ReadWriteWeb

We've all seen photos of ourselves in locations we can't quite remember. Often they're from exotic travels or from days long past. Regardless of the reason for your memory loss, IBM is working on a tool that can help. In collaboration with the European Union consortium, the company is testing SAPIR (Search in Audio-Visual Content Using Peer-to-peer Information Retrieval). The image matching search technology allows users to pull results from large collections of audio-visual content without using tags for search. Instead, users can upload images and match them to similar ones - perhaps even ones with signage and labels. The system analyzes everything from digital photographs, to sound files to video. From here it automatically indexes and ranks the media for retrieval.

What's the easiest travel website? The best test prep software? The most powerful and secure online payment processor? How would you find the answers to these questions, at least from the perspective of your online peers?

RankSpeed is a sentiment-based search engine. It tracks mentions of websites and web-based services in blogs and on Twitter, then ranks their search results based on sentiment analysis.

Collecta, the real-time search startup we reviewed in May and again in June, is releasing their API today and announcing that the developer of the best application will receive a MacBook Pro.

"The API is really simple to integrate," said Collecta CEO Gerry Campbell in a phone conversation yesterday. "It works very similar to the Twitter search API. We enourage that as a standard and wanted to make sure developers could easily pick it up and use it."

No one with any tact would ever tell you that you look fat to your face. But a sea of anonymous netizens will tell you in real-time on multiple channels. Kim Kardashian, Beyonce and Twilight's Stephenie Meyer all come up on real time search engines if you type in "looks fat". And each of these women would see these painful comments if they listened to the publicist who told them to "measure brand conversation". When we last covered UberVU, the company had just launched ContextVoice API - an API that helps developers create tools for conversation tracking. Today, the company added new search functionality to ContextVoice with a number of useful filtering options.

ContextSense is a newly launched sentiment extraction technology from Wingify, a company focused on website optimization solutions. As a part of their core product which helps website owners identify visitor demographics and behavior, target ads, and optimize landing pages, ContextSense demonstrates how Wingify's contextual targeting technology works. To use the tool, you simply enter in a URL or a piece of text, and it will then reveal the overall sentiment of the website (positive or negative), relevant tags, concepts, categories, and contextually similar links. The end result is a quick glimpse into what a site is all about.

We've all seen how semantic technologies improve search results, but rarely do we see those results put to use in such a targeted way. Jens Tellefsen, VP of Marketing and Product Strategy at NetBase Solutions spoke to ReadWriteWeb about today's launch of healthBase - a medical search and discovery application. Using a variety of semantic indexing techniques, the company crawls the web's leading medical and health players including the Mayo Clinic, PubMed (US National Library of Medicine) WedMd, Medical News Today and Discovery Health. What makes this a truly unique technology is that rather than requiring any data manipulation from humans, Netbase's search results are completely automated.

Dorthy.com, a site we've been hearing about since late last year, has just raised $4 million from angel investors for their "new agey" concept of a search engine for dreams. Currently in private alpha, the site makes fluffy claims about how they're "reversing the traditional search process, continuously filtering and focusing the Universe of online content, to connect you with the best stuff around your interests and aspirations."

If you're not clear on what exactly that means, don't feel bad... but don't write them off either. Instead, think of Dorthy.com as a new take on the old 43Things, the site which encourages users to list goals, share progress, and cheer each other on. Dorthy does the same but gets you there by making interesting use of Web 3.0 technologies like AI and natural language search.

Google has launched several new additions to its enterprise version of Labs today. First and foremost, they've created a new tool that will let businesses compare any enterprise search engine with Google Search Appliance or Google Site Search. The software will then let you administer a anonymized and randomized test that users can vote on, letting you determine the quality of search results from different options.

The other announcements today are a new Google Search Appliance Connector for the Salesforce CRM, and the full launch of Google Apps Script for all Premier and Education Edition customers. Apps Script has been in a pilot since May but is now up to snuff for production environments.

The iPhone's email client is pretty good and with the 3.0 update, it can also finally search through email on your server. To do that, though, you have to be online and you can only do basic keyword searches. ReMail 2.0 wants to change this. ReMail's iPhone app (iTunes link), which officially launched today, downloads all your email from any IMAP server and makes it searchable, no matter whether you are online or offline. The app, which costs $4.99, includes advanced search functions as well as a very smart auto-completion feature for speeding up your searches.

But was this a fair fight?

Mobile analyst firm MSearchGroove has just published the results of a series of tests which show that the mobile search service ChaCha beat out two other voice-enabled search applications on the iPhone when it comes to search query accuracy. [Update, Ed: a commenter points out that the report was actually sponsored by ChaCha] To test this, the researchers used Google's own mobile application and Vlingo for iPhone, an app that lets you search both Google or Yahoo. Oddly, they ignored Yahoo's mobile app, which also has voice search built in.

The results of their study aren't entirely shocking: if you want to be understood, ask a human, not a computer.

After seeing how hard it is to combat the goliath that is Google when it comes to search, you almost have to wonder about anyone launching an alternative search engine these days. Are they crazy? Overly ambitious? Probably a little of both. The latest attempt to snag a little search market share comes from Lavva, a company with big ideas about social search. Instead of retrieving sites based on a search algorithm like Google does, Lavva bases its search results on what people say are the top results. According to the company, this makes search "100% democratic." After a few test searches of our own, we can only say this: there's a reason why Google is king. Algorithms work.

Security firm Symantec has identified the top 100 searches conducted by children online. Popular items in the list include some expected entries like YouTube, Facebook, and MySpace as well as queries for popular pop idols like Michael Jackson and Miley Cyrus. However, what's surprising about the children's list is how similar it looks to that of any other online adult - something which seems to imply that our online activities aren't all that age dependent after all.

Earlier this morning the Internet was buzzing with news first reported by The New York Times Bits blog: Doug Cutting was leaving Yahoo. In specific, he was leaving Yahoo for Cloudera, a small startup.

Cutting was one of Yahoo's best and brightest, especially in the area of search and software infrastructure. He got to work on the largest installation of his wildly successful software Hadoop, an open source solution for dealing with huge data sets. Both Yahoo and Cloudera use Hadoop, so the work is the same on the most basic level. Why would he leave to join a 20-person team at a young company?

Stockholm-based startup Spezify is a visual search engine that impresses with relevant results displayed in a visual but still functional way.

Founded by Felix af Ekenstam and Per Persson, digital creatives who have over 10 years of experience in the space, Spezify arrived in beta in April and launched officially about six weeks ago. Results are culled from a number of search APIs and include social and multimedia content presented as a mosaic of the "big picture" for any search terms.

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We at Hakia are proud to announce our upcoming commercial ontology, perhaps the world's first. What is a commercial ontology? If you're asking this question you have just touched on an important distinction: fantasy versus reality. In the context of the Web, a commercial ontology is a realistic version of an ontology, as we explain below.

Twitter just announced its new home page redesign complete with trending topics and search. Publicly launched at the 2006 South by South West interactive festival, users first flocked to the site as a way to communicate with friends and festival attendees. However, as we've seen in the past few years, the site has evolved into a multifaceted real-time tool. The community has given timely updates on earthquakes, the Iran election and we've even seen professional poker players bluff in real-time Tweets. Twitter has evolved into a community where users can discover breaking news and trends and the new home page certainly matches that.

The future of search almost certainly involves social networks, social graphs, or social filtering in some capacity. Companies will live or die by whether they get the "social" part right: creating the right level of intimacy, trust, reliability, social connectedness, and accuracy in their results listings. Of course, this specifically means that their user experience must at least meet or, preferably, exceed that of Google's.

To achieve this, we must first stop arguing over the different flavors of search.

Mobile startup Aloqa launched earlier this week at the MobileBeat conference, revealing their innovative interface for location-aware search. Their new application proactively seeks out nearby businesses, services, events, and even Facebook friends and presents them to you in a colorful yet streamlined interface. The app essentially lists everything that's nearby - with no need for you to perform map-based searches or launch a browser. Instead, all you have to do is look at your phone.

FriendFeed has recently launched a search feature, and so Facebook search must be coming soon.

Real-time Web search (of streams of activities) is a hot topic right now. Everyone, including Google and Microsoft, recognizes the value of using trusted contacts as filters. What was once called social search is now called real-time search, but this time it will really happen. First, it will be applied to streams and then to the Web in general.

What we are about to get is a Social Relevancy Rank. Whenever you search streams of activity, the results will be ordered not chronologically but by how relevant each is to you based on your social graph. That is, people who matter more to you will bubble up. How does this work? Well, there will be a formula, just as there is a formula for Page Rank.

Xobni, the makers of an Outlook add-in for a "smarter inbox," have just released a slew of new premium features in a package called "Xobni Plus." For the most part, these new features aim to bring more advanced search tools to your inbox, including the ability to build advanced queries, search within conversations and networks, and create Boolean searches. Also new are auto-suggest and filtering features. The question now is will users pay $29.95 for the upgrade?