The Hindu : Business : Search engine comparison tool

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Sep 13, 2004

Business

Business

Search engine comparison tool

THIS WEEK NetSpeak features a few search tools developed using popular search engines.

Search engines/directories are used by a large majority of netizens to locate Net resources. Though a search engine produces several pages of output, many users look only at the first few pages. Another aspect to consider is that the output displayed by different engines can vary as the ranking algorithms employed by various search engines need not be similar.

That is, if a site gets first rank in Google, it may not get the same place in Yahoo's output. So, if we look at the top ranked sites from just one search engine's output, we may miss out some relevant sites. However, if we can access the top ranked sites provided by two or more search engines, we may get far better results and an opportunity to compare the results from the two services. The new search service jux2 (http://www.jux2.com/) is an attempt in this direction.

Jux2

Jux2 is a meta-search engine that can search two specified search engines simultaneously and compare the results. Depending on the search services you select, jux2 invokes a search process simultaneously on the two selected search engines, collects the results and produces a customised output. It first displays the top ten overlapping or shared links (sites that appear in the top ten slots of both search engines) and then lists out the rest of the pages from each of the services. The service provides enough options that allow you to view the output in multiple ways.

The `overlap' list gives you an opportunity to compare the results and helps you gain more insight into the differences between the search engines. As per the statistics available at Jux2 (http://www.jux2.com/stats.php), no two major search engines are similar "with none of the pairings sharing more than four results in the top ten, on average.'' Hence, by using only one search engine, you are likely to miss out many relevant sites. Though several search services are available, only a few are used. In fact there are hundreds of specialised search services in place. These include the ones that deal with special subjects (science/technology, business, sports and so on) and search engines designed for specific geographical locations. In this context, you may look at the search directory `Search engine Colossus' (http://www. searchenginecolossus.com/) which is packed with links to a multitude of search engines of different hues from around the world.

A URLinfo service

A web page, generally, has many characteristics such as the owner who registered its domain name, web pages that are similar to it and a copy of its old version stored on various search engine databases. That is, lots of information pieces are associated with the URL of a Net resource. There are many on-line services available that let you extract these information bits linked to a URL. For instance, the `whois' service helps you get the domain name details of a URL.

Apart from this, there are services that compile/present pages related to a site, services that alert you as and when the content of a web page is changed and tools that translate the content of a web page from one language to another. Naturally, Net life will be more comfortable if any of these services can be invoked from a single web page interface. The Fagan Finder's URLinfo service (http://www.faganfinder.com/urlinfo/) is designed with this lofty goal in mind. While you access the service, you will find a window with the input box `URLinfo' and a set of labelled tabs representing various services. To get some information on a specified URL, enter it in the input box, select the appropriate tab and then choose a service from among the ones listed out.

An anti-spam tool

As mentioned several times in this column, your e-mail box becomes more prone to spam or junk mails if it is made public. For example, if your email address is published on the web, spammers, with the help of an e-mail id harvester tool, will ultimately grab it. Of course, the solution to this problem is certainly not to publish the e-mail id on the Net as this will reduce the effectiveness of your e-mail communication channel.

A user id needs to be read properly by a web page visitor and at the same time it should not be visible to programs that hunt for e-mail addresses on web pages. Those who have this requirement may try out the e-mail address encryption solution, `Enkoder,' available here: (http://www.automaticlabs.com/products/enkoder). The Enkoder solution converts your e-mail id into an `encrypted JavaScript code' that can only be rendered by the browser. The mail id converted this way will not be visible to programs that collect e-mail ids.

Start-up inspector

To keep your Windows machine in sound condition, make sure that unnecessary programs are not loaded during the booting stage. We have seen several techniques/tools that can be deployed for managing start-up programs. Windows startup inspector (http://www.windowsstartup.com/) is another one of this kind worth a try.

Newspaper directory

Almost all newspapers worldwide have got on-line editions. If you are one of those who access newspapers on-line, check out the portal, `Online newspapers' (http://www.onlinenewspapers.com/) that hosts links to several newspapers spread across the globe.

J. Murali Email the author at: murali27@satyam.net.in

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