Keotag -- Meta Tag Search With Preview

Gary Price and I don't agree about all aspects of searching, and that's fine. Though we threatened to, we did not actually get into an umbrella swordfight about our various search disagreements. If we ever did, it would probably be over tagging, which I still love and about which he has serious reservations. So he might not like Keotag (http://keotag.com/) as much as I do. Keotag (it's in beta) is a search engine that queries a variety of tag sites and lets you preview the answers from one results screen on Keotag. A couple of the search engine choices are odd, but this site is nifty.

Go to Keotag and enter a query; simpler ones are better because you are searching tag sites. Keotag refreshes with a Technorati graph showing you how active that query has been (sometimes the graph is blank) and a set of icons. If you mouseover the icons you'll get a popup showing you with what search engines they're affiliated. Many of the search engines will be familiar to you -- Technorati, Yahoo, Feedster, Google blog search, etc.

Click on an icon and a preview window will open showing you a summary of the content from that site. For example, click on the Technorati icon and you'll get a list of Technorati's tag search result for your query. (Note that the tag search is NOT the blog search. The tag search is in my experience more limited in its results.) You won't get any additional information that you might get from the search result at the site, like index date, source, or page size. It's just like getting a headline-only RSS feed. The results from a site also include an XML link to get an RSS feed for that specific query from the site.

This is a good idea that's well-implemented, though I confess there were some resources I missed. It seemed odd to have, for example, 43 Things as one of the search results. It didn't seem to fit. On the other hand, it would have been nice to see resources here like FindArticles and Flickr, as well as some of the newer tagging sites like Ma.gnolia. (Don't get me wrong, I think 43 Things is a great site. It just didn't seem to fit with the other offerings here.)

Posted to Internet-Technology-Tagging