Navisso Web Search Goes to Open Beta

The Navisso search engine has announced an open beta. You can check it out at http://navisso.com/. While the front page is pretty simple, a little digging reveals some nice features -- like stemming, fr'instance! Unfortunately the actual results leave something to be desired.

Like I mentioned the front page is pretty unassuming. You can start here with simple searches, but I recommend checking out the search features page at http://navisso.com/topics?c=searchhelp. Scroll down to the bottom for the fun stuff. OR searches are specified with curly brackets. Interesting. I don't see any special syntax mentioned.

Currently the engine is only indexing sites in English, so don't try non-English words with your searches. I did a search for Hawaii and got, in order, Hawaii.edu, a surfing school in Hawaii, and a Web site selling projectors in Hawaii. I didn't see the official site for the state of Hawaii on the front page. Urk. Furthermore, all the page lists is the title of the page, snippet, and URL. I was kind of surprised about that -- there are some nice features in the search engine itself (the wildcards, etc.) so I was expecting similar attention to the presentation of the search results. (At least a cache link and a page size?)

I did another search for Google. The first result is for an interview with Matt Cutts. Google Groups is on the first page of results, but I could not find the search engine itself on the first page of results. Other results on the front page were for ZDNet, Google Blogoscoped, and lots of references to Matt Cutts. Searching for the phrase "Google.com" led to even worse results, with no Google properties on the front page of search results.

Now, I know there are lots of ways to measure the relevance of a site, and there's a lot of different ways to develop rankings, but geez. I was gobsmacked at how way-out these results are. I would use this search engine for non-proper nouns, just to get a different perspectives on searching, but if I was looking for official sites I'd stay far away. It's a shame too, because there are some nice searching options in here.

Posted to Search Engines-Various | TrackBack