Yahoo is making Google its default search engine, replacing Inktomi. Google locates frequently-cited pages for any set of keywords (but without stemming or other generalizations). It indexes about 1B pages, or 2/3 of all Internet content. [NY Times, 27Jun00. NewsScan.] (I've found Google exceptionally easy to use, especially for finding authoritative sites.)

IBM and AT&T are independently developing search engines for digital images, based on color, texture, or shape. Office software using IBM's Query By Image Content (QBIC) can search presentation slides. Their CueVideo project (under Dragutin Petkovic) is adding speech and voice recognition. Virage is developing the ability to search video clips of broadcast news. [NY Times, 17Feb00. Edupage.]

Kristian Hammond's lab at Northwestern U. has a "Watson" search engine that fine-tunes its search depending on text in the document you have open. As you type, it suggests Web pages that might be useful to you. [LA Times, 28Oct99. NewsScan.]

James Pustejobsky of Brandeis and Lexeme, Inc. (Cambridge, MA) is providing the NLP techniques for a new eQualia search engine that interprets context instead of just keywords. [Neil Gross, BW, 19Jun00, p. 208.]

The WebTop uses a context-based, concept-driven approach to search for relevant Web pages. . [Curt Davis , DUC, 14Dec99. net-hap.]

Jon Greenblatt is proud of his InfoJukebox question-answering software, which gives you direct answers to your questions instead of pointing to pages that might possibly be relevant. It can also do full proximity searching of the Web, and you can specify keywords that must not appear in the document. Give it a try at . [, comp.ai.nat-lang, 10May00.] (He suggests asking if Perry Mason ever lost a case, or about past Oscar winners, political appointments, or the parts of an airplane. Or anything you like.)

The English and French search site at lists 30 metasearch engines, with an estimate of relative usefulness. [Grantseeker Tips, 21Nov99.]

You can search other people's bookmarks at , or upload your own so that you can access them from any computer.

MusicMatch offers music recommendations based on collaborative filtering. A Mac version of the software is available in beta from . [TidBITS, 19Jun00.]

ToggleBot offers four kinds of search, including ordinary (deep) search, metasearch, Open Directory lookup, and auction search. . [Curt Davis, DUC, 15Dec99. net-hap.]

(For more search engine reviews, see Curt's Corner in Cyberspace, , or Curt's Interesting Stuff list, .)

Idea Keeper is a useful Mac tool for storing snippets of information. It indexes the text bits within a currently active folder by showing a column of "topics" and a column of "ideas" within the currently selected topic. Ideas can also be hyperlinked to each other, or to text sections within ideas. Click on an idea to open up the snippet in a word processor, or search for snippets via keyword tags or text phrases. Clicking on a URL in the text window -- which can include formatted text, outlines, graphics, and sounds -- opens up the Web page in your browser. Or you can click on an alias to open up an associated text file, PDF document, or movie from your hard drive. Palm Database files can be imported as topics broken into ideas according to their bookmarks. Idea Keeper has both automatic and manual formatting tools to simplify idea capture from text and HTML files. The program also has knowledge management features, such as alert times for bringing an idea to your attention. The program does have occasional bugs and crashes, but the author has been quick to fix them. $30 shareware from Glenn Berntson of Plum Island Software, . [Matt Neuburg , TidBITS, 08May00.] (For other Mac-based solutions, see .)

----- "Knowledge is the food of the soul." -- Plato. -----