5 Visual Search Engines you may not have heard about !!

All of us are pretty familiar with the simple austere look of Google and Yahoo search engines.Microsoft Bing is more colorful but result pages remain sober. Now take a look at the below mentioned five search engines to find how differently they present information.They are all Visual Search Engines as they present information in a visually appealing picture rich fashion. It may be in the form of maps or in form of a sliding picture show or a 3D graphical view.These search engines also show us the way in which we may be searching information in future.

Note: All these search engines require Java and Flash supported browsers and all are quite heavy,so a fast internet connection is recommended to view them.

1. Redz

Redz presents you with a sliding thumbshot gallery where you can scroll through the results with main result thumbshot shown on top with description underneath.

2. Search-Cube

Search-cube offers you a 3D cube with images of webpages pasted on all sides.Cube can be flipped and page description is shown in a side panel on mouse hover.Cool animation makes it an interesting exercise.

3. Ujiko

Ujiko is a device shaped search engine where middle screen shows you the webpage image with descriptions in the side bars.All functions are presented as buttons and there is a lot of that machine-guy feel using this engine.Try it to see the fun yourself!!

4. Middlespot

Middlespot shows you results arranged in a grid where you can choose results in the grid and it shows up in a larger thumbnail.You can do a lot of tweaking to change your experience.

5. Tianamo

Tianamo is a 3D graphic renderer search which is in beta phase. Its resource intensive and shows you a neat 3D graph with peaks representing the importance of webpages. See it to get a hang of it.It's really geeky!!

All these Visual Search Engines give you results in a new way but right now you will find them just amusing.Also, though some of them are powered by Google search, effectiveness of results is one thing that these engines have to pay real attention to. Meanwhile, enjoy the information in an aesthetic way to sooth your senses in this age of info overload.

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Knoling on Google Knol : A new web 2.0 tool

Google has launched its new service Google Knol to encourage users to contribute articles on their choice of subjects.Its similar to wikipages but with a little difference.Here author's identity is their for all to see.You can log in with your existing Google account or you can create a new one if you wish.His profile, his other contributions, his ratings etc. is available to viewers. In wiki you can change whatever content you want to.In Google Knol this can be controlled by the author himself.He can set preferences to give full control to knol viewers or he can provide a moderated collaboration, where, he gets to choose what changes to make in an article.


Interestingly, everything in Google Knol is a knol...even your profile is a knol you write about yourself!!

We have Adsense associated with knol and you can monetize your articles.

It's still in beta phase and that shows up in some of the obvious shortcomings.For example there is no place to show viewers what new contributions or knols have come in.Categorization and search also needs to be improved. People write articles only to find that actually no one can find them on the Google knol or in the search also.Now search is something that we need not tell about to Google!!! So I seriously expect them to improve it ASAP.

So you can expect a new term 'Knoling' (like 'blogging') doing the rounds in days to come.

Hats off to Web 2.0!!

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Add a free shopping cart facility to your website

Ok..you have a website or a blog and you want to sell products through it.But where to get that cool 'Buy it' or 'Add to cart' button functionality.Thankfully you can get such a service online at Mal's E-Commerce website .The website offers both free and paid services but free service is pretty enough for a beginner's purpose or for a small online store.It allows you to simply add a 'buy me' button to your page.Clicking on this button takes the your potential customer to the mal's site where other functionalities like 'add to cart' and payment options are shown to her.This database is kept on the mal's site and the site claims it to be a secure system.



It offers facilities like tax calculations,shipping information etc. to help you start selling products and services right away.It offers preferred currency types and confirmation email facilities.That is you get an email when a customer places an order and the system can be configured to send a personalized custom receipt email to the customer.The site don't process any credit card or payment and that has to be done via your own merchant account with a bank or through third part payment processors.You can visit the site at Mal's E-Commerce website and you can visit their demo store to get a good feel of the service..So go ahead and start your very own online store for free!

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