Start-up alternative search engines (Alts) seem to be happening every day nowadays. With a huge variety of different niches being tried and tested with alphas, betas, and other Greek letters if applicable, it’s rather interesting to see where all, or at least many of these things are coming from. In my research for AltSearchEngines (ASE) in the past 3 months, more than half, if not most of the alts I’ve come across have been Israeli startups.

Of course, as Aaron Ciechanover, Israel’s 2004 Nobel Prize winner in chemistry quipped—brains are pretty much the only thing Israel can export. So here’s a cross-section of the different types of search coming out of that tiny slice of holyland in the Mideast.

Semantinet – Tal Keinan and Tal Muskal

The so-called smart alt headed by the double Tal team in Tel Aviv, SemantiNet, the “personal assistant to the web.” This one gets to know more about you as you use it, gets to know your preferences, the people in your social network, your interests, but doesn’t get as far as your relationship with your mother-in-law, which is probably a good thing.

Not quite your traditional website-based search engine, SemantiNet is a browser plugin that enlightens search by discovering, integrating and providing easy access to personally-relevant content on the pages you view. It actually scans each webpage and points out anything related to your world. The result, hopefully, is a web that is more personal and powerful for you.

As for the question of the Greek letter it’s at—Alpha. To participate in testing, insert email where you see this:

IRSeeK – Eran Cohen and Ariel Berkman

Does anyone know what “Internet Relay Chat” is? It’s basically a bunch of people chatting away with one another, usually under interesting-sounding pseudonyms. The thing about it is that sometimes they solve problems by chatting away at them, and you might be looking for a solution to the same solution. So you might want to consider searching other people’s chat. (Don’t worry, it’s not snooping.) That’s what IRSeeK is for.

I was having a problem with my DVD player once. Something about regions and me only being allowed to switch them from “Region 1″ to “Region 2″ so many times. This is the problem when you don’t live in America and buy American DVD’s. So I searched “region code” on IRSeeK, and found a few conversations. What follows is a section of some people talking about just my problem.

When searching, inside the conversation window, you can highlight a certain user (or users), by clicking on their nickname in order to help you track a certain conversation.

IRSeeK indexes chat for 7 years, and is currently looking for staff to help it expand its operations and efficiency.

Gogimon – Menachem Reinshmidt, Erez Keller, Ofer Zvi

Ah…traditional search…sort of. It’s actually a program that you download, and it gives you all the major search engines in one shot. Gogimon takes it’s own search engine, adds Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo, and puts them all together.

Before you download it, here’s a quick video explaining what this thing can do.

To get it, go to their site, download the application, and type in a search term in a little tool that pops up on your screen. You can see it on the right here. The tabs on the top left show Gogimon, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft Live, where you can switch between them and see what they all have.

Gogimon also has some additional nifty apps. The “mind reader,” for one, looks at what you’re searching and presents you with a list of related suggestions that you may want to look at the bottom of the screen. Another interesting feature is the composite search ranker. Let’s say you’re looking for ‘inexpensive eye glasses in Chicago’. The results usually seen in a traditional search will likely leave you with mostly irrelevant responses that don’t lead to ‘inexpensive eye glasses in Chicago’. Maybe that result exists, but it could be buried a few pages deep. They rank the site by how much people actually used it in a similar search instead of by the number of links leading to it, as a tradition google-type search would do.

I actually did the Chicago search, and came up with links that were pretty useful. Some links were still irrelevant, but had I actually been looking for cheap glasses, I would have been in OK shape. I didn’t see all that much of a difference with the other tabs, though, which all came out with OK info.

Gogimon also has what is called a Continuously Directed RSS. This feature allows for a continuous search, so when relevant results come along, you get them immediately.

iMedix - Amir Leitersdorf and Iri Amirav

My wife has periodic psoriasis breakouts. Those can get itchy. The doctor gave her coal tar shampoo, which didn’t do anything except smell like coal tar. What to do? Go to what is now my personal favorite health alt, Imedix.

iMedix offers pre-approved articles on almost any disease in the known world, with a fix-as-you-go spellchecker in case you don’t know about the silent p in psoriasis. See below:

Second, iMedix gives you a network of people who are interested in the same disease. It’s like Facebook for diseases, which is great for hypochondriacs and the truly diseased alike. Unless hypochondria is a disease in itself, in which case I am in an infinite logical loop. Back to iMedix.

In comparing Googlehealth with Imedix, Iri Amirav (the guy in the bold on the top of this section) had this to say, “Googlehealth is a walled approach, it’s private and secure. On Imedix, we’re about openness. The philosophy that my partner and I have for healthcare is to promote transparency. Complimentary to google, this is something that’s different but can be used at the same time. Here you can search for health information that was already filtered. Google can’t do that because everything’s private.”

And the psoriasis information I found? There’s a certain bark on a French tree you’re supposed to put in pill form and swallow it, that and omega-3 fish pills. Three a day, double strength. We bought that. It really helps, and it doesn’t smell like coal tar. And neither does the Dead Sea which an article on iMedix told me to do. I’m going there on Monday.

Smart search, collective search, Internet Relay Chat search, and a health alt. That’s just four. Next week there will be four more.  Stay tuned next week for “Search is Happening in Israel, Part II.”

This entry was posted on Friday, August 8th, 2008 at 10:27 am and is filed under Guest Authors, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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