Icerocket Search Engine Offers Searches by E-Mail

I saw a news article about Icerocket -- it must be several months ago now, and I think it was in the Las Vegas Business Journal. At any rate, when I went to check on it there wasn't much there. In the last couple days I have been hearing more Icerocket buzz so I went to check them out. To use at least one of the features you'll have to use ActiveX.

Icerocket, as you might expect, is available at http://www.icerocket.com . It's a meta-search engine, but unfortunately though its "About" page says it searches " WiseNut, Yahoo, MSN, Teoma, Altavista, Alltheweb, Lycos, and many more" it doesn't get more specific than that. Further, the news search, from what I'm seeing from the results, doesn't do meta-searching but rather searches large sources (USA Today, MSNBC, etc.)

The cool thing is that you can do these searches via e-mail. Send your search to an e-mail address (the address depends on whether you want to search for news, pictures or Web pages -- see http://www.icerocket.com/c?p=emailsearch for more details) and you'll get the results back via e-mail . Nice.

Let's start with the Web search, though. There's a standard query box with an advanced search which allows just a few options -- site: search and content filtering are two of 'em. I did a search for fred and was underwhelmed by the 139 results. How do you get a mere 139 results for "fred"? Search results include a thumbnail of the page, title, description, where it ranked on the engines searched, a quick view thing that opens up the page itself, and an Info switch that seems to work only in Internet Explorer. The Info switch isn't clicked; just move your mouse over it and hold it there. It'll tell you the Alexa traffic rank, number of sites that link to it, and the average speed.

There are other searches here besides Web as well. There's a news search (which at 123 results brought almost as many results for "fred" as the Web search) an images search (which includes Yahoo, Picsearch, and WebShots in its results) Products (120 results for "fred") and "Find a Friend," which is apparently some kind of dating thing and, I kid you not, found me the most results for "fred" -- 150.

I like all the information on the search result page. I like the interesting sources used on the picture search. But when the dating service tab gets more results than the Web tab, I think maybe the Web tab needs to go back and be revisited a little bit.

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