From their site: “At Topicle, our goal is to enable users to easily find more relevant information on the Internet, with you - the Topicle community - as experts. We want to generate more precise and useful search results with sources recommended by humans than solely with computer-generated algorithms.”

With Topicle, you can create a new vertical search engine with a few clicks. In Topicle’s world, a vertical search engine is a topic search engine, like Digital Camera Reviews, Parenting or Diabetes. Each Topicle search engine only searches handpicked URLs, instead of the whole Web.

All Topicle search engines are open, and everyone can contribute by adding URLs and rating existing URLs. Just like anyone can author articles on Wikipedia, anyone can create and enhance search engines on Topicle. With everyone’s help, Topicle search engines will get better and better over time.

Here is an example:

You like cooking (we hope you do) and you create a Topicle search engine called “Best Recipe Sites”. You and other community members can add their favorite cooking URLs to the Topicle search engine you just created.

Want to make ratatouille? Select the Best Recipe Sites search engine and enter “ratatouille”. You will only get high quality ratatouille recipes. No information on the movie “Ratatouille”, no Wikipedia entries, no Disney links and no definitions. Of course, this assumes that your search engine has been “fed” with the right URLs. You might only need a handful of them.

Visual search engine Picitup has launched into the alternative fray. The search begins with a textual query which registers a line of images, following which the user can pick the image he wants to find matching images for.

Picitup has also analyzed tens of thousands of images and classified them into categories. The outcome is a category filter that now allows users to limit their image search to faces, products, landscapes, or color. For example, a query of George Bush filtered by products will find posters, political cartoons, or T-shirts either with his face or having to do with him.

For the celebrity fans amongst us, Picitup provides for a celebrity face match service where anyone can upload their photos and receive their ten celebrity lookalikes. While this application is to some extent playful, Picitup hopes the technology behind it will allow further down the road to search for anyone one wishes to find only by his/her photo…!

Picitup’s algorithms compute thousands of visual aspects of an image, such as the corners of a smile, a product title or landscape texture, and then retrieve only images with similarity to the original image.

Guest Author Stephen Arnold

One of my business associates in Canada sent me a link to an interesting search engine named Cluuz.com. The system–unlike the shy Powerset, a media darling developing a semantic search engine–is available for anyone to use. Navigate to Cluuz.com. Make sure you add the extra “u”, or you will be looking at a plain text page from the graphically restrained Clue Computing operation in cow country.

Cluuz.com takes results and applies semantic processes to them. Some of the company’s display options are a bit too sophisticated for my 64-year-young eyes, but I found the system quite useful. Let’s run through a basic search and take a cursory look at some of the features that I found interesting. Then I want to comment on the semantic search boom or boomlet (depending on how jaded you are), and conclude with several observations. In the last few days, the shrinking violets in the Big Name search vendors’ public relations department have reduced their flow of 30-something insights. Perhaps my comments about semantic search will “goose” them into squawking. I certainly hope so. Life’s no fun in rural Kentucky without well-groomed Ivy League wizards asserting their intellectual superiority in email speak.

A Query for Cluuz.com

Navigate to the Cluuz.com splash screen. Make certain that you have checked the option under the search box for “Charts”. We’ll look at the other options in a moment. Now enter the test query as shown in italics: Google +”programmable search engine”. Here’s my result for this query on May 7, 2008:

The system processes results from MSN (search.live.com) and Yahoo, processes them, and displays this map. Note that the system identifies important people and companies. The system correctly identifies the Google Forms service as related to the “programmable search engine”.

The system offers other ways to view the results set. For example, you can look at hits from the search engines to which the query is passed as a traditional laundry list. Other choices include a cluster display and a Flash display which is, in my opinion, cluttered with sliders, controls, and options.

You can also enter a more complex query using the Cluuz.com advanced search page. In my tests, the system did a good job of dealing with specific Boolean queries. You can also set preferences, which may not be necessary for a metasearch-based approach to generating hits.

Cluuz.com’ s Owner

Cluuz.com is a service of Sprylogics International Corp. This Canadian company develops advanced search, analysis, and information display tools and services. The company asserts,

These solutions enable users to search large amounts of unstructured data on the Web and in internal corporate databases, and convert it into actionable intelligence. The core technologies driving Sprylogics’ solutions are embedded in the Analyst and Evidens analytical workflow and Cluuz Search Engine platform which enables both consumers and corporate users to methodically search the Internet and internal corporate resources and find the information they are looking for. Cluuz search results are visually displayed through patent pending semantic graphs and result in improved decision making capabilities.

The company, like Kroll (a unit of Marsh & McLennan and Silobreaker) has a management team with some experience in law enforcement and intelligence. The firm’s president, Avi Shachar, has experience with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Israeli intelligence.

This real world experience is evident in the result set shown in the screen shot above. The default results for the query shown in the graphic in this essay focuses on people. Result lists are useful in certain types of library work. But an investigator wants to know who the key people are and how one or more of the individuals relate to one another, companies, and particular subjects.

Observations

My experience with Cluuz.com was quite positive. I see and test a large number of search and content processing systems, and Sprylogics is worth monitoring. Several other comments are warranted by my test drive:

1. For many years, getting a results list that identified people required expensive software and a lot of fiddling around. The established vendors such as i2 Ltd. in England made products that were not generally available for business intelligence. Sprylogics, it seems to me, wants to bring this type of useful service to a broader audience.
2. If I were able to push additional information into the Sprylogics’ Cluuz.com engine, I would be able to get a useful result without much, if any, manual opening and closing of links in a result list. The bird’s-eye view of the information pertinent to a query about a little-known topic like Google’s PSE is quite useful.
3. The interface permits customization. This is good because some of the fine-grained controls available in the Cluuz.com service as a Flash interface can be easily stripped down for “line of fire” work.

My two complaints are relatively minor but important to me. First, I could not locate pricing information about the company’s products or services. While not unusual, the lack of a floor cost means a phone call and email plus playing the “he’s on the road” game. Second, it’s difficult to determine how easy or hard it would be to integrate this system into a behind-the-firewall intelligence operation. I have a hunch the company has the details, but it has chosen to keep some data close to the vest. Again, this makes the management team happy but it bedevils me.

I have added Sprylogics to my watch list. Take a look, and I will update this posting as I gather more information about the company and gain more experience with the system.

CLICK HERE FOR A SNEAK PEEK OF THE CLEVER SEARCH ENGINE

Cuill, a stealth start-up with a new approach to search, recently announced that the company has secured a second round of equity financing of $25 million, led by Madrone Capital Partners. The Series B investment follows a previous $8 million funding round from Tugboat Ventures and Greylock Partners.

“We are pleased with the confidence of our investors,” said Chief Executive Officer and co-founder Tom Costello. “Our team is using breakthroughs in search architecture and technological advances to create a new paradigm in search, and we now have the resources to reach the next level in pure search.”

“We are thrilled to receive additional funding,” said Anna Patterson, President and co-founder. “I’m very proud of the experienced team we have recruited and the board we have assembled. Our goal is to offer a dramatically improved search experience and we look forward to sharing Cuill with everyone on the Web.” The team is leveraging their own expertise in search architecture, relevance methods and data analysis to provide users with a better search experience.