ResearchBuzz

There’s a metasearch for everything else, so why not. yoName, at http://www.yoname.com , allows you to put in a username, e-mail address, or first and last name, and find people across several different social networks. It’s in beta.

I first tried the search with a friend’s name. I know he’s on MySpace. yoName ran the search across several networks, including Xanga, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Friendster. Here’s the funny part — yoName announced potential matches on a few of the networks but for MySpace, announced confidently that it had found my friend. It hadn’t — it found somebody else with the same name. I didn’t see a way to say “Wrong one, try again.”

It gets even more complicated if you’re using a more general keyword. I know a lot of bands have spots on MySpace, so I tried doing a search for Wolfmother. Sure, I got Wolfmother’s MySpace page — and tens of thousands of other pages that mentioned Wolfmother, videos by Wolfmother, etc etc. So unless you search for a very specific name, you might get some extraneous results.

Enough crabbing, let’s talk about the good parts. When you get a set of results from yoName, you have the option to quickly preview the first ten results in-page. It doesn’t look like you can view all the results though — and if you’re only looking for a single person, why would you want to? Sometimes the previews are a little misaligned because of banner ads, etc, but they’re easy to read.

I don’t use MySpace, but just by doing some experimental searching with yoName I got a sense of the huge cross-section of people (and musical groups) that are on there. Possibly frustrating if you’re trying to do an absolute search, interesting as a browser/explorer.

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I’m not a big user of metasearch engines; my complaint about them is that they tend not to have search engines I use. Further, I don’t find all the results aggregated and smashed together to be useful.

However, after playing with Zuula.com ( http://zuula.com ) a little bit, I might make an exception; I like the search engines it’s offering and it divides out results into tabs. Despite the fact that it’s in beta, it’s very fast and I didn’t have any problems while using it.

Zuula does metasearch in several different categories, including News, Images, Blogs, and Jobs (!!). The Web metasearch includes Google, Exalead, MSN, and Gigablast. Results from each search engines are broken out by tab. There’s a panel for recent searches on the left side of the results page that you can collapse; otherwise the results look like regular search engine results. The blog search is especially nice as it includes Technorati and IceRocket; add Blogdigger in there and I’ll have just one place to go for my blogging search results. (Google Blog search is supposed to be there as well but currently it’s giving an error.)

The tabs for each search type can be rearranged or customized (tabs removed, filters set, number of search results per screen specified.) There are also global preferences available and a limited advanced search.

I like the resources available here — Zuula has apparently skipped the idea of cramming every possible search resource into the engine and has instead focused on the good ones. I also like how easy it is to customize the interface. I’d like to see a couple more engines for blogs, and maybe a general resources searches that uses Wikipedia and other reference sites. All and all, though, nicely done.