Search Engines News & Articles

Man, technology is COOL. Particularly new stuff like image recognition-based search engines, which operate using audio-visual content rather than tags.

IBM (news, site) announced that they are currently working in collaboration with the European Union consortium on such a tool. Search in Audio-Visual Content Using Peer-to-peer Information Retrieval, (SAPIR) analyzes photos, sound files and even video queries. Once you feed the engine any of these file types, it scours the ‘net and hands back similar pieces.

Bada boom, bada bing!

That’s how quickly things seem to happen in the webverse anyway, the search engine avenue being no exception. Accordingly, recently there have been rumors backed by heavy advertising dollars that Microsoft (news, site) plans to release a search engine called "Bing."

As is inevitable whenever big names put out new solutions, "Bing" is already being compared to offerings from other big names. In fact, much like the ongoing Mac vs. PC battle, we’re seeing Microsoft's new offering propositioned as competition for the biggest name.

Perhaps in an attempt to compete with third-party vendors, more Web CMS vendors are offering site search services. CMS Watch reports that 40% of major Web CMS vendors now embed the open source Apache Lucene (news, site) search engine.

You’d think that after Google, nobody would even dare to venture into the search engine market. That apparently doesn’t include some former Googlers who launched Cuil - the newest search engine that describes its mission as “to index the whole Internet” and “analyze and sort out its pages so you get relevant results.”

Cuil (pronounced “cool”) claims to have a “fundamentally different approach” to search engines due to its new architecture and algorithms. Sounds good in theory, but how does it actually do in reality?

Russian search engine Quintura has thrown its hat into the website search ring with a snazzy new search tool. Currently in private Beta, Quintura Site Search delivers the same search navigation principle to website search that Quintura.com brings to Web searches;searching content through a dynamic tag cloud that brings you deeper into the query with every click. The technology is built on semantic principles which focus on context and aim to deliver fewer false positives than Google’s ‘most-linked’ algorithm.

Socialtext, which recently launched offline wiki Socialtext Unplugged at Le Web 3 in Paris, upgraded its search engine over New Years. This upgrade improves upon its already rather luxe professional-quality search function.