PolyMeta is a search engine that someone mentioned in a recent blog comment, and I went along for a look. It searches in the areas of Web, News, Images, Twitter, Video and Blogs. It pulls content from Ask, Bing, Cuil, Google and Yahoo. This could be expanded out to include another 3 engines through their 'sources' option. Choices differed according to search option chosen, so News included content from Topix for example. It also provides a total number of results from each engine together with a click through to go directly to the search engine site.
Content is gathered from the first page of SERPS (which given that Bing has a larger default for the number of results on the home page would seem to give it a slight bias), and then arranged in some way that made no sense. I did a search for a hashtag for a specific conference, and the top result had been found by Cuil, second result had been found by Ask, and the third result by Ask, Google and Yahoo. Unique results are highlighted, which was a nice feature.
Information was displayed in a triptych with clusters/sources on the left, results mid screen and images on the right. There's also a 'did you mean' option which it's culled from Google.
The web search was ok, but having recently looked at Scoopler, it was a little lacking in currency, and didn't hold up any better when I actually checked out their Twitter tab. News was ok, but couldn't hold a candle to the more specialised Silobreaker. Image search pulled content from 10 sources, but was quite lacking in detail - just the image and source, with no further details. The video option was also ok, but again not as good as my preferred option of Trooker. The blog option only pulled content from Ask and Google, which was disappointing.
In summary I think that Polymeta almost makes it, but misses out all around - it's just not quite good enough at any single thing to pull it out of the masses, and doesn't have any kind of unique feature to overcome its other limitations.
Content is gathered from the first page of SERPS (which given that Bing has a larger default for the number of results on the home page would seem to give it a slight bias), and then arranged in some way that made no sense. I did a search for a hashtag for a specific conference, and the top result had been found by Cuil, second result had been found by Ask, and the third result by Ask, Google and Yahoo. Unique results are highlighted, which was a nice feature.
Information was displayed in a triptych with clusters/sources on the left, results mid screen and images on the right. There's also a 'did you mean' option which it's culled from Google.
The web search was ok, but having recently looked at Scoopler, it was a little lacking in currency, and didn't hold up any better when I actually checked out their Twitter tab. News was ok, but couldn't hold a candle to the more specialised Silobreaker. Image search pulled content from 10 sources, but was quite lacking in detail - just the image and source, with no further details. The video option was also ok, but again not as good as my preferred option of Trooker. The blog option only pulled content from Ask and Google, which was disappointing.
In summary I think that Polymeta almost makes it, but misses out all around - it's just not quite good enough at any single thing to pull it out of the masses, and doesn't have any kind of unique feature to overcome its other limitations.
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Thank you for reviewing us!
However I did not understand this: "arranged in some way that made no sense".
Can you give us some feedback, what was the query where you had this impression?
Posted by: Endre Jofoldi | June 17, 2009 at 06:44 PM