Google-Free Wednesday
I’ve been using meta-search sites much more often over the last few months. Some are good, some aren’t. Here are two clustering meta-search sites that don’t measure up.
KillerInfo
KillerInfo purportedly searches Google, MSN, Yahoo, and Lycos. You can select the engines you want to search on the advanced search page. However, if you only select just Yahoo and Lycos and search Tibet, it will not return any results for those two search engines. You either get a response that says the syntax is unsupported by the search engines or it just says nothing and provides no results. If you go the the search engines and do the same search, then you get a huge list of results. Of course, it provides good results for Google and MSN, but what good is that on Google-Free Wednesday?
Like Clusty, KillerInfo is powered by Vivisimo. Clusty says it searches Ask, Open Directory, Gigablast, and Live. A search using Tibet returns results from all these and more. If Visisimo can get Clusty to work, why not KillerInfo?
I would like to use Clusty and KillerInfo in tandem. This would search the major search engines using a similar interface for both the search input and the results. Too bad KillerInfo can’t even handle a one word search statement in Yahoo and Lycos.
KartOO
This meta-search site bills itself as a “visual meta search engine”. This has some promise but it is difficult to navigate through the results “map”. It is also difficult to eliminate irrelevant results without getting lost and having to start over. When I was trying to figure-out how to use KartOO the Help pages were not found on the server.
Most of the results I got were from Yahoo and MSN so this did not seem to offer any unique coverage.
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