Local searches

Some search firms focus on geographical niches, favouring local results to offer what could be more appropriate answers. Several target the British market, including UKWizz (www.ukwizz.com), which looks quite basic and struggles to compete with Googles local search (www.google.co.uk).Newsnow (www.newsnow.co.uk), a British based news searcher, sifts through headlines on news stories and categorises them by age. It is very good for basic searches (Beckham, for example) but you have to pay to search for multiword phrases or inside the full text of an article.Exalead, which is still in beta, ( http: beta.exalead.com ) is a well designed attempt to provide as many search options as possible, including geographically based ones. It also includes audio and video searching, limited clustering and the ability to search for different document types all without cluttering the interface.