Useful Meta-Interface Search Engine: MrSapo

I know a search engine that gathers results from many other search engines is called a meta-search engine. However I don't know what it's called when a site gathers many interfaces via a frame to allow you to do a variety of searching, so I'm going to call it a meta-interface engine. Such is MrSapo, at http://www.mrsapo.com .

MrSapo's one really irritating feature is that a vanilla Google interface appears first no matter which of the search categories you pick from the top of the page (a variety of categories are available including basic (web search), images, news, Weblogs, and Academic.) After you've picked a category and gotten the annoying vanilla Google interface, you'll notice that there's a query box right under the category list, and a group of gray buttons, each labeled with the name of the source it represents.

Enter a query and click the box of your choice. The Google interface will disappear to be replaced by the result page of the resource you picked. If you just click a button without filling in a query, you'll usually get a usable error page (by that I mean you'll be able to do a search from the error page.)

I like MrSapo because of the range of what it offers and because it's apparently making some effort to keep up with the newer search engines in the various categories, but I really dislike the Google search interface being the default page. It's distracting and could be confusing.

Posted in the following categories: Search Engines-Metasearch | TrackBack
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