Spezify is a metasearch engine. The interface is in Flash.
posted by ardgedee on Sep 29, 2009 - 38 comments

Popular Search Engines from the 90s, then and now
posted by sugarfish on Sep 17, 2009 - 92 comments

"Worio is a discovery engine that works alongside keyword search to expose you to stuff you've been missing using search alone." (via) [more inside]
posted by gman on Jun 17, 2009 - 17 comments

Google has released an experimental search tool, Google Squared, that presents search results in the form of a table. Each column represents some attribute or dimension of the things returned - for example, searching for US presidents yields a column for date of birth, and rows for Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, etc. [more inside]
posted by Zarkonnen on Jun 5, 2009 - 70 comments

Recipe Puppy, a new Recipe Search Engine [via mefi projects] A recipe search engine that lets you search for recipes by ingredients. Simply put in the ingredients you have and the type of food you want, and the search engine will return the recipes you are closest to being able to make. You can also specify ingredients you don't have, and ingredients that absolutely must be included in the recipe. [more inside]
posted by yuletide on Apr 21, 2009 - 41 comments

To celebrate their 10th birthday Google have brought back their oldest available index dating back to 2001.
posted by HaloMan on Sep 30, 2008 - 110 comments

TinEye is the first image search engine on the web to use image identification technology. [more inside]
posted by monospace on Aug 21, 2008 - 34 comments

Google Search Engine Ranking Factors v2 "represents the collective wisdom of 37 leaders in the world of organic search engine optimization. Together, they have voted on the various factors that are estimated to comprise Google's ranking algorithm." The highest ranked factor is Keyword Use in Title Tag.
posted by Soup on Aug 18, 2008 - 56 comments

Cuil is a new search engine developed by former Google employees, and claims to index 3x more pages than Google. CNN Money story has the basics. My attempts were met with timeouts. [more inside]
posted by Ynoxas on Jul 28, 2008 - 189 comments

Searchme is a search engine that displays results as images of web pages.
posted by xod on Jun 19, 2008 - 22 comments

According to ComScore, Google takes 59.8% of search traffic in the US, leaving Yahoo, MSN and smaller players to fight for the scraps. Pretty pie-chart here. Slightly different numbers are available from Compete and Hitwise, but Google still rules the roost.
posted by SharQ on Apr 17, 2008 - 25 comments

Microsoft offers $44.6 billion for Yahoo! The grand old man of Redmond has finally come out of the closet to woo the loveliest lady in Sunnyvale, offering a staggering $44.6 billion in cash or shares. Cash or shares? Wow! Bearing in mind the...ah...disappointments both companies have suffered over the recent past, is this a marriage made in heaven? Or hell?
posted by Duug on Feb 1, 2008 - 199 comments

If Google was designed for Google.
posted by armoured-ant on Oct 16, 2007 - 36 comments

DMOZ Editor(s) seeking extortion for continued inclusion is putting further smudge on the "volunteer" directory. Seems lots of folks have had their hands out over inclusion in the DMOZ, so why hasn't a business been built out of it? Is Best of the Web positioning itself as Google Bait?
posted by FlamingBore on Aug 28, 2007 - 12 comments

Chime.TV -- it's a new video hyper-aggregator (like VodPod) by MeFite chime that I've been using since it was in development. It's Wii-compatible and tested and can turn your fave sites into channels (including but not limited to MeFi,Boing Boing, Digg, or Fark). You can automatically watch any YouTube channel as well, or just watch your favorites. I'm personally going to suggest you try out the Net100 channel, which is an aggregate of everbody's top 10 videos. Flash player required
posted by taumeson on Jun 12, 2007 - 26 comments

Sputtr is a front-end for searching a variety of popular sites, of course dipped in some Web 2.0 sauce.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane on May 12, 2007 - 29 comments

Yahoo! Australia introduces a new search engine that uses OpenSearch and pretty little AJAX tricks to integrate results from Flickr, Wikpedia, YouTube (and so on). You can customize the layout, and even add your own search sources. It’s called Alpha, it’s currently in Beta, and aims to get through the rest of the Greek alphabet by June. (Via podlob.)
posted by Milkman Dan on Apr 10, 2007 - 13 comments

Wikiasari search engine. Wikipedia founder plans to offer a new search engine using "the same network of followers" for the process. “Essentially, if you consider one of the basic tasks of a search engine, it is to make a decision: ‘this page is good, this page sucks’,” Mr Wales said. “Computers are notoriously bad at making such judgments, so algorithmic search has to go about it in a roundabout way. But we have a really great method for doing that ourselves,” he added. “We just look at the page. It usually only takes a second to figure out if the page is good, so the key here is building a community of trust that can do that.”
posted by Brian B. on Dec 24, 2006 - 29 comments

Google Checkout is officially unveiled today; the latest service to join the Google arsenal in their race to control the entire www. It has been suggested in the news that the Google payment service was also a big factor in the recent Yahoo and eBay partnership, since eBay's Paypal service might finally have some real competition. More info on the service here.
posted by p3t3 on Jun 29, 2006 - 32 comments

Google Images Censored in China A picture says 1000 words, and Google.cn is censoring them all. Check out the side-by-side screens of a search for "tiananmen+square" in Google.com and Google.cn images. Looks like a nice place, with little historical significance. You can try the search yourself. The text on the bottom left is the censorship disclaimer. Very different than our results. A far cry from Google's claim that they do not censor results. Nice to know that they stand up to the government here but not abroad.

A good spoof of the whole thing.
posted by FeldBum on Jan 30, 2006 - 57 comments

Google music search... It had to happen sooner or later, right? Drop in a phrase, you get artist, album, and song title matches to choose from. Choose an artist, you get a list of their albums and on the album page you get a tracklisting and links to buy the album online, as well as links to do other artist/album/song-related Google searches.
posted by sarajflemming on Dec 15, 2005 - 53 comments

Singing Fish - The search engine for audio and video.
posted by dobbs on Oct 13, 2005 - 13 comments

Yahoo Releases a beta tool that searches for Creative Commons content. It even allows you to specify the type of license you're interested in (derivitive works, commercial use). Lawrence Lessig obviously has something to say about it. If nothing else, it will increase awareness of the cause.
posted by o2b on Mar 24, 2005 - 8 comments

Microsoft has unleashed their internet search engine to the world. It currently isn't working, at least for me. Is it wrong of me to wish it stays that way?
posted by ashbury on Nov 11, 2004 - 43 comments

Mark Cuban, who obviously just has too much time on his hands, is teaming up with Icerocket in an attempt to thwart Google for search engine dominance.
posted by Ufez Jones on Aug 3, 2004 - 22 comments

blinkx is a new contextual search agent that seems to be causing some excitement. Unfortunately, it is not available for Macintosh or Mozilla at present.
posted by davehat on Jul 15, 2004 - 13 comments

I found these images, one, two, when I typed in “tent” in the “search all fields” field and selected image as resource type. The site is OAIster, which is a digital library, which has 3,273,233 records from 301 institutions. Its my new magic eight ball. (via)
posted by JohnR on Jun 20, 2004 - 15 comments

Researchers have created a 3D search engine. Sketch the object you're looking for and the search engine will attempt to find it.
posted by geeknik on Apr 15, 2004 - 11 comments

Mining the Deep Web. Google indexes 4 billion pages, but there are hundreds of billions of documents out there in the Deep Web that are effectively unreachable by search engines because they are locked in databases or are unsearchable media. It looks like Yahoo is going to start giving us a peek by providing unified access to a wide variety of sites that are ordinarily only searchable by their own custom search engines.
posted by badstone on Mar 2, 2004 - 12 comments

Adult search engine, Booble.com has received a cease and desist order from Google on the grounds of trademark infringement. Read Google's letter and Booble's response. all links are work safe.
posted by paulrockNJ on Jan 29, 2004 - 22 comments

Who gives, who gets... and surprise, Google is on top. I always figured that the search engines had a symbiotic relationship, but playing with this Search Engine Decoder to actually see it is far more entertaining. And, I'd never heard of Overture, but it seems like all the big boys pay them for content. The Decoder is hosted by Search This, which "[provides] search engine optimization and web marketing strategies for the everyday web designer." I guess that's a few of us...
posted by pineapple on Nov 16, 2003 - 12 comments

Amazon as search engine. Is it just me, or does every search on Amazon.com result in 90% results for discontinued items or stuff they don't bother to sell? I'm not very confident.
posted by troybob on Sep 25, 2003 - 11 comments

Grub: The seti@home of search engines?
According to the New Scientist: "A distributed computing project called Grub, which harnesses individual users' spare computing power and internet bandwidth, began cataloguing millions of web pages this week."
Grub has thus launched before HyperBee, a similar distributed search project.
This link was previously posted on MeFi when it was still in the conceptual stage.
The project is being run by LookSmart (along with its own open directory project called zeal) but as the New Scientist article notes: "Website information collected by Grub is already being fed into one of LookSmart's search services, called WiseNut. But the collected data are also freely accessible to the public, so they can be incorporated into any web site or desktop application."
Possible Google competition or doomed from the start?
posted by talos on Apr 21, 2003 - 10 comments

Forget BlogChalking. Go by the globe. A (slightly) simpler cousin of the GeoTags search engine (which I could never get useful information from anyway), the GeoURL ICBM Address Server (by Joshua Schachter of Memepool) pegs sites to specific points on the planet via good old-fashioned coordinates and META tags. While the web supposedly has no borders, many sites - like blogs - have a place at their heart, a virtual (if not physical) home. Now you can see if your site has neighbors. [Via Blogdex - More Inside]
posted by pzarquon on Jan 8, 2003 - 8 comments

A warning shot in the dark: For connoisseurs of clever turns of phrase: The phrase "a warning shot in the dark" popped out at me from a Google News preview panel as being a mixed metaphor. Indeed, a Google search reveals that the phrase has never before been used on the entire Web, which is rather amazing. Delving into the story, it appears by paragraph three that the mixed metaphors are appropriate, in this case.
posted by beagle on Nov 27, 2002 - 35 comments

What is MetaFilter?
metafilter is important
metafilter is cool
metafilter is different from most weblogs
metafilter is gone for good
metafilter is boring
metafilter is bad for me
More fun usage of everyone's favourite search engine at www.googlism.com. I myself, am said said to have the highest dispersive mixing capability of any compounder yet. Who knew!?
posted by PenDevil on Nov 3, 2002 - 50 comments

Is Google's use of cookies unnecessarily invasive? Daniel Brandt, described by Salon yesterday as Mr. Anti-Google, says Google "has inadequate justification for planting a cookie that expires in 2038 on every user, and also recording that user's search terms, IP number, and time-date." Brandt is the man behind the NameBase conspiracy database (previously discussed here), and also uncovered the CIA's illegal use of cookies last March. He insists that Google's use of cookies, combined with the Patriot Act, allows U.S. authorities to "do a 'sneak and peek' search of a Google user's hard drive when he isn't home, retrieve a Google cookie id, and then get a keyword search history" specific to the user's computer. Oh yeah, he also thinks PageRank is undemocratic.
posted by mediareport on Aug 30, 2002 - 39 comments

Google makes another killer app? Rackmounted servers devoted to googling your own intranet or website. Just look at those specs and features. Google is selling 1 server, retail $28,000, and they are marketing especially for corporate intranets. But imagine the power that would be at the fingertips of archivists, students, and researchers everywhere with a dedicated, customized Google for their own website. Imagine being able to do a detailed search that would literally comb the content of every page published by Project Gutenberg. In seconds, you could call upon thousands of years of writing for any and all information on any specific subject. What kind of implications will this technology have long-term for students, researchers, and archivists?
posted by insomnyuk on Aug 21, 2002 - 21 comments

BBC funds ad-free, porn-free search engine. Fueled by UK television license fees and Google search technology, the engine doesn't kick out results from paying advertisers. News article here.
posted by CosmicSlop on May 15, 2002 - 6 comments

Teoma takes on Google?
Ask Jeves launched its new search engine yesterday aimed at challenging Google for the best search engine on the web. Teoma offers options to narrow your search using "subject-specific popularity." For example, if someone searched for the name "Bill Clinton," Teoma offers ways to refine your search, showing links to topics related to your search, such as "Clinton Scandal" and "Monica Lewinsky." Will this search engine replace Google as the SE of choice for the Internet savvy? Also, what other search engines do you use?
posted by DragonBoy on Apr 2, 2002 - 36 comments

Google Catalog Search uses Google technology to search thousands of scanned mail-order catalogs, from industrial adhesives to designer clothing and gourmet food.
posted by danec on Dec 14, 2001 - 33 comments

Blogdexter searches the Blogdex for the URL you feed it and gives you the results. At the Blogdex page. Isn't that what that "url search" link--at the Blogdex--page is for?
posted by Su on Nov 5, 2001 - 12 comments

FindSounds.com is your source for on-line sound effects. Their search engine has found and catalogued sounds in several formats. You can search by name, and their spectral analyzer can help you find sounds similar to your search results.
posted by ewagoner on Oct 15, 2001 - 17 comments

Sex no longer interesting. "All the major search engines reported that the word 'sex' had fallen out of their top ten search terms for the first time in the web's young history, replaced with the likes of 'BBC' and 'CNN'." (Scroll down to "SARAH LEFT ON INTERNET NEWS".)
posted by pracowity on Sep 28, 2001 - 14 comments

Lasoo, location-based search engine. Really slick. They've improved it a lot since I last visited.
posted by SilentSalamander on Sep 25, 2001 - 12 comments

Google Current Events: Always the innovator, Google's brains make it easier to find news (and archives of news) about all of today's events.
posted by anildash on Sep 11, 2001 - 1 comment

Lycos Legal - Terms and Conditions This is by far the longest legal agreement I have ever seen for a web site. 15,144 words that would occupy over 31 printed pages. 38 distinct types of prohibited conduct.
posted by jeffbarr on Jul 23, 2001 - 13 comments

For Sale. Pre-owned Search Engine $250,000,000 o.n.o

Google is hinting at an end of year IPO for a measley $250 million. Is this the beginning of the end of the dot-com crash?. Via The Register.
posted by fullerine on Jun 25, 2001 - 22 comments

Interesting idea, but will it work? "Grub provides a free for download, distributed crawling client, which is used to create an infrastructure (database + volunteers) that will eventually provide URL update status information for nearly every web page on the Internet. Grub's distributed crawler network will enable websites, content providers, and individuals to notify others that changes have occurred in their content, all in real time"
posted by sixdifferentways on May 18, 2001 - 0 comments

There's a Japanese portal site named Goo (not to be confused with A Boy Named Goo). I wonder if Goo will merge with the GLE Concern to challenge a certain search engine we all know and love?
posted by jkottke on Jan 20, 2001 - 8 comments