Search 2.0 round-up

Over on Read/WriteWeb I published two excellent articles by Ebrahim Ezzy on the topic of "search 2.0", or third-generation social search. Here is a round-up of all the search 2.0 companies that Ebrahim profiled.

Part one featured the following companies:

Swicki is a community-driven search engine that allows users to create deep, focused searches on a specific niche. Search results from a Swicki can learn and adapt automatically, based on the search behavior of the community.

Rollyo is a community powered, theme-based search. Rollyo allows users to create and publish their own personal search engines, based on websites they decide to include in their 'SearchRoll'.

Clusty is a clustering engine that groups similar items together - organizing search results into folders. It goes beyond simple search and combines the power of clustering with meta-search (i.e. a search of other searches), to provide a productive and flexible search experience. As well as producing organic web results, Clusty also enables searching of shopping information, yellow pages data, news, blog posts and images.

Wink enables users to tag their favorite results, block irrelevant spam and display the best sites - as hand-picked by other users.

Lexxe does what TSE's (Traditional Search Engines) already do, but more efficiently. Lexxe is designed to extract short answers on-the-fly, instead of finding the page on which the answer might be located. It emphasizes the processing of language rather than symbols - using the level of words and the meanings associated with them.

Part two covered these companies:

Gravee is attempting to change the economics of search, by sharing advertising revenue with the content owners and compensating them for making search results possible.

Jookster is another community-driven, social search tool and it works primarily through a browser toolbar or button. It searches through a user's bookmarks and other associated sites of interest, derived from the user's social network. Essentially, it’s a cross between social networking and search.

Krugle is a search engine for developers. It makes it easy to search for technical information, source code and answers to code-related technical questions. It enables searching of code samples from open source repositories, archives, mailing lists, blogs and web pages. It allows tagging, along with sharing of code and sets of search results.

LivePlasma is a visual music and movie discovery engine that covers bands, artists, movies, actors and directors - in a multilingual interface. It features a Flash-based data visualization tool and utilizes mind mapping. It's really a recommendation engine, because the aim is to discover similar music and movies. This may be useful when you're searching for new music or movies to explore.

Qube is a desktop application that provides one-click access to search results - without having to use a browser, switch applications or even enter a keyword. It instantly searches any text already onscreen (or manually entered) and retrieves results in seconds, while also enhancing the search with features like real-time spell checker, history logging, dictionary results and more - all without any performance penalties.

ZoomInfo scours the web (corporate websites, press releases, electronic news services, SEC filings and other public online sources) for people and their contact information. It compiles concise summaries about individuals and companies, in an organized manner. Social networking tools are available if you choose to be their customer.

Summary

As Ebrahim wrote:

"Traditional search engines are becoming increasingly more precise and expansive, however they cannot surpass human intelligence. It can only match words, not the meaning of the ideas discussed within them. Whereas the still-emerging technologies of S-2.0 can help make search more meaningful, subjective and task-based.

While TSE is good for finding information, S-2.0 is good at discovering new information at a rapid pace."

I'd be interested in what ZDNet readers think of social search engines. Are you using them at all - and if so, do you think they can compete against the big search engines like Google and Yahoo?