Forget search engines: Googling is out, stumbling is in DPA
WASHINGTON: Forget search engines. Sure, the Googles and Yahoos of the world will get you quickly to obvious points of interest - Microsoft.com, for instance, if you type microsoft. But they will also have you surfing pointlessly through dozens upon dozens of barely relevant websites if what youre really interested in is slightly off the beaten path. Thats where a new generation of smart, proactive, community-driven search tools comes in. Collectively, they distil the web for you until whats left are sites youll most likely find relevant and fascinating. Individually, they break new ground and are justifiably generating a fair amount of buzz among Web aficionados. StumbleUpon.com Have you ever stumbled upon a site that ends up being one you visit every day? StumbleUpon.com ( www.stumbleupon.com) aims to make that a daily occurrence. But instead of relying on chance, StumbleUpon embeds intelligence into your browser to increase the odds of your finding a truly valuable site. StumbleUpon is a downloadable toolbar that integrates with your Web browser. In some ways this approach to finding whats best on the Web is better than services tied directly to a website, for theres no need for you to visit the site at all to benefit from the service. Once installed, the StumbleUpon.com toolbar allows you to click a button to vote up or down on websites youre visiting. StumbleUpon notes your preferences, compares them with preferences of others who have voted similarly to you and eventually is able to recommend sites that youre likely to find worthwhile. StumbleUpon works with both Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. You can use the toolbar to find interesting videos and people who share your interests as well. The StumbleUpon toolbar may smack of spyware to those who are wary of any site learning about a persons browsing habits in any manner at all, but StumbleUpon assures its users that it is completely free of spyware and adware. Digg.com With so much news online, how in the world can you ever take it all in? The answer is, You cant. But Digg.com ( www.digg.com) has a solution. With the help of millions of others, you can be exposed to the best news on any given day. Diggs members submit links to what they consider to be the best news stories they find each day. If other Digg users find a particular news story worthy, they digg it, clicking a button that then elevates a storys status. As stories accumulate diggs, they rise to the top above other stories. News pieces that end up with hundreds of diggs ultimately make it to Diggs front page. Digg has categories for just about any type of news story, as well as for videos and podcasts. With an RSS-enabled browser, you dont even have to visit Digg to get the scoop. Just have the best stories according to Digg users delivered right to your browser. Del.icio.us Take the concept of Digg and apply it to browser bookmarks, and you end up with Del.icio.us ( http://del.icio.us), a social bookmarking site thats gaining traction around the world. Del.icio.us allows users to upload their bookmark lists, share them, retrieve them from any computer, as well as see what other Del.icio.us find valuable. But Del.icio.us is about much more than finding what people consider the best of the Web, however. At Del.icio.us, you can tag bookmarks with as many keywords as you want, rather than, as with browsers, having to file a bookmark under a single folder or no folder at all. The use of keywords makes it possible to search for bookmarks and to conduct searches of all of the bookmarks that people have assembled and rated highly. The beauty of Del.icio.us is that people can use it in a number of ways to separate the best from the rest. Collectively, these services are taking Web search in a new direction. A marriage of social networking and traditional search, theyre harkening users back to the original days of the Web - when some search engines actually employed people to rank sites - while employing the machine intelligence that has developed over the past decade. If youre wondering how search will evolve over the coming years, this is likely the direction youll want to look. __________________________________________________________ Yahoo! India Answers: Share what you know. Learn something new http://in.answers.yahoo.com/ To unsubscribe send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in
