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No doubt Google, now a household name associated with ‘web search’, remains the top search engine on the internet followed by a distant second, Yahoo. Sporting an extremely clean homepage, Google executes your search queries at lightning speed and the search results are relevant most of the times. If you frame your search queries right, you are very likely to find the information you are looking for.
However, there exists dozens of specialised search engines that are extremely efficient and innovative though not very popular. Let’s discover some of these hidden or unexplored gems on the internet that are not Google which will help you in finding relevant information on Islam and Muslim community.
1. http://www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/: This server is dedicated to providing information and education for Muslim students. This search engine is sponsored by university of Southern California. The site has an excellent Qur’an search and Hadith search.
This database supports searching using USC’s Ultraseek database. A powerful query language is supported. This language supports searching with stemmed variations, and phrases. The results of searching on this database are a list of chapters from the Qur’an, each of which can be clicked to take your browser to that document. The results of searching on hadith search are a list of individual hadeeth numbers. Each number is a link into a chapter from a particular collection. By clicking onto the link, your browser will be positioned directly on top of that particular hadeeth.
2. http://www.truveo.com/: Just type word Islam on the home page of this search engine and you will find 98561 video file on various subjects.Truveo (from AOL) is the search engine that helps you find video content from all video sharing websites (like YouTube, blip.tv), content portals (like CNet, iVillage) and most mainstream media websites (like CNBC, BBC, Reuters). Truveo indexes web videos in near real time so you can safely rely on it for timely searches.
3. http://www.blinkx.com/: Like Truveo, Blinkx TV is another innovative service that indexes almost all the video content on the web. What’s very impressive about Blinkx is that it also indexes the audio portion of the video and transcribes that to text using speech recognition that makes Blinkx search results more relevant. And Blinkx shows short preview clips for every search result without you having to load the full video in the browser.
When you type the word Islam there are 198000 video files which includes topics such as: 5 Minutes introduction to Islam for non-Muslims and Muslims who want to clear their basic concept about islam, German Christian convert to Islam, The Christ in Islam Lecture by Sheikh Ahmed Deedat, Dr. Fazlur-Rahman - Scholars of Islam - Major Themes in the Qur’an etc.
4. http://www.omgili.com/: Omgili is a specialised search engine that limits itself only to discussions happening on public internet forums and online mailing lists it won’t index the regular web pages and is therefore a good place to find quick solutions to problems related to various issues pertaining to Muslim community.
Discussions on message boards are generally in the question and answer format (How can I convert to Islam) where knowledgeable or experienced members help resolve the problems faced by newcomer who start the discussion. While big players like Google or Yahoo do index these web forums, they do not offer the option to restrict search result to only ‘discussion threads’ that’s where Omgili can help.
5. http://pipl.com/: Coming to people search, Pipl rule the web. Type in any name and Pipl.com will extract every bit of information about that person from the web in seconds. Pipl will also show profile summaries (from Flickr, Amazon), research publications, web search results and recent news stories (if any) that relate to the person you are searching for. Type the name of any Islamic or Muslim personality and you will get the wealth of information.
There are various reasons why you might need to search for people, but if you are using a search engine such as Google or Yahoo to search for people, you have probably realized by now that it might work in some cases but in most cases it won’t.
How come the best search engines fail so miserably when it comes to people search? The answer lies in a little known but very important part of the web called “the deep web”.
Also known as “invisible web”, the term “deep web” refers to a vast repository of underlying content, such as documents in online databases that general-purpose web crawlers cannot reach. The deep web content is estimated at 500 times that of the surface web, yet has remained mostly untapped due to the limitations of traditional search engines.
Since most personal profiles, public records and other people-related documents are stored in databases and not on static web pages, most of the higher-quality information about people is simply “invisible” to a regular search engine.Pipl’s query-engine helps you find deep web pages that cannot be found on regular search engines.
6. http://www.spock.com/: Spock is a new but promising player in the people search market it pulls content from most social networking sites and also allows anyone to create their own profile on the web (along with photographs). Even Facebook now allows outsiders to search the profiles of millions of Facebook members that are public.
7. http://blogsearch. google.com/: For searching content published on blogs (and other sites that offer RSS feeds), Ask Blog Search is one of the favourites because the results are almost spam free and can be sorted by date or popularity. Ask provides live previews so you can read the linked story by just hovering the mouse over the search results without visiting the main site. Technorati and IceRocket are also very good alternatives to Google Blog Search.
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