JL Forums

Shablast.com is a general purpose search engine that provides the following features:

1. Multi-document summarization.

When run in "Summary" mode, Shablast extracts the most important snippets from each search result in order to provide you with a solid general understanding of the topic, often without needing to actually click on any specific result.

2. Collective knowledge scoring for web results.
3. Collective knowledge scoring for news results.

For both normal web results and current news searches (the "Standard" and "News" items in the drop down list next to the search query), Shablast analyzes the top results for the keywords and then scores each result to determine which one gives the best coverage of all of the information appearing in the documents.  The document with the best coverage is listed first, second best second and so on.

So, for instance, if you search for "Old time radio" on Google or Bing, the #1 result is RadioLovers.com.  Why?  Because it has the most links aimed at it!  But RadioLovers.com has very little information on the home page.  If you wanted information about OTR it wouldn't offer much -- it's mostly just a list of links.  RadioLovers.com only scores 19% with Shablast's collective knowledge scoring, meaning that it only touches on about 19% of the information covered by the top 30 results for "Old time radio."

The #1 result listed in Shablast, however, (as of right now) is MysteryShows.com, which scores 64% because it has a wealth of information about old time radio on the home page.  So if you visited MysteryShows.com you would get about 64% of all of the information covered in the top 30 documents returned by Bing -- all on that one page!  Talk about a time saver...

This is also very useful when looking up news items.  Rather than having to read a half dozen stories to get the whole picture, Shablast will show the news items that give the best coverage of the overall body of information available.  That means you can read only a few stories, or even just one, to get the full picture of what's going on.

I welcome feedback, so please post your thoughts, questions or comments in posts on this forum.

Jon

Jon,
I know Shablast is free, so you don't get any return from it. I was just wondering if there could be an additional functionality added to it that might allow you to charge (for the extended version)? I would love to find public domain information and pictures and graphics in my areas of interest. Shablast returns very targetted results. so would be great for finding information for niches. There is a lot of public domain info out there and there are a number of well known sites but it takes time to go through each of those individually. Would it be possible to extend Shablast to find information and graphics from Public Domain (and Wiki commons, etc) in specified areas? That would save me time - and time is money. 

Does Bing let you do that? I'm just modifying Bing results with Shablast.

I can search Bing with phrases like "Public domain images exercise" and also click on the "image" link at the top left. It brings up (pretty much like Google) pages of images linked to the original query. Presumably they are tagged in some way.