We're Going to Cover That In Phase 2

A little over a year ago, I posted about a number of interesting search engines that haven’t gotten combined the amount of press that Google alone has garnered. Today, the NY Times had an article about search engines which provided two more interesting engines that I felt compelled to list. Here they are:

• MrSapo, a bizarrely named but extremely useful engine because it allows quick, easy comparisons of the results of the same search on 45 different search engines. Using a DHTML interface, you toggle between the various engines. Using MrSapo, I found a picture Stephanie took of what she thinks an older me will look like.
• The Aquaint project, whose work is unclassified but has gone virtually unnoticed in the news media. The name stands for “advanced question answering for intelligence,” and it refers to a joint effort by the National Security Agency, the C.I.A. and other federal intelligence organizations. To computer scientists, “question answering,” or Q.A., means a form of search that does not just match keywords but also scans, parses and “understands” vast quantities of information to respond to queries. In the real Aquaint program, the questions are more likely to be, “Did any potential terrorist just buy an airplane ticket?” or “How strong is the new evidence of nuclear programs in Country X?” Apart from whatever the project does for national security, its innovations could eventually improve civilian search systems, much as the Pentagon’s Arpanet eventually became the civilian Internet. Of course, the dark potential in ever more effective search-and-surveillance systems is also obvious. I’ll be keeping my eye out for more news on this project.