search engine
New search engine inbound from Helsinki Institute for Information Technology

A new and effective search engine that can potentially replace Google has been developed by Finnish researchers.

Apparently, this fresh new search engine can outperform the current ones, while also helping people search more efficiently.

Brought to life by Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT researchers, the SciNet search engine (not to be mistaken with Skynet from Terminator) is very different from others as it alters internet searches into recognition tasks by displaying keywords related to the user's search in the topic radar.

"The SciNet search engine solves these problems. It is easier for people to recognise what information they want from the options offered by the SciNet search engine than it is to type it themselves," explains project's coordinator Tuukka Ruotsalo.

With SciNet, users can expect relevant and diverse search results at a faster rate than usual. This is especially helpful when users don't know exactly what they are looking for or how to devise a query to access it. If you dig deep, you will be able to relate to the problem easily. Talk about innovation!

People often face difficulty in phrasing what they are looking for, but SciNet effectively eliminates this gap by displaying a range of keywords and topics in a certain topic radar, on initial query. And with assistance of the directions on the radar, the engine shows how these topics are related to each other.

Apart from this, the search engine also offers alternatives that are connected to the topic but might have escaped the users' mind, as far as making a query is concerned. Later, by moving the words around in the topic radar, users can specify the information that is most useful for them.

Also, with the help of a keyword cloud, people can more rapidly deduce which of the search options are more significant to their initial search. Moreover, they do not need to visit the pages offered by the search engine to find new search words and start again, which makes the whole process easier than what's on offer.

The paper for the same was published in the journal Communications of the ACM. And as of now, the researchers have already founded a company, called Etsimo Ltd, to commercialise the search engine. Stay tuned for more updates!