MozDex Open Search Engine In Beta

Last week was the beta launch of mozDex, described as "an Open search system built on open source technologies." The engine uses the Nutch open source search engine, and is seeded with URLs from the Open Directory Project. It is accepting URL submissions. You can test it out at http://www.mozdex.com .

At first blush a search here looks like every other of a zillion search engines out there. Sponsored links at the top, text ads on the right, results below the sponsored links. But there are three interesting bits on the search results: cached, explain, and anchors.

The cached part you probably already know about; it's a cache of the page without an indexing date. Explain shows some information about the page and its score -- why it ranked the way it ranked. (Hey, that "segment" number -- does that incorporate a date? Is that an indexing date?) And "anchors"
showed the incoming anchor text for that page, which in many cases was the page title but sometimes wasn't. In at least one case there was no anchor text at all. Some pages, like Yahoo,have multiple anchor listings.

The idea of a site that explains rankings is interesting, and knowing the anchors of links pointing to a site is also interesting. However the ranking page could be a little better explained, the site could respond faster, and provide a little more search help.

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