Amongst the more special types of Internet search engines are so called Federated search engines. These are search engines that are not based on a robot or a crawler, but search Internet sources in real time, presenting real time search results.
Traditional crawler based Internet search engines are batch operated machines. They typically make a searchable index of downloaded web pages that users can search. The index obviously is dated and can be quite old, multiple days or even longer. The number of sources used is very low, just a few hundred. Federated search engines are very useful if used with a personalised set of sources.
One example of a federated search engine is BizNar, created by Deep Web Technologies. It allows searching in real time of up to a hundred large business sources. Results are presented in a traditional relevance rank order, but also in a visual graph and by topic. BizNar offers e-mail alerts, and storage of selected search results in subfolders. Full Boolean is supported. https://biznar.com/biznar/desktop/en/results.html
An alternative from the same company is MedNar, aimed at medical information. Also full Boolean support, e-mail alerts and results in a traditional relevance ranking list and by Topic. MedNar however, also offers patents and related MeSH from the National Library of Medicine to further refine your searches. https://mednar.com/mednar/desktop/en/results.html
That’s it for this week. Interested in more tools and sources for OSINT? Have a look at the Internet Resource Discovery Toolkit at http://rr.reuser.biz.
