Internet surfing is never really complete without visiting Google—a virtual synonym for search engine in today's world. But even as Google currently enjoys a large search engine market, there are other interesting engines coming up with added capabilities such as allowing natural language queries, content summarisation, and calculations based on questions. Here’s a look at few such engines that go beyond keyword searches.
WolframAlpha.com
Recognising the fact that search is performed for knowledge discovery and often a user has to combine data from a number of pages returned in results, WolframAlpha attempts to automatically summarise the findings. For example, entering a simple term, 'Life expectancy' results in a detailed summary of global trends — ranking top 10 highest and lowest countries, distribution graph, rank curve, along with other demographic trends. Such detailed analysis would take hours if performed manually, considering that within each section, there's a 'More' button further expanding the information.
This makes WolframAlpha particularly useful for students and researchers. For example, try looking up GDP of Pakistan on this engine and on Google. The results at former are tabular, with trend graph and additional economic data such as inflation rate, unemployment rate, GPD at purchasing power parity, exchange rate and local currency, etc. For record purposes, you can download the information in PDF files as well.
Other interesting knowledge computations include time, geography and lots of other data. You could try 'Time in Canada' to generate local and foreign clocks, 'January 1950' to generate back or post-dated calendars, solve mathematical formulas, enter name of website to view number of daily visitors, page views, or enter a city name to view its location on map along with population, temperature and other statistics, or enter names of two cities—say, Karachi and Lahore—to find the distance and flight time in between, and find nutrient contents in food by entering 'Vitamin C in orange'. Since this type of search is not common, it’s advisable to go through the examples section to get acquainted with type of data made available by Wolfram.
Deep web
Deep web, invisible web or dark web is equivalent of dark matter in the realm of cyberspace. As the name suggests, it’s that part of the web—considered to be about 500 times the size of the web we come across—which is not reachable through normal search engines. This huge data often resides in databases and other non-common standard formats making it difficult for ordinary search technologies to harness it in their results. Deepdyve.com claims to be expanding their deep web search capabilities, while CompletePlanet.com and Archive.org offer similar capabilities.
Semantic web / meta-search
Such catch phrases have been around for some years now with experimental search engines coming up every now and then. The idea behind these engines is to make sense out of otherwise cluster of words by understanding context of natural language and possibly linking them with each other. Some of the sites offering this type of search include cuil.com, hakia.com and clusty.com with a feature of showing groupings of topics related to the term being searched on the left.
Via DAWN
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