Daily Archives: October 14, 2004

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Musicplasma

October 14, 2004 4:18 pm ⋅

Musicplasma
Overall: Average quality, yet still very enjoyable to play around with.
If this engine were a drink it would be…a mint julep. It’s not your everyday drink, but you’ll find it a sweet break from the norm.

Intro
Musicplasma is a music search tool that lets you discover music artists similar to ones you already like. Oh, and it’s visual, like Kartoo.

I’m not really sure how they determine similarities. If I had to guess I’d say they base it on an ontology of genres (rock, rap, etc.), and on mining something like Amazon’s “Customers who bought that, also bought these” type of functionality.
UI and Features
You can zoom in or out on clusters, thereby focusing or expanding your view of similar artists.

Clicking on the links - those ethereal lines - scrolls the page in that direction. Nice feature!
Clicking on other clusters will refocus the clusters around that artist.
The Design panel allows for changing colors and other appearances if you’re into that kind of thing.

Query Examples
Sometimes the clusters make total sense. Try a search for Guided by Voices and the closest cluster will be Robert Pollard, the lead singer who has done solo albums. Sometimes the clusters are a bit off. Try searching for David Byrne and for some reason Paul Westerberg - lead singer of the Replacements - comes between Byrne and the Talking Heads. I’m not saying that’ss incorrect, but my first reaction was surprise. It could be accurate that people who like David Byrnes’ solo stuff, which doesn’t sound much like the Talking Heads, might like Paul Westerberg, Warren Zevon and Roxy Music (all closer than the Talking Heads).
I noticed that powerhouses like the Rolling Stones and Neil Young shows up in lots of places. I searched for Prince Buster, the 60s ska pioneer, and there’s Neil’s cluster. A search for Bad Brains similarly showed the Stones lurking one link away. Now obviously Neil Young and the Stones have influenced tons of groups, but I’m not sure that Bad Brains should be one link away. Anyone know why that would be?

Conclusion
I’d like to know more about the links. Is one artist linked to another because they collaborated? Or are they linked because they play similar music? Or are on the same label?
OK, so it’ss fun to play with, but give me some song samples.
How about letting me type in more than one group so I can really focus in?
Focus by time period. I really like early Stones, when they sounded like, say the Small Faces, but I hate recent Stones, when they sound like, say crap.

Musicplasma is fun to play with, but it needs to be more practical. Take the visual music search engine and turn it into an audio search engine. If that’s too far-flung, then at least show more context on how artists are linked. But like I said, it sure is fun…

Posted in: Clustering Engines, General, Search Engine Reviews, Visual Engines

BrainBoost

October 14, 2004 8:10 am ⋅


BrainBoost
Type of Engine: Natural language.
Overall: Very Good.
If this engine were a drink it would be…a Jack and Ginger. An old-time favorite search type that tastes refreshing after not being tried for a long time.

Intro
Don’t be annoyed that there’s no space between the words Brain and Boost. Instead, go ahead and ask BrainBoost questions in plain English and you’ll get answers in plain English. BrainBoost boasts that it’s completely automated and uses no human editorial invention. I guess that’s impressive since it’s pretty good as it is, but I still think any engine can only get better if editors are used in some capacity. And just because AskJeeves uses editors don’t let that fool you. It’s commonsense to me that a successful combination of the two approaches would be best for relevance; but I digress.

The legend goes that BrainBoost was created by 24-year-old software programmer Assaf Rozenblatt. It took him a year to build it and he built it so that his fiancé could better do her college research. (And all I gave my wife was this search engine review blog. Ouch.)

BrainBoost is honest. What does that mean? It means that when it doesn’t know the answer it doesn’t pretend it does know. Usually. Of course it’s not perfect and you get your share of false positive matches, but generally speaking it’s solid.

UI and Features
The Snap Open feature is cool because it opens to the relevant part of the listing; think of an anchor tag where it takes you right to the text on the page that answers your question.
Otherwise it’s all pretty straightforward.

Query Examples
I wanted to know Tony Gwynn’s lifetime average, so I asked:
what was tony gwynn’s lifetime average? and I got no results. Strange, since that should be a relatively easy one.
So I refined my query: what was tony gwynn’s lifetime batting average? . This time I got 2 results and the second one has the answer displayed right there on the search results page: .339 (turns out from other results I looked at that it was actually .338, but that’s certainly not BrainBoost’s fault). I didn’t even have to click to the site. Now obviously that has potential repercussions for all the engines that make $ by driving traffic to sites. But for now I’ll stay out of the financial fray.

For my next search I wanted to find out how much an annual subscription to Smithsonian magazine costs. So I queried:
how much is a year’s subscription to smithsonian magazine? I got 2 results that both had to do with getting a subscription as part of donating to an organization. Not good.
A little refinement was in order:
what is the annual cost of smithsonian magazine? returned no results.
Better try again, but this time I gamed the system by using a keyword-based phrase query instead of natural language. subscription to Smithsonian returned 6 results, 5 of which answered my question. Though with this one I had to click on the actual results (man that sounds lazy) to see the answer to my query because BrainBoost’s display text didn’t show me the answer. That’s par for the course with search engines, but I was hoping BrainBoost would display the answer right up front to this query. And in case you’re wondering, how much is a subscription to Smithsonian? had a very similar result set, though it missed one of the results from my previous query and the display text for the same results was different. But the point is I was able to query this by keywords and by natural language and get good, though slightly different, results.

And of course everyone enjoys a good laugh at the expense of natural language engines, just like we all enjoy laughing at translation engines. So here’s a good one: what is a sous chef?. The first result:
-The sous chef is legal. Hes an American.
But then a few results down is this great display text:
A sous chef is a chef ranking above line cooks and below an executive chef or chef de cuisine.
Nice!
Conclustion
Good stuff. I’m a fan and will use BrainBoost when that nagging trivia question hits me, like what’s the population of Wales? . You’ve got to see that one for yourself, because it’s really good.

Posted in: General, Natural Language Engines, Search Engine Reviews

Clusty

October 14, 2004 8:06 am ⋅

Type of Engine: Clustering.
Overall: Good.
If this engine were a drink it would be…an Anderson Valley Oatmeal Stout. It’s thick and sweet but most people won’t ever get to taste it.

Intro
Clusty is a new search tool made by Vivisimo. It’s a meta-search engine so all results are provided by other search tools. Its distinction is that it clusters results so that you can refine your query by clicking on a more focused topic.

UI and Features
Right now in Web Search there’s a drop-down menu that allows you to cluster as follows:
Source – by engine.
Topic – the heart of Clusty which is clustering by subject.
URL – sort by .com, .org, etc. Also by country code and occasionally by a particular domain though it seems inconsistent as to when this shows up. This is an interesting feature, but I’m not really sure what to do with it just yet. I suppose if I were doing a search for government documents it might be useful to look only at .gov results.

Other tabs, such as News and Shopping, have different clustering drop-down options. I’ll let you explore each of these on your own.

Not only can you set which tabs are seen, but you can also customize which sources are searched. For example, for News searches you can choose Reuters, BBC, CNN or other news sources. Very nice.

If you click on News, Encyclopedia or Gossip, then Clusty will generate a page with related content on it. This is a helpful feature but the front-page of Clusty should let you know about it.

To see specific recall information for each engine that was searched, click on the Details link above the results.

Icons – in the search results you’ll see the following helpful icons:
New window – opens result in new browser window.
Show in cluster – this highlights which cluster on the left contains the site.
Preview – opens the site within Clusty’s search results page.

Query Examples
The more I played around with Clusty the more I liked it. For example, try searching for tickets to an event. I tried the query Black Rider tickets, as in the Tom Waits play, and thought the clusters were pretty good because it successfully showed me a selection of sites where I could buy tickets to the play.
Clusty currently errs on the side of higher recall for its clusters, so many of the clusters are irrelevant. This can be OK if it leads to discovery, but I think the major area Clusty can improve upon is tightening the relevance of the clusters. For my Black Rider tickets query one of the clusters was Game which meant nothing to me. Another ambiguous cluster was Your tickets ready. Both of these clusters were poorly titled and the results contained within were not very relevant. I know, it’s only one query example and you can’t judge from just one query. But feel safe that I’ve conducted many other queries and most of them have been similar to Black Rider tickets. There have been useful clusters as well as clusters that make you scratch your head.

Conclusion
Clusty clusters on a horizontal plane and that’s what they do well: they surface information which lets you scan the breadth quickly. However, I’d like to see them go a little bit deeper into the categories. I didn’t see any categories below the second level. In other words, you do your search, click on one of the categories, and then can click on more category and that’s all. I certainly don’t want them to get carried away by overloading the depth of categories, but I think a couple more layers would be helpful in some cases.
I really wish they’d chosen a better name. Why would you ever name a search engine something that rhymes with lusty? But nonetheless, they’re on to something here. I think clustering is a powerful tool that can let searchers discover similar topics or refine their queries. In the future I hope clustering engines will combine with human-created web directories.

Posted in: Clustering Engines, General, Search Engine Reviews

KaZaZZ!

October 14, 2004 8:03 am ⋅

Type of Engine: Meta-search.
Overall: Needs Improvement.
If this engine were a drink it would be…Bud Light, the wingman.

Intro
KaZaZZ! is a search tool that as far as I can tell doesn’t really offer much by way of useful differentiation. Their claim to uniqueness is their Search Mind Reader which pre-populates queries based on analysis of previous queries you’ve done. Maybe there’s a future to this if the query suggestions can really pinpoint my interests, but even then I’m not sure. Just because I searched for something today doesn’t mean I’ll be interested in the same topic tomorrow. And even if you looked at my search queries over time, how would that help predict future interests? Maybe I’m missing something here, but with their current implementation it’s not useful to me.

UI and Features
KaZaZZ! is a meta-search engine with a selection of tabs to focus your search. One thing they do is they limit the number of results returned. A search for Santa Cruz only returned 80 sites. Personally I don’t think limiting results is the right answer to increasing relevancy. It seems the sites that get returned are the ones that multiple engines have agreed upon.
On the search results page, check out the right hand side. Most of the refinement links are generic, such as News, Pics and Shop. But the one that got my attention was Music. It offers links to music files, though unfortunately for the query I tried, Mark Lanegan, most of the results were dead links. A nice idea though.

Oh, and Kazazz has a men’s search engine called MaZaZZ! and a women’s search engine called WaZaZZ! . Oh boy. Since I don’t have too much of a search history with their sites, the pre-populated Search Mind Reader queries for MaZaZZ! were exclusively female actresses and models. And for WaZaZZ! the queries were about dieting, beauty and fashion. Groan. The fashion queries were things like Guess, Benetton, Estee Lauder, etc. In other words, they’re trying to send users to shopping sites.

Conclusion
Another meta-search engine joins the fray. I’m not convinced they offer anything particularly useful, though it’ll be interesting to see what they do with the Search Mind Reader functionality in the future.

Posted in: General, Search Engine Reviews

A9

October 14, 2004 7:44 am ⋅

Type of Engine: Meta-search.
Overall: Very good.
If this engine were a drink it would be…a martini. It’s not so much about the complexity of the mixture, but it’s always classy and it gets the job done.

Intro
A9 has implemented some really clever UI features. At present they’re searching Google’s Index for web searches, but seeing as how they’re owned by Amazon I expect bigger things from them in the future. Because they’re using Google I won’t go into relevancy. The UI is the first thing you’ll see and it’s what sets them apart, especially since right now they’re using the Google Index and (I think) the Google algorithm with some slight tweaks. The number of results sometimes varies, though page 1 results on A9 and on Google seem identical.

UI and Features
You can focus your search in the following ways:
Web – searches Google
Books – searches Amazon
Images – searches Google
Movies – searches IMDB
Reference – searches GuruNet

Some nice things worth pointing out
• The UI – the tabs are very easy and load right away so that you don’t have to wait for a new page to load.
• Amazon Discount - If you search on A9 and then go to Amazon.com to buy something, they’ll cookie you and give you a 1.57% discount on purchases. I pleasantly discovered this since they don’t seem to advertise it.
• Search History - They maintain a list of your search history that you see right away when you visit A9. I didn’t think this was the most useful feature at first, particularly now that browsers save searches, but I’ve actually used it to recall previous searches.
• Diary – this function lets you leave notes about sites (I use Mozilla and you need IE so I haven’t been able to do this yet, but it sounds cool).
• Bookmarks – they have a built in web-based bookmark function. Personally I don’t see why this is better than using my browser, but that’s because I don’t spend much time on public or shared terminals. For people who use different computers this is a valuable feature.
• Discover– similar, I think, to Amazon’s “You’ve bought this, so check these out,” but with web sites instead of products.
• Preferences – you can set language default, filtering level, font size and colors. I’m guessing they’re still working on adding advanced features here but they may be limited by searching Google’s index for general web results. Just a guess.

Conclusion
A9 is part of my regular repertoire. I’m hoping they build their own web index and algorithm, then they’ll vault into the elite ranks of search engines. If that doesn’t happen they’ve still got one of the finest UIs out there.

Posted in: General, Search Engine Reviews