30 December 2007

A metasearch engine

Thanks to Research Buzz for drawing my attention to Zuula - a new-ish metasearch engine. I don't use these things much myself, but Zuula might change my mind, so I've added it to my Firefox search engines.

It's interesting to see what comes up from the different engines when searching for information research: for Web searches Zuula uses Google, Yahoo, MSN, Gigablast, Exalead, Alexa, Accoona and Mojeek (yes - I'd never heard of some of those, either!) and I score these on the scale: 3 - the journal link appears as the top item; 2 - ...in the top five; 1 - ... on the first page; 0 ...not on the first page. On this basis, the scores are:

3: Google, Yahoo, MSN, Gigablast
1: Exalead
0: Alexa, Accoona, Mojeek.

Using the blog search proved interesting: Zuula uses Google, Technorati, IceRocket, Blogpulse, Sphere, Bloglines, Blogdigger, BlogDimension and Topix. In terms of finding items relating to either the journal or the Weblog (in either its old or its new manifestation) on the top page of results, I had expected Technorati to win, but no! Using a simple count of the number of references to the journal or my Weblog, we find:

9: Topix
4: Google
3: Blog-Dimension
2: Blogdigger
1: Bloglines
0: Technorati, IceRocket, Blogpulse, Sphere

I hadn't heard of Topix, but it is obviously worth a look.

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