Sootle the Search Engine

First they launched, then they relaunched, and now they're launched again in alpha. What is it? It's Sootle! Sootle ( http://www.sootle.net ) is not a meta-search but a standalone search engine and is, as noted, in Alpha.

Sootle has a directory search that looks to be the Open Directory Project, and a Web search. The front page is a plain query box, but the advanced search allows you to specify stemming and the number of search results you want per page. (10, 30, or 100.)You can also limit your search to a certain site but it's an "around your elbow" process -- look at the help pages for details.

A search for "agriculture" found 738 results, with the first result, interestingly enough, from stat-usa.gov. A few results down there were Yahoo directory results. Search results include page title and URL, snippet, size, date (I'm guessing that's an index date) and a link to a "text cache." Two interesting things: it looks like Soople is indexing entire pages (that stat-usa.gov site is over 600K) and their text cache look to be just that -- text only. Nasty for human eyeballs, possibly much fun for scrapers.

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