Upload images to make your entries and sections visually pleasing. Add descriptions and notations to key entries. Write a description, add tags and give your Zakta Guide a real flair.

* Viewed best in full screen mode and HD

As always, please let us know what you think.

Another way to think about this is as follows: Imagine being able to search across multiple related subtopics (using different queries) from across different sources of information and get organized results for all of it in a single step, in an editable document that you can enhance and share with others!

This is what that the Zakta Expert Guide Creator does for you.

* Viewed best in full screen mode and HD

As always, please let us know what you think.

In this post, you’ll learn how to create a Zakta Guide using the handy built-in Guide Editor.

When you click on the Zakta Guide Editor, you will get a draft guide.  From here, all you have to do is start adding the imortant links, sections and descriptions that make your Zakta Guide robust and informational.

* Viewed best in full screen mode and HD

As always, please let us know what you think.

Save your results, organize them into sections, add visuals and images, and keep all relevant information in one easy place.

* Viewed best in full screen mode and HD

As always, please let us know what you think.

Here’s a short video outlining how to to search the Web more efficiently using the ClipPad feature in Zakta.

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In our previous post, we showed how to personalize your Web search with Zakta.  This method makes it very easy to delete, reorder, and tag/annotate your search results for any single query and come right back to them at a later time.

However, searching for information on a single topic often involves doing multiple queries, sifting through results, and saving what we find through bookmarks, email notes, post-its etc. As most of us know from experience, this process can be cumbersome, time consuming and frustrating.

Zakta makes this process much simpler through a tool called the ClipPad. Here’s a quick review of how to use the ClipPad and how it helps make Web searching more efficient:

• The ClipPad is a feature that you can turn on in Zakta *.
• You can attach or dock the ClipPad to the right of your search results page.
• You can add any Zakta search result to the ClipPad.
• You can incrementally organize your additions to the ClipPad using sections.
• The ClipPad automatically saves your findings into your account.
• You can run multiple queries for your search topic, and the ClipPad will remain anchored to your window, giving you instant access to your previously saved results and enabling you to add and organize new results of interest readily.
• You can also generate a Zakta Guide directly from the ClipPad, and easily share what you found with others.

* You need to be logged into Zakta (sign up is free and easy) to benefit from this feature.

If you search the Web frequently for information, we think that you will love the Zakta ClipPad and how it saves time and reduces frustration in searching the Web.

As always, please let us know what you think.

Here’s a short video outlining how to to personalize your web search.

* Viewed best in full screen mode and HD

Here’s a quick review of the top features in Zakta that vastly improve and personalize your web search experience:

• Semantics:  Zakta uses semantic knowledge on millions of topics of information to provide meaningful ways to choose the topic of relevance to you when you are searching, and also to explore the space of semantically related topics to your query.  This improves relevance of the results and enables faster discovery.
• Organized results: Zakta uses automatic classification and templates to organize your search results into categories that are meaningful for your query. So, for example, a query on a celebrity will contain results on categories such as Gossip, Fan Fare etc., while a query on a disease will contain results on categories such as Causes, Medical Treatment etc. This improves efficiency in your web search, letting you focus in on specific aspects of the search results faster.
• Personalization: Beyond the facilities listed above to improve the relevance of your search results, Zakta enables you to delete search results, drag-and-drop to reorder search results, and annotate and tag search results, making the search experience very personal to you.  All your changes are automatically saved to your Zakta account. This saves time and reduces the frustration with having to redo your searches over and over again.

Do send along your feedback and let us know what we can do to make Zakta even better for you.

Here’s a picture of just how dominant there are in the search engine space: Over 65% of all searches are done on Google-related properties including Google.com, according to comScore.

Seeing this from the lens of the buzz in the blogosphere, yet again, we see Google clearly dominating the buzz compared to other popular tech companies.

In face of these realities, I found it quite intriguing when Doug Arthur, the visionary founder of the INTERalliance organization asked me to speak at their inaugural TechOlympics Expo (400 top high school students from 39 schools in Greater Cincinnati region competed and participated in this last weekend), about “More to life than Google“!

With the help of some industry observers including Charles Knight, I assembled a list of 14 innovative services that I really like.  In assembling this list, I deliberately left out the other well-known players like Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, and Ask, which surely are innovating in their own way.  I decided to focus the attention on innovations from small organizations that don’t get as much visibility or publicity, and wanted to see what these smart, young people thought of them.

Admittedly, going in, I was a bit skeptical that they would care about anything beyond Google, Facebook, Wikipedia and maybe a couple of other tools!  Boy, was I wrong!

Not only did the students in attendance eagerly respond to the various services I presented, but they also shared with me some others that I was not aware of.  What was interesting was how so many of them wanted to get a copy of my presentation to follow up and check out some of the cool services I had highlighted.  I was surely not ready for this response and I think it bodes well for entrepreneurs out there who are innovating in their chosen areas.  I am not suggesting, for a moment, that all of a sudden, an entrepeneur’s challenge in getting the word out, has vanished.  No!  What I AM suggesting is that it is heartening that the younger generation is so open minded to absorb innovation.  They seem to want newer, better, faster, cooler things and they are not afraid to try it out and give it a fair shake.

Maybe you are wondering what the revelation in this is – especially as my realization seems kind of obvious.

Maybe!  But then maybe not, when you consider that what I was sharing was a set of 14 search engine tools that do a fabulous job for different needs!  Tools that exist right in the space where Google is the dominant player without any doubt!  And yet, here were a bunch of really smart young people, ready to lap up new, innovative, cool services even in this space!

Here is my complete presentation on More to Life than Google.

For your convenience, here are 14 search engine services I like, which show that search engine innovation is quite alive outside Google.

• Cosmetic Safety:   Skin Deep
• Finding Facts:  Freebase
• Health:  Mednar
• Images:  Cooliris
• Jobs:  Indeed
• Mobile:  ChaCha
• News:  iCurrent
• People:  Pipl
• Real Estate:  Zillow
• Reviews:  Yelp
• Shopping:  Milo
• Travel:  UpTake
• Video:  Clicker
• Web:  Zakta

Admittedly, I’ve been partial to the search engine innovation listed last, our own Zakta   Barring this glaring bit of self-promotion, truly, the other services listed here are worth a closer look.  Please visit them and spread the word about them if you like them!

As always, I look forward to your feedback on this.

Image search

Now, for all your queries, relevant images from the Web are automatically included in the organized search results on Zakta.  You can simply click the “More” link below the image listing to get more images added to your result set.

Video search

As you probably already know, Zakta search results are organized into a single result page.  Now, matching videos from the Web are automatically included in your results. Like with Images, you can click on “More” below the last video to get more images into your results.

What is unique about Image and Video searching on Zakta?

Image and Video searching are more powerful on Zakta than elsewhere on the Web. Here’s why:

• You can edit the Image and Video results — you can delete them, drag-and-drop t0 reorganize their order as you see fit, and even add annotations and tags to them.
• You can automatically create Zakta Guides from the search results that include the Images and Videos in them with no extra effort.
• From within the Guide Editor in Zakta, you can incrementally add new Images and Videos to your Zakta Guides as needed.

i.e. Images and Videos are now fully integrated into Zakta’s personal and social search framework for finding, personalizing, and sharing information from the Web.

As always, we look forward to hearing your feedback on this.

We have planned many new and exciting capabilities for this year.  We thank you for your support in 2009, and look forward to serving your needs and receiving your support in 2010 as well.  Wish you and yours a wonderful 2010!

Brian Solis wrote about the rapid evolution of search (also here) citing the flurry of activity in the search industry around such capabilities as real-time search, social search and semantic search.  In my personal opinion, one big issue that hasn’t received much attention is the one I raise above – what is going to help people with their searches for in-depth information on the Web?

Zakta, our personal and social Web search engine, offers a way that makes Web searching useful, purposeful and fun.  As I’ve written before, Zakta helps with these deeper informational searches, by presenting organized information for your search queries, enabling you to personalize the results, save them for later use and even share the search results you’ve found useful with friends, family, workgroups and the world.

A few weeks ago, Matt Hurst wrote on his Datamining blog that Zakta was a new way to organize Web knowledge and might be part of a set of emerging tools for what he calls “web gardening“.  I wanted to elaborate on this part of Zakta, by introducing Zakta Guides, the social media tool in Zakta that enables organization of resources from the Web on any topic, and all the benefits it brings to people everywhere and to the authors of Guides in particular.

On Zakta, no matter what topic you are searching on, you can collect the best Web sites, news articles, blog posts, products, companies, services, videos, images, whatever is relevant and useful for your search, and organize and share it in the form of a Guide with others. When other users look for similar information, Zakta presents your Guide (or other matching Guides created by other Zakta users) in their search results.  i.e. Others can benefit from the results of your searching effort, and begin their search with what you have found useful.

In turn, other users can vote and recommend your Guide, share it with others, and even suggest new resources to add to your Guide, so you and everyone else can benefit from what others have discovered. Users who like certain Guides can subscribe to them so they can stay on top of updates and additional search results. A really powerful capability in Zakta is that you can even invite other people you trust – friends, family members, co-workers, and associates – to collaborate with you and add to and edit your Guide. In this way, a Zakta Guide enables the best information from the Web to be organized in one place for a given topic.

See these interesting Zakta Guides that people have created so far.

There are Guides on a diverse range of subjects such as these:

• Niagara Falls
• Lucille Ball
• U.S. political satirists from the 1950s-today
• Financial Aid 101 (part of a collection of Zakta Guides on College Planning Made Easy!)
• Finding a Job in an Economic Downturn
• Chess
• Ivory Soap Advertising History
• Gay Marriage in the United States

When you organize and share the best resources from the Web on a topic you are interested in, you make it easy for others to search on that topic. Likewise, you benefit from what others have shared.  Imagine if everyone decided to share what they’ve found useful from their searches on topics they know about using Guides!  Just how much more useful the search experience can be for everyone!  Jason Falls mused about the game changing possibilities this kind of approach to getting curated search results in his recent post on Zakta. And Jason was right in arguing that this will require that people come to Zakta.

I can cite three reasons why Zakta can be very useful to you:

1. Help yourself with a personalized searching experience that saves you time with your deeper searches for information.  Who wouldn’t want to save time in this ever-demanding world we live in!
2. Help others by sharing what you know or have found. You will likewise benefit from others doing the same.  This is a win-win proposition coming from a search framework that lets people help each other!
3. You can offer more value to your current visitors, reach more searchers on the Web, and engage your followers better in social networks!  This is a big, practical benefit for you, and here’s how Zakta enables this:
   • Zakta Guides can be linked from your blog, Web site, or social network page, to offer additional information to new and recurring visitors alike.
   • Here’s the big kicker - If your Guides are good, it will be automatically indexed by other popular search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and others – this means that users searching on the Web using these popular search engines for matching topics will find your Guides in the search engine results page, and benefit from your Guides.

By combining a personalized search engine with a social media tool in the form of Zakta Guides, and a social network to let you connect with people you trust, Zakta makes it possible for people to make a difference in the quality of the search experience for themselves and everyone else.  The overarching benefit for the Web as a whole is that Zakta can help organize the chaos of the Web, one topic at a time!

I invite you to dig deeper into Zakta and experience these benefits for yourself.  As always, we’d love to hear feedback and what we can do to make Zakta better for you.

But what is social search?

According to different industry voices, social search …

“… involves combining social graph information with pure algorithmic search results.“

“… combines traditional algorithm-driven technology with online community filtering.“

“… helps you find more relevant public content from your broader social circle.“

“… is information retrieval, way finding tools informed by human judgment.“

These definitions are quite broad and varying, and the result is that so many solutions have come under the banner of “social search”. However, one thing common across these diverse set of tools and services is this: they’ve all used collective intelligence (wisdom of the crowds, if you will) in some way to improve what they present to users in the search process.