Triplify: Search three search engines at the same time!

Tired of too many useless websites or advertisement when you are searching? Triplify may help you simplify the search results from three main search engines (Google, Yahoo, and Live) at the same time. Many statistics show that we usually use the first page of the search results or even the first (top) three information/websites. Therefore, Triplify may be a good idea that helps we narrow down the search results. Moreover, Triplify can compare and sort the results from one, two, or three search engines that I mention above and no advertisement showing on the top or side.

Unfortunately Triplify does not support Chinese very well. When I search Triplify with Chinese, some search results are unreadable or incorrect encoding. I am not sure wether Triplify support other languages better than Chinese, or it only works better with English. But it is a good idea of combining and comparing different search engines.

Powerset: a cool search engine that helps you discovering Wikipedia

If you are a Wikipedia lover, you should try Powerset . Powerset originally is a search engine company that advocates a technology of “natural language” search instead of just “keywords” search. Last year, Powerset launched their first searching product which uses Wikipedia as the main searching database based on their searching technology.

What is “natural language” search? According to Powerset, “the natural language search engine that can find targeted answers to user questions”. Users not only can search keywords that they would like to know such as people, movie, history…, but also can use sentences of question such as “what is the capital of Taiwan?” or “Who is the first president of the United States?” The main page of Powerset shows different search examples to guide users, so users can easily understand what they need to start searching.
Although we also can use the same strategy searching on Google, the presentation of searching result is a little different between Google and Powerset.

Here is an example of searching result from Powerset; I type “what is the capital of Taiwan?” The result page presents all the possible results from Wikipedia and highlight possible answers that I may want to know.

The best part of this search engine which I love is the result page shows the possible answer to me directly instead of just website lists. If you want to search something factual or some background knowledge, this search engine may help you find things quickly.

New start! Oops, what should I write?

I actually started this blog back in 2007 in order to fulfill one of my assignments while I took the digital library class. Since I graduated in the end of 2008, I am always thinking about renewing my blog and writing some of my observation and exploration of the Internet. This blog is basically for myself and I wish this blog could also keep me continuing learning, practicing writing, and critical thinking; however, hopefully this blog could provide some useful and interesting information for others.

Therefore, what should I write? How could I build an interesting blog? I tried to Google some tips of building an impressive blog and I found out lots of interesting articles. Darren Rowse’s blog is a good inspiration. In one of his articles, “21 Ways to Write Posts that Are Guaranteed to Grow Your Blog”, he provides some simple but good tips for the new bloggers. (Actually I was very impressive that he is a full-time blogger who makes a living with a topic “how to build and promote your blog”.)

I do not wish to be a professional writer especially English is not my first language, but I wish I could learn more knowledge and skills through exploring new things.