I've been playing around with a new search engine called SearchLion.
It's actually rather nice. It's a fairly straightforward search engine - you can see what it covers from the tabbed bar. It's worth mentioning that you can also add in more search options yourself if you wish. You can choose where it takes its results from - Google, Yahoo/Bing or SearchLion's resources itself. Unfortunately, you don't have that option with the other search tabs, which is a bit of a shame.
You can run a search and the results screen looks fairly straightforward - results to the left, adverts to the right. However, you can also choose a multi category, so as well as looking at Web results, you can also choose to view images, news etc. at the same time.
That's nice and simple, and you can scroll through the tabbed options quickly, to get a nice roundup of images, news, blog results, tweets and video. However, what's also quite neat is the 'Open' option next to the results on the left hand side. This opens up a floating window that can be moved around the screen and resized as necessary.
In and of itself, that's not too exciting. Bing has the flyout option, Google is playing with a preview pane, and other engines such as Exalead have a preview option in their results as well. However, the SearchLion offering is slightly different as it allows you to actually use the site; you can click on links and they open in the same window. Great for the competitive intelligence searches!
However, that's not all. If you open a second or third site, they tab in the same window. It's really easy to just bounce back and forth between them.
You can also like, tweet or email results, and you can choose how you want the preview screen displayed for you. Alternatively, by clicking on the LionV option you can open the screens onto a new page:
You can then click on the tab option to return to the previous display. It's very nice and simple - clear and easy to use, although you can't choose which result is the large screen of (in this case) the three. That's a minor point however.
Finally, you can save your searches and open windows.
All told, this is a nice and flexible search engine. I can see that it would be really useful when you're trolling through a lot of sites, or need to do some comparison work between sites/products/prices.
Comments