In reviewing some recent visitor stats to my blog, I was curious about quite a few inbound links from a search engine I didn’t recognize – Previewseek.
A quick look at it shows that this search engine (it’s in beta – what isn’t these days?) works in a different way to what you might be accustomed to with services like Google, MSN Search, Yahoo, etc.
How different? From Previewseek’s about page:
[…] With our revolutionary artificial intelligence and adaptive behavioral technologies, you no longer have to visit multiple search engines to see what you may be missing. You no longer have to wade through hundreds of impersonal or irrelevant results to find what you need. You no longer have to resort to arcane query operators and lengthy Boolean commands to complete difficult searches.
How we do all this is rather complicated. We rely on over 35 proprietary, patent pending algorithms based on 20 years of academic research into artificial intelligence, Bayesian statistical data mining, word-sense disambiguation, cognitive visualization theory, heterogeneous database querying technologies, and behavioral psychology.
Right. Well, however it works, the half-dozen random searches I conducted produced good results, at least as good as the same searches with Google.
What I really like, though, is the way in which Previewseek gives you general results in the center of your screen with a sort of directory tree on the left-hand side made up of key words the search has found; you can click on those words to expand a listing and which produces fresh information in the screen center along with thumbnail graphics of the relevant websites or blogs. Nice.
Techcrunch described Previewseek well in a post last October.
Definitely worth a look.
Neville Hobson is the author of the popular NevilleHobson.com blog which focuses on business communication and technology.
Neville is currentlly the VP of New Marketing at Crayon. Visit Neville Hobson’s blog: NevilleHobson.com.
