Amazon has now extended its search to include the full text of over 120,000 books. It will even do hit-highlighting on the actual pages that match. Slick!

Penn State University has released a new search engine called SMEALSearch, which is focused on indexing academic and business white papers, articles and reports.

“SMEALSearch is a niche search engine that searches the web and catalogs academic articles as well as commercially produced articles and reports that address any branch of Business. The search engine crawls websites of universities, commercial organizations, research institutes and government departments to retrieve academic articles, working papers, white papers, consulting reports, magazine articles, and published statistics and facts.”

Unfortunately, I haven’t been using any IM clients recently due to the fact that their usage is banned and blocked where I work (more on that sometime).

Anyway, it was intriguing to read via Jeremy Zawodny Blog about Yahoo’s new IMVironment (e.g. plug-in) for its Messenger client that allows users to search collaboratively.

“Pull up a map or yellow pages listing together instantly. Working with a colleague in another city? Search together in real time for info, images, news…”

Well, that was quick… Here’s quote via San Jose Biz Journal

“Kaltix Corp., a search technology startup, has been purchased by Internet search engine company Google Inc., of Mountain View. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.”

(Thanks for the heads-up Anil.)

I posted something about this back in August, but based on their “published research that claims to offer a way to compute search results nearly 1,000 times faster than what’s possible using current methods”, it seems like a smart move for Google.

Fredrick Marckini talks to advertising pioneer Jack Trout about exactly how Microsoft can trump Google…

Jack Trout, “says Google is dangerously close to becoming the generic in the space. Should that happen, the company would be open to brand and product positioning attacks on multiple fronts.”

[Fredrick Marckini] “…asked Jack Trout about the possibility of Microsoft gaining search market share by adding a search interface to its new OS as many expect it will — effectively creating a structural barrier to all other search engines by saving steps, eliminating the need to even launch a browser: “You’ve just defined a ‘next generation’ idea,” he said. “This way you make search an operating system component. That’s tough to unseat.”

I just tested X1 for a few minutes and I’m truly impressed with its ability to quickly index and search my local repository of files and email messages.

“X1 is free PC software that uses an advanced indexing process that lets you find any word in any email or file on your computer, in under a second.”

The Pro version of X1 is just under $50 (US) and adds the ability to search network shares and native file preview options as well.

The Wall Street Journal covers Google’s closest competitors (except Microsoft [for now]):

“Some search industry gurus even preach heresy: that Google isn’t the field’s technology leader anymore.”

Teoma’s providing more value by providing refinements from the “community”

“Teoma’s software has, in effect, found the “community” associated with your search, and is listing what related topics that community is “discussing.” For “power blackout,” the refinements Friday included “electrical surge” and “cost of downtime.”

An article on CNet about a new search startup out of Stanford (link via Anil)

Kaltrix — “A stealth start-up out of Stanford University is hoping to raise the heat on one of the toughest problems in Web search–and possibly out-Google Google in the process.”

“Without discussing Kaltix’s plans publicly, the company’s founders have published research that claims to offer a way to compute search results nearly 1,000 times faster than what’s possible using current methods.”

John sent me a link to KartOO Technology’s search engine and visualization UI that was “developed in Flash to present a friendly and clear visual interface while integrating the graphic charter of your company.”

You can see here what I think is a demo of the search and flash-based UI that’s actually meta-search engine of sorts that visually maps result-sets in the UI.

I wonder what their pricing mode is for these tools.

Tim Bray’s latest On Search essay alludes to the effectiveness of Google’s PageRank within the Enterprise:

“…even if it turns out that popularity [PageRank] is the key thing for Internet search, the Internet is a very special place, and itÂ’s quite unlikely that popularity is the killer metadatum for the whole universe of search applications.”

However, I suspect that part of what’s in works with Google’s acquisition and integration of Blogger is to augment PageRank in the enterprise. Yet, utilizing blogs internally to enhance the PageRank-ing of documents and resources indexed with the Google Search Appliance will require some ramp-up time to become useful.