IceRocket Has Some New Searches

IceRocket, last mentioned in ResearchBuzz in August has a few new searches you might find of interest.

IceRocket's at http://www.icerocket.com . Their available searches are in a row over the query box. New searches available since the last time I looked at it include Phone Pictures, Blogs, and Multimedia.

Now, in my last writeup I said that IceRocket was a meta-search engine, and when you look at the News tab (which I covered in the last writeup) you can clearly see the sources of the items. But I can't find an About page that provides information about where these results are coming from, and I can't find an advanced search anywhere that allows you to choose what to search. I e-mailed IceRocket and asked them about this. This is how it works: they index the blogs themselves. for the Phone Pictures they're working with "a few sources". For the Multimedia they're in partnership with GoFish (I thought that search page looked familiar.) Let's take a look at each of these searches.

Blogs -- The direct blogs search is at http://www.icerocket.com/?tab=blog&q= . A search for UFO (sorry, I'm not feeling very inspired today in the example department) got over 20,000 results. At the top of the page is a link highlighted in blue that says Online Games! I presume it's an ad, and if it's an ad it SHOULD BE MARKED AS SUCH. Underneath it are the results, providing post title, snippet, and source, and three nifty little links that allow you to focus on that 'blog in your results, exclude it from your results, or subscribe to its RSS feed. And speaking of RSS feeds, there's a feed for the entire IceRocket results page out to the right of the results. A couple of switches at the top of the page, under the query box, allow you to restrict your results to a certain time period.

Phone Pictures -- In this case UFO found 37 results, with the results providing thumbnails of the pictures (in one case it was broken), the name of the 'blog, and the date. Clicking on the picture takes you back to the 'blog. Some of these pictures go back pretty far (I saw one going back to July 2003) and in one case when I clicked on the picture the 'blog had moved.

Multimedia -- Since I already covered GoFish earlier I won't get too deeply into this. I will note however that the Professor Longhair search now finds 110 songs.

In addition to the new searches IceRocket has a few more new features. There's an RSS builder, a free toolbar (IE only, though the page also links to a third-party toolbar for Firefox), IceSpy (see what other people are searching for, unfiltered and most probably unsafe for work), and the ability to search by e-mail for Web, pictures, and news topics.

I wish I had a better sense of which parts of this search engine were meta-search and which weren't. That being said, though, I like the kinds of things they're getting into, and I like the structure of their search results, especially the blog search (though if that blue-shaded link is an ad it really ought to be marked as such.) Worth a look.

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