Search engines are appearing at a dizzying rate, leading to a variety types of vertical search applications emerged on the Web. A newly launched document search engine called DocMazy has attracted my attention solely because of its unique search feature in document. It is important to note that this DocMazy allows you to search multiple of popular document types such as PDF, Word, PowerPoint, Text format as well as Excel.

In fact, DocMazy’s search result page provides a slick interface that you can preview or download the document that you want. To view the document in a “Preview” mode, the document is opening in a quite fast manner. For every time the document loads, it will automatically convert to a Scribd’s iPaper format. Frankly, I like the Scribd’s iPaper fomat since it is not only a nice feature, free of charge and the viewing pane looks simply just attractive and easy-to-use even for the Internet beginners.

For some who are googling documents that use Google, DocMazy serves as an alternative with the ability to manage its document repository in a much better organized way. If DozMazy continue to improve its search function, and its core search database, it might become a valuable service for everyone who is looking for any free document of any kind.

Due to the fact that most of the Web masters who run and maintain Web sites would like to find out the real visual representations of where their sites’ visitors came from, and how their sites stand in the search engine ratings and results, I happen to think that the Web-based analytic sites are serving a vital role in evaluating the performance of a Web site.

In fact, it is true that there is no shortage of Web-based analytic sites that can give you a real-time stats (statistics) reporting across the Web. And the other day I did came across a new one called pageboss, which provides a visual stats tracking service relating to a site’s ownership, where the site is currently hosted at, in addition to the tracking of some key metrics such as Google PageRank, backlinks, Web traffic rankings and etc.

Pageboss, at my first glance, its service is very much similar to another free stats tracking service that I profiled in this blog called Web Valuer. Though it did not provide an estimated monetary value of a site based on the figure of the important data points, but it can feature a real-time visual overlay of your site’s overall ranking.

After you typing in your site’s URL name, pageboss will start to track the traffic, inbound link, ranking, and some important data points via some analytic vendors or search engines one by one in a one-page layout format. Your site’s publicly available stats data from some of the big name giants such as Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft’s Live Search, Alexa, Quantcast are all to be visible onto the result page. It’s good that with all this data, you’ll grasp a simple visual view of your site’s performance when compare to other sites. However, the downside is, if you find that your site’s overall ranking, inbound link, or traffic is low, you might get disappointed and most likely fail to show the expected return of the efforts that you put into the site.

Twitter is very popular nowadays, leading to quite a number of impressive Twitter applications that being built with Twitter API. For this reason, you’ll still see a lot of Web developers tried to increase the value of Twitter and rapidly deliver some Twitter applications bundled with leading-edge functionality with an aim to deliver significant benefits to the Twitter users.

Frankly, it’s good that someone has develop a sort of Twitter application directory like Twtbase. It’s look very much like Facebook’s or MySpace’s application directory, where different kind of Twitter applications can be found on the site. All the Twitter applications listed there are sorted appropriately based on the suitable category and currently there are over 258 applications have been submitted. For the Web developers, if you’ve developed a Twitter application, you can consider submit your application so that other Twitter users will aware of it and thus, increasing the traffic and visibility of your finished product.

Perhaps there is no other easier way to build an application directory by using WordPress open source software and a WordPress CSS Gallery theme. Instead of hardcode a site, this theme helps to showcase the snapshot of the application as a design gallery, features ten (10) applications on every page and a voting feature is available. For each application, the application’s site name or URL, brief description are also displayed as the basic information for each. A special note is that Twtbase is started by a 14-year old Web geek that based in Holland, Michigan.

If you like to read the top tech news but yet to keep track what is happening in the tech world by using an RSS reader, TechFuga might be a suitable site for you to check out with. It works much like Techmeme, that use an unique search algorithm to aggregate technology news around various providers and as told on its “About” page, the site is updated every five (5) minutes.

At present, TechFuga still very much in its beginning stage, though it claimed its current version is 2.0. Users can find all sort of the technology news mainly from the mainstream such as CNETnews, AP, Reuters, just to name a few. Hover your mouse onto any piece of news appeared on the site, you’ll come across the headline, brief description of the content, time of submission as well as the URL link to the original news article. Included with each news article is the related news stories, where the search bot collects and presents important related stories in order to form a continuing conversation based on the same topic. At the bottom of the page, there is a column purposely designed to show the related pictures under each news article, help further shape the user experience of TechFuga.

At first glance, this site is powered particularly by a search bot that scour a few big tech news providers for the news. However, carefully read the news stories some of the sources are not solely algorithm-based. Put an example, the news articles that are aggregated from Digg, as we know the top news on Digg are all users voted, a barely user-determine system. Another example would be del.icio.us, the results aggregated are the most popular bookmarks by the users on that site.

Interestingly, TechFuga has also incorporated its search function with Twitter search, not only it can compile results from the news articles it aggregated, it also will get you the latest tweets in the Twittersphere; you will find it most useful in some scenarios, Twitter users break news faster than most of the other news sources.

There is a newly launched Google Maps mashup called filmaps. It is a mashup that mapping the film and location, with the makers are submitted by the filmaps users. Although tons of Google Maps mashups have been created by using Google Maps API since the API was released in year 2005, filmaps seems to be a different map-based mashup that relied entirely upon its users to plot all the film locations on its interactive map.

On the front page of filmaps, you’ll find some of the popular films’ thumbnail posters shown on the map that powered by Google. Clicking on the thumbnail poster will tell the map to display the info window whenever the poster is clicked. On the upside, the info window will display more detail information regarding the film by showing the film’s title, the location where the film exactly was shot as well as description of the scene. If there is any photo related to a particular film location, a series of five (5) photos to be shown by default from Panoramio so you can discover the actual place where the scene is taking place. What’s more, users that want to plot the film location do not require to figure out the latitude and longitude of the point in which the film was shot, and it is indeed an interesting thing to do in order to waste away their time.

To find the location of your favorite film, filmaps also provided a search function whereby you can perform search on any location in which any film was shot in that particular location. Perhaps if you find some of the film locations are interesting and would like to embed it onto your Web site or blogs, you can just install the widget as prepared by filmaps.

I recently stumbled onto this site, whobuilt.it. I happen to think it is a site that served as a directory for all the Web developers to show-off their impression feat, with the offering of a claiming feature that enables the developers to associate their identities with the cool sites that they’ve made.

Apparently, this type claiming feature has appeared before on the Web. One of the well-known blog search engine, Technorati has adopted this compelling feature into its blog directory portfolio that allows bloggers to claim their blogs respectively. However, on whobuilt.it, you’ll only see the cool sites that claimed by the developers one after another, and if you typed in a dot com company that hasn’t been claimed by anyone, whobuilt.it will prompt you to register an account with them and thus, claim the site as your own baby and get whatever credit for working on it.

I think Web developers should making use of this site as one of the great marketing tools to promote their works since it is free, and they can display their sites as many as they could developed. From the broad swath of sites that listed on whobuilt.it, one can rate the site as “like” it, even though the site has not been claimed by anyone. Not surprise, the most liked site is Twitter.com, with 66 likes at the time of my writing as majority of the whobuilt.it users have used the Twitter micro-blogging service. This can be seen on most of the users’ profiles, their twitter IDs are name after their real names.