NEW! Now Noflail Search shows you how real-time search results change as you browse them. See the blog post on browsing real-time search results.
Noflail Search, a Multisearch Engine
Traditional search engines are being overwhelmed by an explosion of low-quality content, including SEO spam and social chatter. But thousands of vertical search engines have emerged over the last few years to provide spam-free results each in its own area of expertise.
In June 2010 Noflail Search added a search engines panel that gives you access to more than a hundred vertical and traditional search engines. You can formulate a query and run it on different engines by clicking on their entries in the panel. Noflail Search is available at:
A short video tutorial is hosted on YouTube.
The list of search engines in Noflai Search is organized using self-explanatory tags. Noflail Search uses a novel method of browsing tagged data, described in the following white paper:
Noflail Search is implemented in Flex and features a cross-engine search history, kept in Flex local storage.
When a search engine does not have a Web API, Noflail Search runs queries on the engine’s site and shows their results in a pop-up window. We refer to those results as native results. When a suitable API is available, Noflail Search obtains results through the API and displays them in the Results panel. We refer to those results as Noflail results. Noflail results come with two special features: zero-result analysis, and the ability to interleave the browsing of multiple result sets to solve difficult search problems.
Zero-Result Analysis
When a query, sent to a search engine through an API, finds no results, Noflail Search provides a zero-result analysis that lists the most general subqueries (queries with fewer search terms) that do not have results, and the most specific subqueries that do have results. Providing a zero-result analysis is a form of cooperative answering.
The following white paper has background information on cooperative answering:
and the following technical report describes and analyzes the algorithm used by Noflail Search to compute cooperative responses:
Browsing Multiple Result Sets At Once
When you are browsing Noflail results in the results panel, the Noflail search history feature keeps track of your position within each result set. This makes it possible to browse multiple result sets at once, switching from one to the other with a single click. You can thus tackle a difficult search problem by issuing several queries and exploring the collection of their result sets in a breadth-first manner.
This search history feature is described in:
- PowerPoint slides that were presented at the 2009 Search Engine Meeting
and in the white papers:
