Cluster ballooning is an unusual, some would say ‘extreme’ sport: think hot air ballooning, but with as many as 150 smaller, helium-filled balloons tied to a lawn chair – then you float away, controlling your flight (sometimes across state lines) by popping the four-foot-high balloons, selectively of course. It’s the stuff of movies, rallies and media events. Let’s see how some of the search engines treat this topic.

Type in “cluster ballooning”, and Google offers a respectable set of results: beginning with an Introduction at www.clusterballoon.org, a Wikipedia entry and several image results. Then a smattering of sites from a few of the experts on the sport, a couple of recent blog posts and video results from YouTube. Next, we’ll try Kosmix, which features a dashboard of news, reviews, videos and tweets on a given topic. It provides the same results from Google but simply groups them together into Web Search, Images, Video, News & Blogs, etc., as well as recent Twitter results.

But what if you need real-time results, not those based on popularity over time? Try Collecta, which continuously monitors the Web for new blog posts, tweets and news updates. In a matter of seconds, a handful of results appear: from Twitter, Reddit and more – today, a month ago, etc. Or maybe you need real-time and more overall results on cluster balloons? IceRocket delivers that, with an emphasis on Blog results, even a cool News item that didn’t show up elsewhere.

Since cluster ballooning is such a visual topic, search-cube.com may offer another perspective. A “visual search engine”, it does allow you to preview websites, videos and images instantly, before you click through, particularly if you are searching for a specific photo or graphic. How does Bing stack up? While the weighted search results are similar to Google’s, the biggest difference with Bing includes built-in features offering a very different user experience. Compared to the Google UI, Bing SERPs are generally cleaner, more visually appealing. “Similar” searches are listed in the right sidebar, along with a “Table of Contents” in the upper left, and users can easily access their own search history.

Next: Comparing Google, Bing, Yahoo

The Search For Search, Part II. is a post from: Codero dedicated hosting blog

Clearly, Google is still the undisputed king of search – and rightly so, with its innovative algorithms and diverse array of tools and analytics. But there are some new kids on the block that promise to stir things up a bit and provide both users and site owners with more choices than ever.

Let’s start with Hakia.com, still in beta, which calls itself a general purpose “semantic” search engine. Hakia defines ‘relevance’ not in terms of popularity, but as results that are recent and sourced from credible websites. In addition, search results are grouped into All results, Credible sites, News, Images, and Meet Others (start a conversation room). Also in beta is Kosmix, a ‘categorization engine’ which organizes topics into a dashboard of news, videos, reviews, conversations and a continuous Twitter feed.

Specialized search offers new, focused ways to find information quickly. Search-cube, for example, is a graphical search engine that presents visual search results in a compact, 3-D format (hence the cube), so you see web pages before you click through.

IceRocket isn’t brand new, though their emphasis on real-time indexing and introduction of new features offers an interesting search alternative; “Big Buzz”, launched last April, delivers search results for blogs, tweets, news, video and images all on the same page. Live since June, Collecta strives to be even more real-time, by monitoring the update streams of news sites, popular blogs and social media.

Then there is WolframAlpha, the brainchild of Stephen Wolfram, a particle physics genius and computational scientist. W|A isn’t so much a search tool as an enormous calculator, a ‘computational knowledge engine’ designed to answer user queries on mathematics, dates and times, chemistry, and places. And finally, Microsoft’s Bing stills gets a lot of buzz as a ‘decision engine’. Featuring a colorful home page design, Bing utilizes new algorithms to provide the context behind each search which, in turn, aims to deliver more relevant matches for local search, health questions, shopping, and more.

Next: We’ll take a closer look at how to use each of these new tools in “The Search For Search, Part II”.

The Search For Search, Part I. is a post from: Codero dedicated hosting blog