Life’s getting complex when you start to see the value in a search engine of search engines. An uber-search engine. Since my previous posts on Search Tools for Savvy Speechwriters I keep coming across ever more useful pointers.

The latest, and best, is in today’s Financial Times where technology columnist Paul Taylor summerizes the “meta” search sites. (Subscription Required).

Jux2

‘Spose ya’ wanna jux-ta-pose the results from the three main search engines – Google, Yahoo Search and Microsoft’s MSN Search. Jux2 (geddit?) is the solution.

The Jux2 site carefully analyses the results of searching the three main sites. A cautionary tale supporting my argument that the Savvy Speechwriter needs to gather sources from more than just Google:

Conventional wisdom is that the search engines serve up very similar results. Our research suggests the opposite: that search engines are far more different than most people think. For example, what do you suppose is the overlap between the top 10 results on Google and the top 10 results on Yahoo! for the average search term? Most people we asked thought about 70 percent. So did we, until we checked.

The actual overlap is roughly half of that. In a test we conducted using the 500 most popular search terms in April 2004, on average, only 3.5 of Google’s top 10 results were in Yahoo!’s top 10, and vice versa.

Even more striking is the distribution of results: fully 30% of the search terms had 2 overlapping terms or fewer, and only 17% of the search terms had 6 or more overlapping results among the top 10.

Best feature: Run the search and then hit the ‘Compare’ tabs and see what ’s unique to each engine.

Dogpile

Three search engines not enough for ‘ya? How about four? More? Gotta use Dogpile for this level of comparison. Great search engine, crap name.

“All the best search engines piled into one.” Gag me with a spoon! An annoying cute clip-art Dalmatian puppy. A ‘Go fetch!” prompt. The branding stinks. (OK, OK, there was a time when Google used to mean a squirrly cricket ball but I don’t see anyone saying “Did you Dogpile that?” anytime soon. )

But wait. I looked up Global Warming and was blown away by Dogpile. It showed me this unique Map. I was able to bring in columns for up to six different search engines. It suggested some useful alternative searches (Acid rain; Greenhouse Gas). For this I can forgive them the tacky brand.

Ask.com blog search update

Paul alerts us to an update from the Ask.com search engine when applied to Blog searches (my single best source of content for many presentations and public speeches). They’ve refined the process of searching blogs by analyzing the use of Bloglines which I’ve written a guide to. Three really useful tools are embedded in the results:

You can also subscribe to a search term for daily updates to your Bloglines reader on any topics-du-jour that you need keep an eye open for.

Blinkx

Video killed the radio star. In today’s personal, digital, virtual, converged multi-media world it’s soooo last century to confine your search activity to text, be it web, blog or newsgroup.

You need to get with the program and use Blinkx to search video. It provides access to millions of hours of audio, video, podcasts, viral videos and television content. My search on Global Warming turned up a wide selection of streaming video clips. Top of the list was the Daily Show’s spoof on the Sierra Club’s complaints about CO2. With the right re-use permission video clips can liven up any speech.

Singingfish

Singingfish provides another alternative audio/video search engine. Unlike traditional search engines, it indexes only multimedia formats, including Windows Media, Real, QuickTime and MP3 audio files.

Forget Global Warming – this time I went for the Jugular and got 281 hits of music by Roy Harper and over 7,000 sources of Bob Dylan tunes. Wow!

Kosmix

Kosmix is a beta (test) project out of Mountain View, CA that categorizes the web into different areas such as health, travel, finance and politics. By spooky coincidence the Politics category suggests a search on Global Warming as a trial search term – great minds and all that!

Kosmix’s claim to fame is the ‘multi-dimensional’ manner in which it displays search results – listing by categories. It classifies Global Warming results into Liberal, Conservative or Libertarian groupings. It lists 6,232 Liberal sites (top result – the Union of Concerned Scientists); 1,226 Libertarian sites (top result – The Fraser Institute of Canada) and 1,269 Conservative (top result – Skepticism.Net)

What a fascinating taxonomy for any speaker to comment on! “Ladies and gentlemen, with six times the number of liberal-leaning web sites available on the subject, it is any wonder…”

Answers.com

Answers.com draws on more than 60 titles from brand-name publishers, as well as original content created by the site’s editorial team. The site offers useful answers in categories such as business, health, travel, technology, science, entertainment, arts, history and many more.

My Global Warming search delivered an incredibly comprehensive listing:

At the bottom of the results page they even list the correct way to cite these sources in the text of your speech or article. Now, what could be easier than that? Well, how about a free installable toolbar that let’s you Alt-Click on any word on an Internet Explorer screen and get a pop-up definition from Answers.com. Cool, huh? Wait! There’s more, it slices, it dices, it even….ooops, sorry, wrong product.