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Back to Best of the Web by L Ritzel
Pls Click for useful Sites in following Categories:
eCollaboration tools (Having talked about the Information Age for some years we now have entered the Collaboration Age. Here some of the Webs most usefull and innovative tools available on the WWW)
Cyberhelpers (some virtual helpers, once you know them you could not live without them anymore)
Innovative Searchtool (or what is beyond Google and Yahoo?)
Finding Multimedia on the Web (Sounds, Images and Animations)
eSwitzerland (Helpful sites about Switzerland)
Travel Helpers (You are planning vacations and need some virtual help)
Information from the World Wide Web
A bit more technical Sites for the Teckies among you
Information from the World Wide Web. The Internet is NOT Google, even if sometimes it seems as if it is like this. Google for sure is one of a fine search engine, but there is much more out there in Cyberspace that can make your heart ponder and can lead you to information that you have been looking for since ages
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The real killer sites are since always the Searchengines, I am sure you all know the Googles, The Yahoos, AskJeeves, AOLSearch, Hotbot, Teoma, Altavista, LookSmart, Lycos, MSNSearch, OpenDirectory, Exite, iWon, WebCrawler, PepeSearch, Aeiwi, Qango |
| DayPop beside being a News specific Searchengine is one of the best index for WebBlogs (only News related), therefore really a great start in your News research | |
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Based on DMOZ The Open Directory Project and largest of all Internet Directories, MapDotNet came on the idea to actually visualize the Internet on a map. Maps show a lot of Web sites, all laid out on the surface of Antarctica. They come from the Open Directory Project (ODP), the largest human-edited directory on the Web. The Antarcti.ca Visual Net software uses the ODP’s category information to plot each individual Web site on the map with a virtual geographic location. Thus, the position of the site in relation to other sites is based on category designation, and how closely related the categories are to each other. Every map can get Zoomed in or Out and the viuals can then be exported into image files for your presentation. |
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A very new kind
of Meta Search engine is DoZoMo.
Dozomo let's you reach 193 search engines, dictionaries, maps -- virtually
any web service -- from one place. Dozomo sends you directly to the
result page of the things you're looking for.
Some examples: |
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Blinkx as quoted from their site ".. the smartest thing on your computer, is changing the way that people think about search technology. Free-to-download, blinkx automatically and intelligently links to relevant information anywhere and in any format: on the Web, in the news or on the desktop. Utilizing blinkx, users are no longer limited to Boolean keyword search. Instead, blinkx automatically and implicitly conducts searches based on the content being viewed by each individual user. " |
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Many other engines are gearing up to help power the personal search bandwagon. Copernic , for example, allows you to refine your search by entering the dates on which the data you are looking for was sent or created. But it's more user-led - you have to ask it for information. And while we're all used to asking for information, some of the bigger players have other ideas |
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Singing
Fish is a powerful search tool that only indexes multimedia
formats, including Windows Media, Real, QuickTime, and mp3s. According
to the blurb, millions of people use it every day, and its is aim
to bring a universe of free media to the likes of you and me.
You can find movie trailers, sampler tunes, instructional videos, news reports, and so much more. Use the category selector on the left to narrow down your search, and if you're seeking inspiration then have a look at what other people have been searching for in the explore section. |
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A kind of speciality Searchengine is provided by Barnes and Nobles to find any bood by ISB Number or any other criteria |
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The Vivísimo
Clustering Engine automatically clusters search results into categories
that are intelligently selected from the words and phrases contained
in the search results themselves. This means that categories will
be as up-to-date and fresh as your content.Completely automatic categories,
chosen on-the-fly Never again will novel document themes be forced into obsolete, pre-defined categories. No need for expensive and complicated tagging or taxonomy-building schemes that require perpetual maintenance. The Vivísimo Clustering Engin completes a powerful information retrieval system for any search-based product, service, or internal company process, on intranets, customer support sites, databases, web services, or other knowledge management application. |
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One of the visual
most appealing sites is clearly Kartoo.
In fact, KartOO
technology analyses the words you are asking for and then decides
to question the most accurate search engines. For example, if your request is a question ending with a question-mark, KartOO will query the search engines that are specialized in natural language. As to the notion of relevance: when you ask for the word "ray" for example, you may mean the sea animal or the light device. The results you obtain may therefore be accurate or totally irrelevant to what you are looking for. What is significant about KartOO in such a situation is that this technology provides a map that summarizes all the various and possible topics so that retrieved sites are in fact grouped into a form of topical "family". A list, i. e., a linear classification of search results, could not represent all the applications connected to a word like "nuclear" for example, and above all, a list could not display the links existing between the applications. Very similar is the approach from Grokker |
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More and more the Web becomes visual. The people behind Touchgraph have developed such an visual open source application that can be used in many different innovative ways. TouchGraph provides a hands-on way to visualize networks of interrelated information. Networks are rendered as interactive graphs, which lend themselves to a variety of transformations. By engaging their visual image, a user is able to navigate through large networks, and to explore different ways of arranging the network's components on screen. Visually navigating through a network is inherently a dynamic process, and steps need to be taken to keep the user feeling oriented and in control. TouchGraph achieves this by keeping the graph looking as static as possible, and more importantly, by making sure that dynamic changes are predictable, repeatable, and undoable. The associative nature of a network makes remembering its structure surprisingly easy, but it is the experience of seeing a series of recurring stable visual images that really gives a boost to the user's memory. The ability to create and navigate these stable images is what makes TouchGraph special, and is also the key to empowering both the designer and the user. |
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Scenario:
Managers want to be different. Everybody is using either Google, Yahoo
or Altavista - NOT you. You will use from now on the fast engine by
Itakhi.
Ithaki is a metasearch engine, which means we search in other
search engines and databases to find the results for your query. There's no other metasearch engine armed with so many different search channels to enhance your search and available in so many different languages. Ithaki has many different topics to search, each one groups the best search engines we have found in the Internet in that specific topic, in that way you can get quickly the most accurate results. This also helps to overrride any defect that a particular search engine could have. The carefull selection of specific tools makes. Ithaki is as well also the first WAP and Imode (wireless) meta search engine (means you can use it from your WAP enabled mobilephone) |
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Scenario:
Are you in something a bit special and for once don't want to use
a killer search engine developped by some kind of Computer wonder
kid from Sillicon Valley. Try IxQuick
Meta search engine. As the creators of this engine proclaim: "Top
ten reasons Ixquick is the most useful metasearch engine around".
As the first reason they write then; "Ixquick's stellar web
metasearch was created by a twelve year old Himalayan mountain goat
named Daphne". This is then followed by some more 9 more
or less convincing points. At the very end however they add on: "all
but one of these reasons are true...". If now true or not
and of animalic origin, its a kidn of pretty complete and fast metasearch
engine, worth to be tried out |
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Scenario:
Are you more into the handmade stuff done by some kind of smart computer
wizz out there. Just reada more here: Anyone can own a search engine
these days. You don’t have to be a global corporation like AOL
or Yahoo!, or a former cheeky upstart like Google, to write a bit
of software that cruises around the web and remembers what it finds.
Now that Google is another old-timer, there are new upstarts looming.
One of these is Gigablast,
a site put together by one young programmer. It doesn’t have
any slick design or super-advanced features, but it does the required
job. He wrote the software from scratch, with the idea of keeping costs as low as possible. The code is capable of handling 40 search requests per second and indexing eight million web pages per day. All that work is done by a cluster of eight fairly standard desktop PCs, although they do have plenty of memory and large hard disks, to help them cope with the vast amount of data they have to crunch every day. One of Gigablast’s
smarter features is the way it guesses related keywords and phrases
that might help you refine your search, and displays them at the
top of a new results page. These keywords are given the name “GigaBits”
and highlighted as a quick way of finding an answer for many factual
questions. For example, if you ask Gigablast “who is the
president of the USA?“, the answer “President Bush”
appears in the list of GigaBits at the top of the page. Then again,
so do several wrong answers, including “Garfield“, “Ohio“,
and “Knights Templar and the First President“. |
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Ujiko
the latest Searchengine, brought to Cyberworlds by the same people
who invented Kartoo (see above). UJIKO
displays in the center of the screen sets of themes: just click on
one of these to improve / refine your search. Some of these topics
are coloured and are linked to small bricks with the same color: these
indicate which sites are associated with a specific theme. In
fact, UJIKO sorts these sites taking into account their common topics:
instead of providing results according to a simple criterion of relevance,
it orders the sites around the circle, grouping them by themes. For
example, for the request "HP" which corresponds at the same
time to Harry Potter (movie, books), and Hewlett Packard (computer),
it will distribute the sites on both sides of the circle to form 2
sets of themes (Film and Computer |
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Scenario: You are asked to make the Intro presentation to the yearly company meeting and you want to want to ‘shine’ with a innovative graphical presentation with nice images, fonts and some multimedia features (sound and animations). You need images, visuals for your Presentation. To find pictures, just go to Google image type what ever keyword combination to describe what kind of picture you are looking for and press enter key. It will then search the web and find you the all pictures in thumbnails. Click on the pictures to see the origin of it. If you like the pictures, just rightclick and eitehr copy them or save them into your image folder for later usage. Make sure that what ever image you want to use is in the right resolution (file size and quality). If you want to use it for eample for a background image to fill the whole slide, around 50-80 kbytes are fine, smaller images might look unsharp and ugly when resized. |
| What is new with MyVasco is that it has implemented a date range filter. The datafeed is then coming from Google | |
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Scenario: You brain is so overbooked with all this most important information about your organization, your clients, your employees and partners. There is simply no more space for the most important favorite websites of yours. Onesite brings you a neat solution for such a problem. The web's first portable favourites page! gives you a easy way to have one single access to at least 8 (free version) favorites. You must register and then off you go. |
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Blinkx.tv - Search for TV news clips and other video bits from more than two dozen sources, including ABC News, BBC News, Fox News, ESPN and C-Span. There's plenty of lighter fare, too—a search for Nicole Kidman pulled up a documentary clip from Biography.com and assorted movie reviews and trailers. Blinkx has its own way of indexing clips that makes it more effective than other video search engines for finding particular segments within a broadcast, and each video stream starts off at the point in the segment that's most relevant to your query. |
| Clusty - Google, Yahoo and MSN dominate search, but we're always on the lookout for an innovative approach. This metasearch engine from Vivisimo clusters results by sub-category to help you zero in on what you need | |
| Google now has a new killer application for free, the Google Video search with unique Google VDO player | |
| Are you looking for a ride to an airport, theater, party, store, work or any place else? Do you feel like finding the right company is a bit of a shot in the dark? Worried about getting picked up in a timely fashion or whether the company has vehicles in the area? With Google Ride Finder, you can search for taxis, limousines and shuttles and make better decisions by seeing the exact location of vehicles in your area. Just enter a zip code, the name of a city or even a specific address. You will get a map showing the companies and where their vehicles are located. A real cool immidiate search engine is as well coming from the Google labs. Its Googles new Ride Finder. A pity so far only working for the states, but I wanted to add it to my selection because i am just always again impressed about the many great ideas from the Google team and I am sure that within some months the same application will already be available for some larger towns in Europe and else. |