search technology as it rolls towards an elusive shoreline that might be representative of the Internet say five years down the road.
For starters, and to recognize that Google is so good at its core business, why not try out Soople, the nifty little web site from Belgium that helps to unlock Google capabilities you may not previously have considered?
Soople (www.soople.com) has been extensively reviewed in this space more than a year ago so I won’t bother with all of the details but an experience I had a week ago suggests it is at least time to issue a small reminder.
I was at a physics institute in Waterloo, Ont. recently when during a session each participant offered a teaching strategy, a lesson plan, a resource of some kind that could be quickly put to use.
Being somewhat unprepared when my turn rolled around, I asked the coordinator to enter the Soople URL on the floor-to-ceiling computer display and then to type in “Relativity.” With a few more clicks and drop-down menu choices I then pointed to the screen and announced “There you have the entire complement of the world’s shared PowerPoint relativity presentations.”
Given the excellent material that had already been presented I expected a collective “uh huh” instead of the spontaneous whoops and applause that followed.
You see, these were all people who use the term “Google” as a verb but who in most cases have never done much more than key in a word or two, perhaps a sentence, and assumed that the material returned by the engine was as good as it could be.
It is doubtful that any had ever used Google’s advanced search options.
That’s where Soople comes in. It actually simplifies use of those advanced options in most cases and in others makes available features that aren’t well documented.
For my little demo I had the presenter select the “Filter search for filetype” option, key in the term “relativity” and then choose “PowerPoint” from the five filetype options (recently the RSS option has been added for users looking for web site content distribution feeds).
Teachers are always looking for clipart and photographs so it seemed useful to demonstrate Soople’s simplification of Google’s image search facility. Operating much like the filetype filter, image search requires a keyword or words, an image type (jpg, gif or png) and, most useful of all, an image size that can range from icon-sized all the way up to wallpaper (computer screen) size. Needless to say this was another big hit with my physics teacher colleagues.
Enough about Google for the moment. After all, this was supposed to be a column about alternatives to the ubiquitous search engine.
New search engines continue to surface at the rate of around one a month. Even Bill Clinton was tapped to promote a recent release, Acoona, a Chinese-backed engine that has quickly fallen from the radar.
More promising are ventures such as Vivisimo (www.vivisimo.com), a Carnegie-Mellon project that organizes returned data into meaningful folders that may guide the user to higher quality results than typically surfaces in a Google lookup.
Recently, the Vivisimo researchers have released a modified version of the Vivisimo concept under the name “clusty” (www.clusty.com) to denote the clustering of search results in user-specified ways.
Clusty and Vivisimo are both well worth a test drive. Clusty also offers a sophisticated search capability of the popular Wikipedia online reference, something not directly offered by other engines.
Also worthy of mention is the rather quirkily named Mr. Sapo meta search engine (www.mrsapo.com). Somewhat reminiscent of Dogpile, a facility that returns search results from several engines and directories at once, although sometimes at a glacial pace, Mr. Sapo takes the meta engine concept in a different direction.
In fact Mr. Sapo might best be described as “more than 50 search engines in one.” Through one interface, and more importantly with just one entry of your search term, you can compare results across search engines that you choose.
If you’ve never used another search engine besides Google you might find this an interesting and useful exercise. You might even find yourself switching to Exalead, A9 or IceRocket.
As this column goes to press, Mr Sapo is being rebranded as “SearchScanner” (www.searchscanner.com).
The bottom line is that there is more to search than Google and innovation and research in the field remain in high gear.
Peter Vogel is a Physics and Computer Sciences teacher at Notre Dame Regional Secondary School (www.ndrs.org). Suggestions and comments may be sent via email to peterv@portal.ca.
Of course, you might say “Why bother?” After all, if Google is the world’s most used search engine, doesn’t it stand to reason that it must be the best at its job?
There’s no denying the fact that the software experts at Google are riding a massive popularity wave, a wave that is sweeping up much more than search technology as it rolls towards an elusive shoreline that might be representative of the Internet say five years down the road.
For starters, and to recognize that Google is so good at its core business, why not try out Soople, the nifty little web site from Belgium that helps to unlock Google capabilities you may not previously have considered?
Soople (www.soople.com) has been extensively reviewed in this space more than a year ago so I won’t bother with all of the details but an experience I had a week ago suggests it is at least time to issue a small reminder.
I was at a physics institute in Waterloo, Ont. recently when during a session each participant offered a teaching strategy, a lesson plan, a resource of some kind that could be quickly put to use.
Being somewhat unprepared when my turn rolled around, I asked the coordinator to enter the Soople URL on the floor-to-ceiling computer display and then to type in “Relativity.” With a few more clicks and drop-down menu choices I then pointed to the screen and announced “There you have the entire complement of the world’s shared PowerPoint relativity presentations.”
Given the excellent material that had already been presented I expected a collective “uh huh” instead of the spontaneous whoops and applause that followed.
You see, these were all people who use the term “Google” as a verb but who in most cases have never done much more than key in a word or two, perhaps a sentence, and assumed that the material returned by the engine was as good as it could be.
It is doubtful that any had ever used Google’s advanced search options.
That’s where Soople comes in. It actually simplifies use of those advanced options in most cases and in others makes available features that aren’t well documented.
For my little demo I had the presenter select the “Filter search for filetype” option, key in the term “relativity” and then choose “PowerPoint” from the five filetype options (recently the RSS option has been added for users looking for web site content distribution feeds).
Teachers are always looking for clipart and photographs so it seemed useful to demonstrate Soople’s simplification of Google’s image search facility. Operating much like the filetype filter, image search requires a keyword or words, an image type (jpg, gif or png) and, most useful of all, an image size that can range from icon-sized all the way up to wallpaper (computer screen) size. Needless to say this was another big hit with my physics teacher colleagues.
Enough about Google for the moment. After all, this was supposed to be a column about alternatives to the ubiquitous search engine.
New search engines continue to surface at the rate of around one a month. Even Bill Clinton was tapped to promote a recent release, Acoona, a Chinese-backed engine that has quickly fallen from the radar.
More promising are ventures such as Vivisimo (www.vivisimo.com), a Carnegie-Mellon project that organizes returned data into meaningful folders that may guide the user to higher quality results than typically surfaces in a Google lookup.
Recently, the Vivisimo researchers have released a modified version of the Vivisimo concept under the name “clusty” (www.clusty.com) to denote the clustering of search results in user-specified ways.
Clusty and Vivisimo are both well worth a test drive. Clusty also offers a sophisticated search capability of the popular Wikipedia online reference, something not directly offered by other engines.
Also worthy of mention is the rather quirkily named Mr. Sapo meta search engine (www.mrsapo.com). Somewhat reminiscent of Dogpile, a facility that returns search results from several engines and directories at once, although sometimes at a glacial pace, Mr. Sapo takes the meta engine concept in a different direction.
In fact Mr. Sapo might best be described as “more than 50 search engines in one.” Through one interface, and more importantly with just one entry of your search term, you can compare results across search engines that you choose.
If you’ve never used another search engine besides Google you might find this an interesting and useful exercise. You might even find yourself switching to Exalead, A9 or IceRocket.
As this column goes to press, Mr Sapo is being rebranded as “SearchScanner” (www.searchscanner.com).
The bottom line is that there is more to search than Google and innovation and research in the field remain in high gear.
Peter Vogel is a Physics and Computer Sciences teacher at Notre Dame Regional Secondary School (www.ndrs.org). Suggestions and comments may be sent via email to peterv@portal.ca.
posted by Peter Vogel at 5:44 PM
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