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.

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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.

The Museum of Advertising is intended to offer a uniquely compelling exploration of the ways in which advertising has reflected and shaped American culture, from 19th century postcards to 21st-century media.  The museum also seeks to celebrate Cincinnati’s unique role in the growth, development, and even redefinition of the advertising and marketing industry.   Importantly, we envision much more than just a “physical” place to visit. We also envision an accessible, always-on storytelling lab, anchored to virtual participation and user-contribution. In fact, we hope and expect hundreds of “digital ad curators” will help shape, refine, and contribute the stories and learning we will put on display both online and offline.  (Source: About the Museum of Advertising)

Pete Blackshaw, co-founder of the Museum of Advertising presents the concept in this introductory video:

Zakta is proud to partner with the Museum of Advertising to deliver a platform for “digital curation“.  Using the searching, information organization, sharing and collaboration tools on Zakta, supporters of the Museum of Advertising can now be “digital ad curators”, bringing together the very best advertising information from the Web, in the form of compelling online exhibits.

Here are some excellent exhibits (“Guides”) that have already come together:

• Mad Men:  Mad Men Era
• Super Bowl Commercials:  Cars, Beer and Liquor, Technology, Celebrity Ads, Soft Drinks, Snacks
• Brand Advertising History: Crisco, Ivory Soap, Coca Cola

We invite people to jump in and contribute to these Guides.

You can also create new Guides for including in the Museum of Advertising site.  How can you do this?  Just go to Zakta.com and login.  Explore the Web using Zakta’s search tools, create a new Guide, invite others you know to collaborate with you, and publish it for the world to see and add to.

Join the growing team of digital curators at the Museum of Advertising now!

As always, we value your feedback.  Please let us know what you think.

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!

Zakta has been selected as “Cool Site of the Day”.

Please cast your vote for Zakta here – voting is valid only today, November 14th 2009 – and pass the word along. Thank you for your support!

Here is the blog post here announcing this.