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Author Topic: Recommendation for a good comparison search engine  (Read 4115 times)

icekin

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Recommendation for a good comparison search engine
« on: October 19, 2008, 12:21 AM »
I came up with an idea which I am not sure has been implemented yet.

I frequently read reviews before purchasing a software or even installing the trial version. Normally I search through DC as it has high quality reviews, but sometimes I also look at other sites that turn up on the search results.

I have noticed that I frequently view comparison tables, like the ones on Wikipedia. (e.g. Comparison of media players) I was wondering if there is a search engine that can specifically return results of such comparison tables from across the web.

In fact, it would be neat if the search engine could generate such a table in real time if no existing one was found. For example, say I search for "Winamp versus foobar" but find no existing comparison tables among the results. It would be nice if the search engine can automatically go to the features page on both music player's sites and extract the data and put it in a new table for me to view. Or at least show the two product reviews side by side in a window split down the middle or something.

Think Google Fight, but put to an actual use.

icekin

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Re: Recommendation for a good comparison search engine
« Reply #1 on: November 15, 2008, 10:00 PM »
I haven't visited this in a while and have yet to find what I was looking for, but I did find a site called ListDump which contains large numbers of community generated lists. While not the same thing, its one step closer. Unfortunately, as with everything on the internet, quality of content is always the issue and there is no way of verifying the content of the lists, except to look at the article's points and comments.

icekin

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Re: Recommendation for a good comparison search engine
« Reply #2 on: June 09, 2009, 01:34 AM »
I recently came across 2 other solutions that have tried to implement this.

1) Wolfram Alpha (http://www.wolframalpha.com)


2) Google Squared (http://google.com/squared)