Geekblok

BOK surprised me with an invitation email about a website I never noticed. The small mail suggested that I should check it out and maybe write a little about it here, due to absence of BOK this weekend.

So I did check it out and had no clue what to expect. The sign up was easy enough and after a few seconds, I was looking at my online “notebook” hosted by Evernote.

I’ve seen such dump sites before and they never really seemed to interest me for more than a minute. I know Joffie has his own wiki at home for dumping notes, and I have CVS and SVN software installed on my home machine(s) so I don’t really need this either. But then I found out it also offers text recognition within images. Now that’s something my `grep` can’t do, so this might be nice! Time to explore the service after all.

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Today I received an invitation for Searchme. While currently in REAL beta (as they call it themselves), it looks very promising. The search index is around one billion pages (and growing each day) so not everything can be found (but hey, Geekblok is in there!).

Nonetheless this looks very cool and extremely useful. Will this be the new way to search for information? Search 3.0, or not, I’ve made a little screencast of how it works. In the example, I search for “scummvm”.

Yahoo! Search has a lot of cool features, that really take searching to a next level. Back in the day, when Google came into focus, the clean interface and awesome search results defined the standard for modern search engines. Yahoo!, however, has beaten Google, in my humble opinion, by completely reinventing the search engine.

Google’s search results are not what they’ve used to be. I usually show people the awesome Dutch website zoekmachinetest.nl. It shows you a the results of the major search engines in Dutch in random order so you can see for yourself which one you really like best. Since I couldn’t find an English version of this website, I’ve created one myself: searchenginetest.swal.org. Go check it out!

But let’s look at some of these new features!

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To stay with the R-enabled web-services, I present you smplr.
“smplr” is a very good looking search-engine front end, that offers different triggers to search for and on different search-enabled websites, like Google (the default), Yahoo, WikiPedia, weblogs, IMDB and even the PirateBay for torrents.

There’s is even an option to skin the default look (requires cookies to be enabled) and hey: a Mac OS X Dashboard-widget (download: smplr.wdgt.zip)!

Give it a try. It’s definitely better looking than Google’s default page!

Bookmarking interesting pages with del.icio.us is extremely handy. Not only can you use your bookmarks on any machine that you access, you can also share the bookmarks with your friends and family. Searching can be a bit annoying though.

deliGoo helps you to retrieve the pages you’re looking for, by allowing you to search within the pages itself, rather than just searching by title or tag (or the little description you’ve added). deliGoo describes their service as:

we take the best websites, selected by you and other del.icio.us users,
add a powerful Google search engine and we get a free and easy way to find what we need and exactly where it is!

You basically search the web and restrict the results to only show sites you (or other del.icio.us users) have bookmarked before. Good stuff!

The only downfall is that they want you to install the firefox extension, which is completely unnecessary in my humble opinion. Just go to the search page directly and skip the extension (heck, you can even bookmark that search page in del.icio.us).