The Software Abstractions Blog

Could You Survive For A Day - Without Google?

Can you spend a whole day without using Google? - that's the challenge issued by my friend Charles Knight over on the Alt Search Engines blog (see also ReadWriteWeb's coverage). To help you out, he's going to publish the latest version of his popular Top 100 Alternative Search Engines list tomorrow.

I think this is a great idea! We have all become addicted to the power (and limitations) of Google search - just like television before the age of the Internet, we cannot imagine life without it. And yet, as Charles' list shows, there are plenty of alternative search engines out there, innovating Search in a variety of different ways.

Personally, I'm going to use this opportunity to learn the latest features of Quintura, an innovative search engine we've covered before on this blog (here and here ). Quintura has jumped on board this idea by creating a special destination page for discovering the best hoaxes, pranks, jokes and tricks for April fool's day. [Rest assured, this is no joke!]

So how about you - can you do it? Why not give it a shot and try out an alternative search engine? Or two, or five, or all hundred on Charles' list? Can you last a day, an hour, even five minutes? Try it and the results may surprise you!

Quintura Launches Site Search Widget

Alternative search engine Quintura, which I've mentioned before on this blog, has launched its site search widget. This widget allows site publishers to provide users with a specialized search limited to that specific site; it joins earlier offerings from Google, Yahoo!, Rollyo and Eurekster swiki in this space.

This blog was an early user of this widget. You can see a customized, Quintura-generated mini-tag cloud in the earlier post; a full-size tag cloud is also available. The widget is hosted by Quintura, so installation was a snap: once the site was indexed, all I had to do was to embed the widget code into my blog pages and provide some styling control.

The biggest benefit of using the Quintura solution, as I've said before, is the dynamic tag cloud that allows the user to navigate the search space; initial feedback from our readers here has been positive, but not enthusiastic.

The real benefits to both users and publishers will come when Quintura search results prove to be better than equivalent results from a mainstream search engine solution, such as Google; as long as the Google site search results are good enough, it will be hard for the Quintura widget to make significant inroads into the market share of the big-G juggernaut.

This widget release is currently in private beta; an invite for this beta is available over on ReadWriteWeb.

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