Google has made the jump into supporting Microformats as well as RDFa, calling their implementation “Rich Snippets”!

This is great news on several different levels. Semantic markup within web pages provides a way to target searches much more effectively.  TechCrunch provides an excellent example:

“If I was to write a post that mentioned “The President” without naming him, Google probably wouldn’t realize that I was talking about President Obama – it might think I was referring to another US president, or perhaps the leader of a company. But using RDFa I could tag the words “The President” with “Barack Obama”. That tag would be visible to machines spidering the page for indexing (resulting in smarter search results), but wouldn’t be shown to users reading the post. In effect, it’s a way to tell search engines about your content without exposing your visitors to extraneous text.”

In addition, sites that provide well-structured metadata have the potential to be much more usable (and useful).  Library web sites, especially OPACs and Resource pages, should include structured information that details the context of the displayed content.  Using microformats in our web sites will benefit everyone involved over time.  As David Peterson notes on the SitePoint blog:

“Now that Google is supporting structured data it is high time to learn how to use this stuff.”

Intelways is an interesting search site.  It isn’t a meta search tool, but it does harness multiple search engines to create an improved experience.

As with many things on the web, the best way to understand it is to try it.  Enter a search term, then select a category above the search bar, or a specific search tool below the search bar.  This tool makes it easy to perform a search one one engine, then switch to another to see a different set of results without having to retype the query or load the search pages.

One note to add, however: this site has been around for a while, but has changed its name a couple of times.  Follow the link below if you are curious about the history of the site.

from ResourceShelf

eTools.ch is a search engine with a couple of interesting twists…

It is a meta-search engine, meaning it doesn’t do its own crawling and indexing of web pages, it sends your search to 10 other search engines, then sorts the results for you. But this is neither new or interesting; MetaCrawler was doing that when Google was called BackRub.   Look at these features, though:

• eTools lets you rank, and even disable, any of the 10 search engines it uses. Thus, if you don’t like the results that Google retrieves, you can eliminate them.
• eTools works with keyword search terms, like every other search engine. Unlike every other search engine, however, it accepts boolean queries, and translates it into the closest equivalent for each of the search engines it uses.
• eTools allows you to select a language limit for your results.
• eTools will export the search result list as either a Pdf or RSS file (essentially an XML file).

from Search Engine Land

For those who like the power that is offered by the command line, there is Sugarcode The Web!, a site that lets you build search queries using keyboard entries that access many of the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, etc.).  Not really a command line search, and not really a metasearch tool, Sugarcode is certainly something to try out to see what it can do for you.

from TechCrunch