Tag: search

More on Search

So the week with Viewzi on the blog has ended pretty mixed. While I like the styling of it there were some issues with searches not returning accurate (or any) results so I’ve replaced it with Lijit. This has support for more search sources and some nice extra features but I’ve also got a couple of issues.

Firstly none of my Flickr content seems to be indexed but I’ve raised this with the support team. I’m also not overly keen on the styling of the search window and performance seems a bit iffy.

Still, I prefer this to the standard WordPress search so I’ll keep this on for a couple of weeks and see how it goes.

This post has been sitting in draft for a couple of weeks now. Lijit is still enabled and the Flickr images are now correctly indexed. All of the content I want to be returned is returning but the overall performance is a bit slow. I’ll keep it enabled for now but the search for a better WordPress search goes on.

MSN Toolbar Suite…

…is it’s official name but it includes MSN Desktop Search, Microsoft’s entry into the desktop search market. First impressions were very good. It quickly indexed (my recently formatted) drives and allowed me to content search Office App files, Outlook mail, Text files and also title search all files including music and pictures. Results returned were quick and accurate. It also worked across a network. Great – as fast as Google desktop with a lot more content. Annoyingly you also had to install the MSN Toolbar at the same time which meant IE and Control Panel etc. had a MSN search bar – once installed you can remove.

However after a reboot it stopped working. Only logging in as administrator allowed the desktop search to work – anything else failed. So it’s uninstalled but one to keep an eye on. MS have created a Wiki to track developments.

Google Desktop

Beta now launched and can be downloaded from the Google Desktop site. First impressions are good. Quick to index my files using less system resources than Windows in-built indexing and search results are fast. Also searches Outlook . Option to integrate with Google web searches which is nice. Finally its as quick to find my files as it is to find others peoples files on the web.

*Update* Couple of alternatives for searching. One is Filehand which also searches mp3’s and pdf’s and the other is Copernic Desktop Search. Both are standalone search engines – I’ll give them a whirl over the weekend.

A9.com

New web search engine from…Amazon! A9.com uses Google as its main search engine but adds a couple of nice features. Firstly your search results will contain any book references which are found in a seperate tab. Also, if you have an Amazon account and log into a9.com your search history will be displayed – handy when trying to remember how you found a particular website. Like Google they also have a browser toolbar which has the same features as Google but also contains a ‘diary’ feature where you can store comments/to-do’s against any websites. Nice.

However it looks more like Amazon trying to capture sales than anything else, and also the searches return less results than Google. Maybe they only have access to some of Google’s search engine? And I don’t like the idea of search results tied to my user account ties to my purchases. I’ll stick to Google for now.