This Cincinnati Enquirer article provides some background information about Zakta.com and its developers a new search engine with a different angle.
The guiding principle for Zakta.com is clearly stated on the front page:
Zakta relieves the pain of deeper Web searches. Zakta lessens your frustration and saves precious time by giving you powerful tools to find, edit, save, share, and truly benefit from information on the web.
The site is more than a search engine. It may make information professionals think about traditional pathfinders. The guides provided certainly gather the resources and provide enough information to let researchers explore a topic in an overview frame of mind.
The “How Can Zakta Help” section answer the needs specifically of Information Researchers and more. The site aims to allow for collaborative research beyond social bookmarking. The guides allow for promotion of the Guide creators. Deep research activities seem to be easily retained and ready for your return and easy pick-up.
The site also has built in technology to integrate guides with your Facebook account. I haven’t tested this yet because I don’t always want the open web to have complete access to my Facebook data.
Since I am researching the future of special libraries right now, I ran that phrase through the search engine. At first glance I was impressed with the clean results that were relevant and uncluttered. The site allows a direct comparison between their search results and Bing and Google. I haven’t yet tested these features but I suspect I will soon.
From the brief tests I have run over the past week or so on this site, it’s worth exploring. It takes web research deeper than popularity and the added benefit of the guides provides a bit of clarity on specific topics. The site does a good job, at first glance, of combining social, semantic and keyword search techniques.
If you are always searching for the next best tool to improve, streamline or test your online search methods, Zakta.com is worth a test drive.
Constance Ard September 14, 2009
September 14, 2009 at 10:55 am |
Hi Constance,
Thanks for sharing your evaluation of Zakta with your readers. We recognize deeply that searching for information is a process, and we’ve tried to put together a powerful toolset to support the process. Please see this blog post: http://blog.zakta.com/2009/07/10/7-ways-to-improve-informational-searches-summary/ for more information. We would love to hear from your readers about their experience with Zakta and what we can do to make it more useful.
Thank you!
Sundar Kadayam
Founder and CEO, Zakta
September 17, 2009 at 9:23 am |
[...] Ard, Answermaven: “Zakta.com: Collaborative, Expert Search Tool Goes Beyond Search Engines As We Know [...]