Tag Archives: search

app of the week

Dragon Search – iPhone App of the Week

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Dragon Search – iPhone App of the Week

Dragon Search is the Fast, Accurate and Smart way to search online content on your iPhone using your voice.

Simply speak your search queries and get simultaneous results from a variety of top websites and content sources including:

  • Google or Yahoo! depending on your default settings
  • YouTube
  • Twitter Search
  • iTunes
  • Wikipedia

The innovative Dragon Search Carousel allows you to quickly access results from multiple sources, and is a one-stop shop for all of your search needs, even when your hands are busy.

Dragon Search currently supports U.K. English, U.S. English and German. French, Italian and Spanish support will be added later this year.

This week’s App is Dragon Search

Free

I have written before about Dragon Dictation an App that allows you to dictate and have your speech converted into text.

This search app is from the same stable and at a simple level allows you to speak your search terms and search multiple sites with a single term.

As well as searching Google…

…it also searches Wikipedia…

…and YouTube.

I’ve had this App for a while now, but it has only been recently made available in the UK iTunes Store. The version I was using only (really) responded to US English, this recently released version now supports UK English, so I no longer need to use a “fake” American accent!

Where I think this app is useful is if you don’t need to know how to spell something, but do want to search for it.

The downside of this app is that it is an app. On my Google Nexus One has speech search built into the operating system and available from the front page.

Get Dragon Search in the iTunes Store.

stuff

Yahoo to adopt “semantic web”

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Yahoo is going to adopt some of the key standards of the “semantic web” in order to improve the search experience for its users, reports the BBC.

The technology is widely seen as the next step for the world wide web and it involves a much richer understanding of the masses of data placed online.

Andy Powell Pete Johnston makes some additional observations on his blog entry:

It is worth bearing in mind the note of caution from Paul Miller that such an approach brings with it the challenges of dealing with malicious or mischievous attempts to spam rankings, and as I think Micah Dubinko’s post makes clear, this is not going to be an aggregator of all the RDF data on the Web.

Wikipedia on the semantic web.

Edit: Corrected who wrote the blog entry on eFoundations.

google, news

An open source rival to Google?

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Today sees the launch of Wikia Search.

An open source rival to Google?

Wikia is a new search engine and unlike the closed Google system, the results are “created” by a community of users.

Wikia’s search engine concept is that of trusted user feedback from a community of users acting together in an open, transparent, public way. Of course, before we start, we have no user feedback data. So the results are pretty bad. But we expect them to improve rapidly in coming weeks, so please bookmark the site and return often.

As Wikia comes from Jimmy Wales (one of the names behind Wikipedia) you will have an understanding of the philosophy behind this new search engine.

It will be interesting to see how this pans out.