Houston SEO Articles

 Houston SEO News

February 15, 2009

Beyond the 10 blue links: how search engines are getting smarter

Google & Microsoft's plans

The world of search is changing, and changing fast.

The days of people typing a couple of words into a search box and hoping for the best are numbered.

Companies big and small are moving things forward, experimenting with searches based on complex sentences, images and audio, mashing up mobile search with location data, and aiming to make results more useful than the traditional list of blue links.

One approach is to show results in a more visual style. Viewzi, for example, has a number of options, including viewing results from Flickr as a photo thumbnail cloud; viewing thumbnails of web pages found by Google, Ask, Yahoo and Live Search on one page; and viewing news results from Google News in the style of a newspaper front page. Seachme, which recently raised $31 million in funding, also presents its results as a series of web screenshots, mimicking the iTunes Cover Flow look.

For books, zoomii.com uses the Amazon search API but presents the search results as book cover thumbnails. Amazon must have liked the idea as it launched its own version, Amazon Windowshop – though this doesn't have a search option, and only lets you browse Amazon's new releases and popular content.

PicClick throws eBay into the mix. To use PicClick, enter a search term, your minimum and maximum price, and your (US) postcode. PicClick then scours Amazon or eBay and returns a list of thumbnail images. Briteclick, meanwhile, takes a different approach: it's a browser add-on that lets you right-click words on the web page to perform searches for maps and prices, so there's no need to leave the page you're on when you want to search for related sites.

Firefox, too, lets users right-click a word on a page and search for it in Google, while the extension Advanced Dork adds a contextual right-click search that lets you highlight a keyword and search Google using advanced operators, such as intitle and inurl. And of course, you can already search in-browser via the search box in the top right-hand window of Firefox and Internet Explorer.

www.techradar.com

 

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