Serendipity35

I tried out two new search services this past week.

Are you thinking - Why would we need new search sites when we have Google and Yahoo! and a bunch of other ones that I already don't use?

You'd have to imagine that these folks thought about that too, and that they believe they have something that the others don't have - and so...

ChaCha search at first seems to be a step back. It's a search engine powered by computers and human intelligence. When your query is submitted it is sent to a very human "Guide" who is knowledgeable in the topic you're searching.

The service is new so they have a limited number of human Guides, so you won't get an expert on everything, but they should be an expert on search. reminds me of finding that really good reference librarian who is assigned to your academic department.

The number of results you will get is less than a Google search - and that can be good.

I tried it out with questions on poetry, Latin phrases, cooking and Web 2.0 for teenagers. The results were uneven. Some good links, but not the ones I knew existed.

I don't see this as a replacement for Google and Yahoo! search - a company would be foolish to try to catch up with them at this point. Rather, it is an alternative. It might be a better search for new Net users. If my mom was online, it would work for her. Even web-wise students could benefit from some help in knowing what to ask and how to ask the search engine.

According to the site

When your query is submitted, an alert is sent to all appropriate Guides who are currently signed in to the system. Because the Guides can see the question you submit, you can submit your question in natural language, just like you'd ask any person a question.

It also means that if you submit a question filled with non-specifics (like "foot") nonsensicals (like "asdfjlakjf"), you will most likely not get connected to a Guide because no one will accept it. Same goes for any profanity.

If you are at all profane or offensive during the chat session, your Guide will press a "Report Abuse" button, your IP address and the chat session will be logged, and you can prevented from using ChaCha in the future.

---

You might like that the Snap search engine gives a large preview screen of every search result. That might save you some time by previewing the site and possibly avoiding clicking on irrelevant sites. Maybe you just like pictures.

They claim to have 300 million stored site images and are updating & adding every time someone does a new search. Currently, they serve more than 50,000 searches a day.

This month they previewed (at the Third Web 2.0 Summit) Snap Preview Anywhere , a free service that lets you add previewing technology to your sites. If it is installed every external link on the site shows a preview when you hover over the link. Nice if you like that, maybe annoying if you don't.

I didn't install it here on the blog because I thought it would be a distraction, but I could see it being used on other sites - perhaps e-commerce sites with links to other vendors. If they release a version that works with internal links (within your own site) that might be interesting.