Scandoo

Link: Scandoo. Is an interesting search engine. It's a bolt on interface to Google, MSN, Yahoo and Ask. Type your search as normal, and you then get taken to the results page from that engine. However, what Scandoo then does is to flag each result with a ggreen tick, red cross or orange question mark to indicate the trustworthiness of the sites in the results. I did a couple of quick searches - it clearly indicated that my site was ok for my 'phil bradley' search, but gave a red cross against the porn sites for my namesake. I also tried a search for 'gay' and it again correctly identified good informative sites as well as the porn stuff. Impressive.

Comments

[Alison Taylor]

Interesting concept this. However, we have to question what is meant by 'trustiworthiness'. I just did a search for 'cancer cures' and as ever Dr Lorraine Day came out near the top, with a big green tick for 'trustworthy'. This is a site in which the author claims she "got well by using God's natural remedies". While I'm all in favour of alternative therapies, this site, and many millions of others like it aren't exactly the type of reliable evidence that we health librarians are encouraging our users to look at.

[Richard Johnson]

It's ironic that for Scandoo's security warnings to be visible the user must enable Active-x, which itself compromises the computer's security.

[Mladen Adamovic]

You might visit http://www.online-utility.org and if you like it you might write the blog entry about it :)