Smarter Ways to Search
Harry McCracken
I thought that I had finally settled down with the right search engine. In fact, for the past few months I'd found life with Google so agreeable that the other search sites I used to dally with in my younger days had become no more than fuzzy memories.
Foolish me. I'd forgotten one of the Web's eternal verities: There's no such thing as a perfect search site. True, Google is the one engine to have if you're having only one. But even though it's eerily accurate most of the time, it doesn't sleuth out everything. And cool tools keep popping up elsewhere--frequently at sites that lack the brand-name cachet of the big engines. Herewith, a handful of recent developments:
Facts in a Flash: As its name suggests, IWon is a portal where prize giveaways are the main attraction. Even so, it's got one feature that a serious info-junkie can love: Fact Finder.
Powered by a service called Fact City, Fact Finder melds a natural-language interface with its own vast repository of data on sports, movies, TV, history, and more, licensed from reputable sources like Billboard magazine and the CIA's World Factbook. Fact Finder usually knew the answers when I posed burning questions such as "Who did Ingrid Bergman play in Spellbound?" and "What is the capital of Micronesia?" (Dr. Constance Peterson and Palikir, in case you were wondering).
The laudable goal here is to let you snag such arcana without wading out into the Web at large, where information is often buried, garbled, or just plain wrong. But when my questions got too complex, they stumped Fact Finder. What baseball player had the highest single-season batting average in history? Beats me--Fact Finder struck out on that one.
The More Sources the Merrier: Metasearchers can search multiple engines with one query. They remain the best option when your favorite engine comes up clueless. I tried the newly revamped ProFusion, for example, when Google couldn't help me find a long-lost friend. ProFusion found a link to his home page from MSN, an engine I'd never have tried on my own.
Unlike most metasearchers, ProFusion offers a topic directory that lets you limit your quest to specialized engines and databases. Planning a vacation in Portugal? Try ProFusion's travel search, which ignores irrelevancies such as the site of a school of meteorology in Lisbon (which was among the first links that Google offered when I searched for "Portugal").
Whereas ProFusion claims to scour 1000 information sources, Vivisimo collates links from a mere eight. But its user interface sorts links into folders for easy browsing. If you search for "scanners," for instance, you get separate folders for flatbed scanners, virus scanners, and police scanners.
Picture This: One of the few sites that focus on finding images, Diggit is new and innovative. Most strikingly, it analyzes images for similarities in color, shapes, and textures--so it can find photos that all show red pickup trucks or the Eiffel Tower. While the technology is ingenious, the results are erratic: When I searched for pictures of Abraham Lincoln, Diggit retrieved a bunch of Honest Abe images--plus shots of Tony Bennett and Dr. Laura Schlessinger.
Ditto.com, an older image searcher, is less prone to drag images out of left field. On the other hand, it lacks Diggit's cornucopia of features, such as the ability to restrict searches to images of a certain size. So when I'm trolling for pictures, I'll hop between both sites. And I'll keep my eye out for other options. Hey, if you're not going to stick with one search engine, you might as well play the field.
Gimme Five: Sites for Office Suite Help
Are you a word wrangler? A spreadsheet jockey? Make the most of Microsoft Office and its rivals with the help of these sites:
- Woody's Office Portal: Home of busy message boards and an opinionated Microsoft Office newsletter.
- About.com Desktop Publishing: The name doesn't say it all--this site also covers word processing and more.
- Office Update: Microsoft's official Office site backs the suite with plentiful help and downloads (and relatively little promotional hype).
- WordPerfect Universe: An online community of WordPerfect aficionados, plus links to other resources.
- David McRitchie's Excel Pages: Number crunchers rejoice! Meaty articles and tutorials galore.
Contact PC World Executive Editor Harry McCracken at websavvy@pcworld.com.