This post was written by Liz Brady
ClearForest Gnosis addon has a great future but there is no point of lots of ‘hyperlinks’ to ’search engines’ when there is no data there e.g. the Reuters service. More work is needed to hide those services which have no data for the particular hyperlink. Reviewers were impressed with the natural language processing unit it has but they dont see how pointing to a search engine with the key word is any different than someone pulling up google or yahoo on their own.
Zemanta is an amazing service - really takes a lot of the slog out of blogging by suggesting links, which saves a lot of time researching them and entering them into the HTML or entry box on your blog. Very valuable for bloggers as it means you can post more quickly and with richer content that search engines will love because of all the links you can put in. You realize that all the hype about semantic web technologies is cool, but it’s always a great user experience that paves the way forward.
Hakia’s ScoopBar looks like a standard search toolbox, but it is more than that. Not only can it highlight the most query-related sentence on the pages, it can also capture a portion of the text and save it to your computer as HTML files for future reference. And of course, not to mention the ability to open the files captured from the toolbar itself. You can search the Web using the hakia ScoopBar embedded in your browser. This one definitely saves time, but it supports searches from hakia only.
Hakia is currently in beta testing but the site is available to the Web public with some of the explanation of their endeavors apparent in the hakia labs section. One of the most difficult aspects of new technology is the “explanation” of the technology. This is particularly true for hakia as the heart of the engine is comprised of advanced mathematics, linguistics, semantics, artificial intelligence and fuzzy logic. Hakia’s indexing system is far more diverse and effective than Google’s in that it responds more quickly and is not constrained to a linear index system.
AdaptiveBlue´s BlueOrganizer, one such site incorporating the semantic web approach, is a Firefox plug-in which understands what a page is about; because it is able to comprehend the contents of a site, it can automatically retrieve related info from other sites. Bluemarks, or BlueOrganizer bookmarks can be easily shared across the web with friends and family. Your Bluemarks can be organized into Bluebadges, widgets which can be placed in your blog or profile to share your bookmarks. AdaptiveBlue is seriously one cool plug-in.
BooRah is a crowd-sourced restaurant review site along the lines of Yelp (review) and Zagat (review) but with a couple of differences. BooRah pulls in reviews from other sites like CitySearch, Insider Pages and Yahoo Reviews. It performs a structural and semantic analysis of the review text and extracts whether the reviewer is expressing a negative (Boo) or positive (Rah). Unlike Yelp, Boorah seems very good at accurately locating the closest restaurants to a specific address, zip code or intersection. BooRah reviews tend to be somewhat dry and factual.
TripIt application helps in organizing your trip in an easy and simple to read format. All you have to do is forward all your confirmation and reservation emails. You can also add and subtract details as you will. The only downside is that it doesn’t remind the user to print out itinerary or to access via mobile phone! If the user forgets to make a printout he or she will have to spend the beginning of trip getting directions.
There is a lot of buzz surrounding Powerset, a semantic search engine, at the moment. Powerset allows you to search more intelligently by asking everyday questions instead of having to guess which keywords to enter. Simply go to powerset.com and enter a topic, phrase, or question into the search bar, and Powerset will give you results that are related to the meaning of your question and sometimes even the direct answer. So the next time you need to answer “who is Hulk Hogan”, plug your question into Powerset and actually get the answer.
Yahoo SearchMonkey is too good for developers. The results are effective and user oriented. You can tweak them as you want. Looks interesting but the only way how SearchMonkey can succeed is if they enable the enhancements as a default across all Yahoo search. Giving a level of control over the way results display makes sense in the long run at least until there are programs that can automate these type of listings. For online marketers, it’s a way to further enhance our offerings and possibly capture a more broad audience.
As per first-impressions review Twine is a sort of self-constructed encyclopedia, but its real power comes from users who make their profile public, or even open for collaboration with others. Because of its sharing tools, Twine is like Twitter, Del.icio.us and any number of other current web apps: Good for notifying others of what you’re looking at and what’s useful. Twine’s user interface needs some serious work to make the process of pawing through saved items much faster. Auto-tagging is also still fairly unreliable, with errors popping up.