Phil Bradley's weblog

AlltheInternet search engine

AlltheInternet search engine is a fairly straightforward multi search engine. The home page reminds me of what Yahoo! looked like about a decade or so ago, in that it's broken up into tile type elements, covering popular sites, check your email, games, social, news and so on. It's got a real old style 'portal' feel to it, but it's very US biased, so links to eBay, Craigslist and so on are pointless for those of us in the rest of the world. Also, it's not possible to change any of them, so you're stuck with what someone else has decided is important to you.

However, that said, it's not a bad search engine. You can run your search and have 13 options to choose from, such as Google, Bing, Amazon, Dictionary and so on (though there's still that irritating American bias with Target and Walmart). A search opens up a new tab, and depending on the search that you have chosen, you may well go straight to Google image results and so on. It has a nice advanced search function - which of course isn't advanced at all, it simply lays out the options for search in an easy to understand approach. 

In summary, it's ok, with a strong American bias, and while it does what it does reasonably well, I'd like to see far more by way of innovation before really being able to recommend it. 

Instya multi search engine

The search engine world really is like a revolving door. One goes out (Blekko) and another one comes in, and this time it's a multi search engine called Instya. The idea is simple - choose the subject area of your search, such as web, images, news, video, shopping, answers, social and then type in your search term. Next choose the search engine(s) you want to search. These will differ according to the subject area that you're looking at, so web engines obviously include Google, Yahoo, Bing, Duckduckgo and Yandex, while video covers YouTube, DailyMotion, Vimeo and so on. Then simply run the search. You can run one search engine at a time, or several simultaneously.

It's nice and straightforward. Worth a look. 

eTools.ch - Metasearch

Nice meta search engine called eTools which I think is worth a minute of your time. As the domain implies, it's a European search engine, which is always a nice change, but it's mainly in English, so shouldn't be a problem. It searches Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yandex, in total 16 different engines. Results are displayed in summary format with a preview and status box, but you can have the results broken down by topic, domain, and source. There's also a nice preferences option, links to other engines and the opportunity to weight particular search engines to really tailor the results to your liking. All in all, it seems to be a really nice search engine. 

finderoo - meta search engine

Despite the name and logo, www.finderoo.com isn't Australian - it's based in Germany. It is supposed to search across a number of other search engines for you, but there's no indication at all as to which ones they use, which isn't terribly helpful. It does have a number of search options - as well as searching the web, it will search images, video, news, blogs and 'knowledge'. There is also an option to filter results using the 'Topic' option, which is used to rather better effect by engines such as Carrot2 as this one takes a bunch of words that it finds and tries to work with those. Filtered topics for the search on 'CILIP' for example are 'The Leading', 'Institute of', and 'Body for', which really don't help at all. Searchers can limit by domain, such as .com or .org and there's a family filter. The latter is so bad it's laughable, so cross this one off the list if you don't ever want to see adult content.

I'm merely including this one because it was suggested to me, but it's not an engine that I'd really suggest spending much of your time on.

InSiteFo

Shopping, Comparison, Research Online InSiteFo provides searchers with lots of options when searching. Basically you click on a subject area that interests you once you've input your search term. Examples are Shopping:Books, Shopping:Gifts, Research:Questions, Science and Technology:Internet:Alexa and so on. There really is a very wide variety of options, and I like the fact that it brings a lot of these together in one place for you - a nice multi search engine.

I wasn't so keen on the interface though - it's very retro (read old fashioned) and looks as though it was first put together in 2001 and hasn't been updated ever since. I also wasn't keen on the fact that when you search it can open up several new windows, plus a menu window, so you're quickly overwhelmed with different screens to look at. Then you have to close them all to carry on. This really isn't helpful, and I'd prefer a side by side comparision.

However, its strength is, as I said in the sheer variety of search options, and if you can get past the interface it's worth an explore.

Info.com

Info.com - Search the Web is a meta search engine, combining results from Google, Yahoo, Bing and Yandex. It covers Web, 'topics', shop, images, news, video, classified, flights, yellow pages and webmail. It's not bad - it gives fairly basic results, with title, URL, brief summary, an 'Are you looking for top section', 'related searches' and a feature I really quite like, 'related news'. I am presuming that it's running the search and then combining all of them into a single result, although it would help if they actually said which engines returned which results. It has a 'search wizard' which is actually just a basic advanced search function.

I looked at the Topics section - it covers automotive, business, leisure, health, home, lifestyle and world information. I was slightly surprised to see (as a result of a search for my name) 'sponsored results' listing my own website, and I certainly haven't sponsored any, so I'm not sure what's going on there. This section is actually more like a directory option, leading to specific questions - I looked at the automotive section and it was answering questiosn such as 'which colors of cards are the safest?' and 'Hybrid cars'. Although there was a search option, it didn't seem to really want to play for me, so I soon gave up on that.

'Shop' was what you'd expect - but it's US based, so probably of little use to the rest of us. Ditto the jobs section, which was also 'enter city, state or zip code'.

Images did what you'd expect - thumbnails with image name. However, there was a side column of web results, which I really liked. 'In the News' did the same thing, with a 2 column approach. The news was reasonably quick - my 'librarian' search pulled up something produced 44 minutes ago. Video worked in the same way. I was less impressed with the results though - no particular reason why, they just looked very sparse.

Bottom line - I liked it. Reasonable coverage, and the two column approach worked well. If you're looking for a meta search engine, this one may well fit the bill.

 

WiinkZ

WiinkZ is a multi search engine which provides button based access to a variety of different engines mainly the usual suspects. It's also got icon access to country based websites - so if you're using the UK version the BBC site pops up, as does the Guardian and so on. Unfortunately you don't seem to be able to edit them yourself, which is a bit of a shame. Wiinkz also provides search access via categories, maps, images and so on. It looked fine to me, though I found the continually changing backgrounds irritating, and they haven't got their HTML quite right, so scrolling is a bit messy.

Qwant: interesting new search engine

Qwant was launched in January 2013 having been in development for a couple of years. It's an interesting engine, because it really tries very hard to do a whole range of different things. It says of itself "QWANT offers the first web and social service, where you can dynamically use the power of your own brain to refine search in classic Web, Live, Social, Media and Shopping verticals so as to reach exactly the information and the people you are looking for, those that answer your exact query of the moment." What this means in practice is that you run a search and get 6 datasets to play with. It looks a little like this:

A series of images/video results across the top, and then 5 columns - Web, Live, Qnowledge Graph, Social and Shopping. They are very cramped, but you see enough to let you make a reasonable choice. However, if you want a different layout, these are available: classic (as above), mosaic, media, people. The results will be reformatted for you according to choice. Results can be bookmarked and saved, which is a nice function and there's also a 'hot trends' feature, which I suspect is being pulled from Twitter.

Searchers can also refine their results as well, though I didn't find this worked terribly well, and I kept getting no results when I should have got several (starting a search with 'library' and using CILIP to refine for example) and I wasn't happy that the engine reinterpreted my search without giving me the opportunity to override - turning 'CILIP' into 'clip' for example, which is irritating and unnecessary. It was also a shame that there wasn't an Advanced Search option, and they really are not clear on exactly where their results are being pulled from.

In summary however, it's a good start, and I'll be interested to see exactly how it develops. Certainly worth giving it a go and if you do - let me know what you think!

Soovle

Let the web help. Just when you thought there was nothing new in search, along comes a new idea. Soovle is a cross between a multi search engine and a visual search engine. If you imagine the concept of a clock, with search engine results available at different times on the clock, you input your search in the middle, get keyword results on the 'hours' and you can then skim the results around so that you can see what's available at 12 o'clock.

If that sounds vague, let me explain better with an image:

So we have our query - eBooks - in the input panel, and results from Bing, YouTube, Answers.com, Wikipedia, Google, Amazon and Yahoo around the edge. Simply click on the icon under the search bar to see the results move to the top of the screen. Click on the results that you like the best to be taken to that specific search engine. As an aside, the method of moving around the screen does look quite snazzy! You can add in more search engines; the default is 7, but you can go up to 11 or 15 which you can choose from pre-assigned options. I was disappointed not to see DuckDuckGo or Blekko available however, and there were several US based tools (such as a Walmart engine) which would never be of any interest to me. It was sometimes slow - Wikipedia particularly, so be patient, or concentrate on taking a look at the results that come up at once - the others should be along shortly.

It's a very nice tool. It's fun to play with, gives a good variety of results and it's a different approach. Well worth exporing.

ufind.it - The Ultimate Web Search Tool

his is a multi search engine, which pulls its results from a variety of search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Twitter and more. However, I didn't see any results from Twitter or 'more' in the searches that I ran. The results screen is very basic, providing title, summary and engine icons that returned the results - an example is below:

No advanced search options, no help screens, no ability to search for images, videos or news. Quick and basic would be the best description I could come up with I think; nothing wrong with that of course, but I'd like to see more from it.