Hakia, a semantic search engine, uses Yahoo’s BOSS and does a good job at neatly clustering results (e.g. try a search for a country) and also has a reasonable ranking – something many new search engines don’t manage well. By contrast, the much-hyped Powerset, another recent semantic search engine, is simply disappointing.
Cluuz aims at graphically clustering search results. So far, I have been sceptical towards visualizations of search results, because the mind-map kind of graphs (e.g. in Thinkmap or Quintura) are either rather trivial or useless. But Cluuz (or similarly, KartOO), cluster their sources rather than semantic characteristics. Not that this is entirely new – Clusty (previously Vivisimo; I’ve used the example in the post on information literacy vs usability) does it in form of a regular list – but the focus on sources is one I much appreciate, and showing relationships between sources might prove promising.
A last tip for today: While searchme’s sequential presentation of search results is too playful for my liking, because I need a quick overview to make my choice what I want to take a closer look at. However a really nice feature is the integration of stacks which allows you to create visual bookmarks – something completely different, because it is not about seeking new, but rather showing known objects (cf Theresaneil’s extensive post on seek or show).
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