Which search engines search horizontally? Vivísimo, at http://www.vivisimo.com/, spontaneously organizes results from a variety of search tools into hierarchies of topics and subtopics in a file-folder-tree display.
Turbo10, at http://www.turbo10.com, is a meta-search engine with the impressive ability to search the deep Web, that is, the Web not easily accessible by search engines because it is buried in databases and non-HTML files. A pull-down menu lists its clusters and the number of sites each cluster offers.
Guidebeam, at http://www.guidebeam.com, is a utility that has developed a kind of symbiotic relationship with a variety of search tools. Now posted over Yahoo, Guidebeam extracts and infers phrases from documents, and automatically clusters them into a browsable "hyperindex."
WiseNut, at http://www.wisenut.com, besides its WiseGuide categories, claims to improve on Google's link relevance system with more frequent Web crawling and context-sensitive ranking.
Teoma, at http://www.teoma.com, now owned by Ask Jeeves, organizes results in three sections: Results are ranked by subject-specific popularity; Refine suggests topic clusters to narrow the search; and Resources offers link collections created by experts and enthusiasts.
iBoogie, at http://www.iboogie.com, resembles Vivísimo in its folder-tree approach, but its deep Web holdings tend to be commercial.
Query Server, at http://www.queryserver.com , a meta-search tool, queries the general Web, or health, money or government sites, and offers handy customizing features along with its Result Clusters.
Ixquick, at http://www.ixquick.com, a meta-search tool with a kind of "greatest hits" approach to results, offers "Related Searches" suggestions, and a star ranking system summarizing the consensus of the major search engines.
New features to watch:
Kartoo, at http://www.kartoo.com, a meta-search tool, available in either Flash or HTML versions, presents its "topical families" of results on a highly attractive "cartographic interface."
WebBrain, at http://www.webbrain.com , uses concept mapping to make the subject categories of the Open Directory project more visual and accessible.
Alexa, at http://www.alexa.com, combines Google's approach to results with Amazon's marketing techniques. When you visit a site from Alexa's result lists, you see a thumbnail preview, rankings, reviews, topic clusters, and a note about its unique clusters: "people who visit this page also visit... "
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Joyce Kasman Valenza is the librarian at Springfield High School in Erdenheim, Montgomery County. Her column appears every other week in tech.life. Her e-mail address is joyce.valenza@phillynews.com.
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