Two relatively new search engines to have a look at. One looks like a mega spam fest and the other, while narrowly focussed, is very interesting.
www.stumpedia.com is the first and I think it really has a short life span. It allows registered users to submit sites then other registered users vote these sites it up or down the search results! As I said – spam heaven. I registered and searched for ‘Ireland’ where there were four, yes 4, results returned; “Dublin” returned no results at all. Whilst I wish them luck in the venture and as much as I think it’s interesting, I also feel that it not going anywhere fast.
Alternatively www.newssift.com is a much more interesting prospect. It’s a business search engine that uses semantics to provide “meaning-based results”. It says that it has indexed thousands of articles from various new sources and the searches are based on meanings and relationships not specifically the actual keyword. According to their own blurb they believe that these search results give better, more rounded results than other search engines.
Once you conduct a search is then gives you ways to redefine your original term by filtering it. The filters are broad but obviously bases on what’s contained in those search results. Another interesting graphic they place in the results a general ‘mood’ index for the articles it surfaces whether overall the articles returns are deemed positive, neutral, negative – which has a human element to it:
Content is aggregated and annotated by editors to ensure relevant and deep analysis of global business news
I had fun with that: ‘Irish Economy’ 49% Negative, 14% positive. As the engine is owned by the Financial Times we plumbed for “Newspaper Advertising”: 30% positive 31% negative and “England Cricket” 45% negative, 23% positive!
