Phil Bradley's weblog

Startpage Metasearch is the new Ixquick

Ixquick, one of the old timer multi/meta search engines has undergone a makeover, and renamed itself to Startpage Metasearch. It looks just like Ixquick used to look however, so no difference there. It's a good search engine, and one of its main claims to fame is that it doesn't record IP addresses.

It's currently pulling results from 12 other engines, including All the Web, Ask, Bing, Cuil, EntireWeb, Exalead, Gigablast, Lycos, Open Directory, Qkport (no idea on that one, will investigate!), Wikipedia and Yahoo. No Google though you'll notice.

It also has a 'Phone' option, which is actually a people search for addresses and numbers. There's a video option, powered by Blinkx. Amusingly, while Bing is carrying on something chronic about their mouseover function, Startpage just shows the videos in the thumbnail, though admittedly and to be fair, you just get a few seconds of clips.

There's also a picture search, which is probably the poorest of the options, with a limited amount of background data.

Advanced search is catered for, as there's an advanced and an expert search page with even more options, but nothing amazingly exciting that you won't already be aware of.

Oddly the Ixquick site is still up and running and isn't redirecting, which seems a little odd. If you've not tried the engine, it's worth giving it a go.

Fefoo multi search engine

Fefoo is a neat little multi search engine that provides access to over 250 different search engines. Straightforward interface as you can see below:

In most cases I found the choice of engines reasonable, although there were a few surprises - no Exalead in the websearch selection for example. When you run a search Fefoo loads the appropriate search engine into the main element of the screen, leaving room at the top for little ribbon search element:

Nice and easy to use, with a few command line switches for specific engines or types of search.

PolyMeta - Intelligent MetaSearch and Clustering Engine

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.

Browsys adds virtual search folders & Twoogle

Browsys is a multi search engine, in that it has a variety of tabs along the screen enabling you to run a search on your engine of choice. It's a nice engine that does a good job and if you've not tried it, I'd encourage you to do so. However, that's not the purpose of this post. They've recently added Virtual search folders as an option. This is a set of tabs that have been created and point to major sites that you might be interested in. There's the Google tools tab for example taking you to major Google sites, or the Technology or World News options. The idea is simple - you can use these as a quick way of browsing through sites that interest you - a little like the bookmarks option that you'll find in start pages.

What's interesting however is that you can save the tab to your browser, or send it to other people. I created a set of tabs for sites that are mine or linked to me in some way; weblog, site and so on. You'll need to look at the tabs at the top of screen to recognise this however, since you'll still see the default folders in the body of the page. I've added a screenshot for you:

My user created tabs are at the top, to the right of 'Start'. Annoyingly the 3 at the end are not mine (Wikipedia, Maps, YouTube), but the system seems to want 10 links and if you don't give it ten it simply adds in default options which is silly and annoying. I also couldn't see a way of adding the 'Phil Bradley' folder to the featured virtual folders. Even more annoying - when you leave the page you leave the folder behind as well - the only way of getting it back is to remember the link to it. This really restricts what you can do with this, and I hope that Browsys will find some way to overcome this since it's a fatal flaw in my opinion. If you could store these folders, make them default choices it would be a great idea to make that page a default browser home page for public machines. So, 8/10 for idea but only 4/10 for execution of concept.

The second resource Browsys has added is called Twoogle. No prizes if you've worked out that it's a cross over app for Twitter and Google. Screen shot below:

It's an okay application, except that you have to scroll horizontally in order to see the full content which is irritating. It does tend to leave me thinking 'Yes, and?' but perhaps that's just me.

SearchMerge

SearchMerge is a multi search engine, pulling results from Google, Twitter, YouTube, FriendFeed, Flickr and Last.FM (if you're in the right location I think for that last one). Very simple - just pop in some terms and you're good to go. 3 search options available to you - Search, I'm feeling lucky and Real Time. Results are short summaries and titles. No help, no indication of what is available with regards functionality, so nothing unusual there.

Will I use it? Probably not. It's a fair mix of resources, but a bit too broad and not enough options for my liking. However - give it a whirl yourself!

Thanks to Intute for the headsup on this one.

SearchDazzle

A multi search engine that places four key search engines directly onto the SearchDazzle page, with a search option at the top that replicates the search for you. I think it looks very messy, with screens being cut off, overlapping and it's horrible visually.

Spezify - inspired searching

This is a slightly different search engine, and the keyword that comes to mind here is 'messy'. Essentially Spezify allows you to type in a search and it will then go off and find information from various sources (acting as a multi search engine). It then displays the information it finds in a visual format as can be seen below:

 
Any text information is rendered in a visual format as you can see. One click on the image enlarges it and provides a link to the original source and a second click opens the page. It's certainly quite attractive - you only get a little bit of a feel from this image. It's bright and colourful and is the kind of thing that would appeal to children, though some of the images (yes, even for the term 'librarian') were sailing a little close to the wind, though none that I saw were absolutely NSFW. It was also nice and fast. There is a 'related words' search but it's fairly basic.

That's the good news. The bad news is, as I say, it's a total mess. You can't get an overview of the entire screen and have to mouse around which wastes time. You can only search for a single term or combination of single terms, so phrase searching is out. No help screens or about us (look Spezify, searching the net is a complicated business, don't pretend it's so simple we don't need to know how you want us to do it!). The emphasis is on images rather than text pages, which is fine I suppose, but it does lead me to think that I may just as well use a proper image search engine or a text search engine, since this falls between the two. I'm left wondering if the relative size of the images and text is anything to do with relevance. Your guess is as good as mine. Re-running the same search results in images loading in a different order, so you have to hunt around if you're trying to find a particular picture you saw previously. However, the developers do make it clear that it's just a beta version at the moment.

Nice idea then, but it needs a lot of tweaking before it's particularly useful. An option to view the entire screen would be marvellous, an 'about us' page, help screen, the ability to search phrases, a standardised order of display and option to filter, and as they say themselves, the option of adding in video and audio. Thanks to Judy O'Connell for this one via Twitter.

OXYsearch

There's a temptation to say 'By the Power of Oxysearch!' when looking at OXYsearch. Even the logo amuses me - I'm sure that it's intended to look like one of the soap powder brands. What do you think?
Anyway, this is a multi search engine, drawing together (with concentrated power!) results from Google, Yahoo, Live, Ask, Pixsy and a few others for good measure. The results screen is very similar to the triptych used by Ask before they took the dopey pills, with a narrow results option on the left, results in the middle and appropriate other content on the right, such as headlines, video, images, blog results and so on. If you liked the way Ask used to work, you'll probably like this one. Not so happy with the fact that the adverts take most of the real estate above the fold, and it's necessary to right scroll to see the extra content column, especially when there's a great gaping nothing to the right of the results. It could also provide more information about the results - it's all well and good telling us that results have come from specific engines, but I'd like to know which position as well as which engine. The 'share' option is also worth a quick note; it's really giving you the chance to provide friends information across a very wide range of social media resources including Twitter.

If you're into blended results, as well as getting your whites whiter than white, then you could do worse than spend a few minutes browsing OXYsearch.

surchur

I've been informed that surchur has been updated. This is a nice search engine which has a rather different looking interface. Type in your search term and surchur will find appropriate results in areas as diverse as Yahoo Buzz, Google Trends, CNN Topics, Twitter search, social applications such as digg, and delicious, images from Flickr, photobucket and pixsy, blog search engines, news sources, video sources, and product sites such as ebay and Amazon.

The folks at surchur have improved the interface, so it has a much cleaner design, it loads quickly, there's a 'popular search' option, a 'surchmeter' to see how hot your keywords are with various sources and a nice little dashboard to hold everything. And RSS feeds for your searches, hot topics and so on. No Help option though, and no, the short FAQ doesn't count. Well - I have to moan about something don't I!

All told, it's a nice engine; it does what it should do quickly and effectively. Give it a spin.

Whatever happened to Fazzle?

There used to be a search engine out there called 'Fazzle' which was a multi/meta search engine which gave percentage results from the major engines. I checked it out about a month or so ago, but it now seems to have disappeared, leaving behind a page load error. I've not really seen any blog mentions of its demise, so this could just bit a blip. If anyone knows anything though, do let me know via comments!