Phil Bradley's weblog

Sperse

I think the idea is that www.sperse.com is supposed to read as 'sparse' given that it provides a very cut down set of results. It's a multi search engine, across Google, Yahoo and Bing, and it can also pull data from Twitter as well. Users can search web, news, video, jobs, images, blogs and some file formats.

Very straightforward, does what it says on the tin.

Fastoise - The evolution of instant searching

The evolution of instant searching. This multi search engine drags in results from Yahoo!, Bing (why both?), Yahoo Images, YouTube and Twitter. It's fast and effective. It does display results in a 4 column approach though, which means right hand scrolling - never a good idea. Otherwise, it works well.

MyAllSearch

MyAllSearch. This is a nice search engine once you get into it. It's one that allows you to input a search, run it and then click on any other engines to see the results that they can provide you with.

With web search you can choose from Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask (Jeeves), Yandex, Lycos, Metacrawler, Entireweb and DuckDuckGo.

Blogs gives you Technorati, Google, Blogs.com, Blogged and Icerocket.

Other options for search include downloads, images, lyrics, music, torrents and video.

MyAllSearch does exactly what it sets out to do. Clear and clean, nice crisp interface. The only confusion that I found was with the main screen, which is set up so that it looks as though it only lets you search Yahoo, Ask and Images, but if you ignore that and just jump straight into a search, you're good to go.

Yiwis

Yiwis. Choose two of AOL, Ask, Bing, Google, Yahoo and see the results in two panes. That's what it does, no more, no less. I can't pad this out any further! :)

Forelook multi search engine

This is quite interesting, because Forelook is a search engine that's been broken down to the absolute bare minimum. Take a look:

Virtually nothing there! Very basic, which isn't always a bad thing. Results loaded quite quickly, except for the times when they didn't, at which point they just didn't seem to come up at all. However, if you want sparse and reasonably quick and a fair spread of engines, give this one a look over.

Heapr and Goofram - multi search engines

For no particularly good reason that I've been able to understand, a multi search engine called Heapr has been talked up in the last few days on Twitter. People seem to think that it's brilliant and the next best thing to Google. It's certainly fine, but it's been around for a couple of years, so the recent hysteria is a bit odd. Never mind, on with the review. Screenshot below:

Web search is powered by a Google custom search and you can choose from Twitter, WolframAlpha and Wikipedia in the second right hand pane, obviously flicking between them as you choose, though I'd prefer the option of comparing any two of four rather than Google and one of three.

Other search options are Images (Google V Yahoo), Video with YouTube, Hulu and Vimeo, Twitter - with 3 different search term options and 'Lite' which is just Google by itself.

The claim is that it's faster than Google - and yes, it certainly did appear to be almost lightening quick. If you're just interested in really quick, simple searches this is worth taking a look at. Of course, it does miss all of the extra options that Google gives you, such as a timeline and wonderwheel, but that's a choice you have to make. On the other hand, you don't get lots of adverts to skip either.

Goofram is the second engine that I've looked at recently which does a pane approach, but this time it's limited to just Google and Wolfram Alpha. I have to say that I don't think it really stacks up against Heapr - it's slower, forces Google ads on you, the panes are poorly sized and it just doesn't look as professional. Of course, it also doesn't provide access to Images, Videos and so on. Very much the poor relation here I'm afraid.

MUNDU Search

Web search, Sound search, Music search, Lyrics search, Video search. Mundu combines results from their own search engines with metasearch results from the major search engines to give you very best of what the web has to offer. On Mundu, you can search for:

Pages and Documents

Sounds from the web

Lyrics, i.e. song texts

Music videos matching lyrics

Miscellaneous videos

It's nice, clear and neat. I tended to search for video, music and lyrics and it found the ones that I input (both well known and unusual) without any problems. I wouldn't use it for a straightforward web based search, but to get a combination response for music and lyrics, with the backup of content from the web, this was very nice indeed.

Favitt adds neat functionality

Favitt has added a clever piece of new functionality. If you're not familiar with it, Favitt is a multi search engine in that it provides links to different engines via tabs (Google for websearch, Images are pulled from Bing, YouTube is available, there's eBay, Amazon, Wikipedia and so on - a fair variety to choose from. You can have up to 6 immediately tabbed and available with more available in a drop down menu.

However, the neat thing is that you can now add your own tabs for your own choice of sites - such as getting Favitt to search *your* site (via Google's index, which is the only drawback). You can save your page, which comes with its own URL, so you can share it with others. This could be very useful if you wanted to create several search engines that focussed on a particular subject area for example. You can also add in your own background image to further brand what you're doing. (I haven't found a way to turn this off though, without uploading a plain image, which is irritating.) If you want to, have a look at philbradley's favitt page which I just put together which searches my site and this weblog. You do have to put up with the background though, and I'm not sure how it'll render on your monitor - it's fine on one of mine and rubbish on the other.

It's a really neat idea, and well executed.

Clusty becomes Yippy

You may recall Clusty - it's been around for years and it's a clustering engine - type in your term and not only get a bunch of results back, but clustered sets. Very useful if you're not sure of what you want, or you're searching a broad term and want to narrow things down a little. Well, Clusty is now no more - it's Yippy. Thanks to ResearchBuzz for the heads up on this one by the way. My feeling is the same as Tara's - what the heck is a Yippy? (My first thought was a Bruce Willis line which I won't repeat here!)

Having spent a little time looking at the search engine, it's immediately gone right off my list of search engines to use. It's one of the few search engines that I've come across that actively promotes censorship. It states that it blocks:

1. Politically-oriented propaganda or agendas
2. Pornographic Material
3. Gambling content
4. Sexual products or sites that sell same
5. Anti-Semitic views or opinions
6. Anti-Christian views or opinions
7. Anti-Conservative views or opinions
8. Anti-Sovereign USA views or opinions
9. Sites deemed inappropriate for children

How's that for a list? Of course, I immediately went off to try a 'naughty word' search, and true enough - 'breasts' came up with a very small number of strange results that didn't have the term on the page, and I was told that the 'adult filter' was on - but there seemed no way of turning it off; at least not that I could find. This approach is just so stupid, as there are plenty of other terms that people could use to search for adult material which don't trip their filter. Found the same thing with their image and news function. Yippy completely ignored the search term - it didn't even return a 'no results, naughty person!' message - just 'please enter a query.'

I poked around a little further, and took a look at the 'privacy' option. How's this for a little gem: "So to all the good people of the greatest nation on God’s earth we say, "surf and search away, all the time and NO QUESTIONS ASKED. We trust you will love Yippy and all the services we offer. We are proud to be Americans; "One Nation Under God.""  I'm happy that they're pleased to be American, but this is really starting to send 'whoop whoop whoop whoop, Danger Will Robinson!' noises in my direction.

Looking even further into the Yippy (Ki-Yay, Mothe.. damn, almost got me!) site at Yippy itself it's basically trying to be a portal - offering email accounts, cloud storage, video conferencing, chat, weather reports and so on. The icons are painfully retro, but not in a good way, but which is in keeping with their general approach and ethos. Take a look:

So, thanks for all the good stuff Clusty - you'll be missed. As for this ... 'thing', I won't be coming back!

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• Vivisimo Sells Clusty.com (arnoldit.com)

Letzfind

Search made Simple and Easy. Straightforward framed multi search engine, with Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask, Alltheweb, AOL, Lycos, Dogpile, AltaVista and Clusty. Those are the web based options. Can also search on blogs (8 options), books (6), downloads (8), images (10), jobs (9), lyrics (5), music (10), bookmarking (10), videos (11), which is about 76 options, though several engines double up.

Bottom line: Fine - nothing wrong with it, but nothing interesting either.