ResearchBuzz

When I first got the e-mail about Stinky Teddy, I almost threw it away. I mean, Stinky Teddy? That could be anything. But I read a little more and I was reassured. Stinky Teddy is in fact the name of David Hardtke’s daughter’s beloved stuffed animal. David Hardtke took the name and adopted it for his search engine that collects buzz from all over the Web. Stinky Teddy, complete with cute logo, is available at http://www.stinkyteddy.com.

Stinky Teddy is what I guess you would call real time metasearch. Enter a keyword and you’ll get search results from Bing, Yahoo, VideoSearch, Twitter, Oneriot, and Collecta. These different search types are choosable from the front page via checkboxes; I did a search for superbowl.

Stinky Teddy provides the results stacked on top of each other; Web, News, Images, Twitter, Popular Links, etc. There’s also a “Buzz-O-Meter” that measure how fast tweets are being generated and posts added to OneRiot. My searches brought me discussions on Twitter, fairly current news, and overview Web sites for context. The videos didn’t seem particularly “real-time,” but that was the only spot that seemed weak.

If you don’t like what results are being gathered, you do have some options; a brief preferences page allows you to specify what kinds of resources are being searched, as well as whether you want adult content, where you want to get your “gossip streams” (Twitter, Collecta, and/or OneRiot.) There’s also an option to specify whether you want the gossip streams to influence your search results — I think this means that that concepts that appear in the gossip stream will influence the other search results. I tried turning this preference off and on (it defaults to on) and I found that it made more difference in the video search results than anywhere else — maybe it was my search terms.

Stinky Teddy gets points for the Buzz-O-Meter. It gets more points for not having any Google Web search resource in its search (not that Google is bad. It’s just that too many search tools start and stay with Google search, and don’t explore other sites and possibilities.) the site is planning to look at other things to add to its search lineup, and I’m looking forward to that. I like the search results here but would like to see more.

Can you stand another metasearch engine? Sure you can. So check out Search3, which launched last month at http://www.search3.com. (And I’m not even going to tell you it’s in beta because you probably know already.)

This metasearch engine has two sets of searches — Web and images. The Web search finds results on Google, Bing, and Twitter (?). Well, that’s the default, anyway. Each column of search results on the page (there are three columns; I can’t believe they did that and it still looks nice) has a pulldown menu that allows you to replace each column’s search results. Google, Bing, and Twitter are the ones initially visibile but you can have Yahoo or eBay as well.) I’m glad you have the option to change the search results columns; except for the most general searches I wouldn’t have much luck using Google and Twitter at the same time.

The image search finds results on Flickr, Google, and Bing. (In this case the only image search option not available is Yahoo.) thumbnails show screen shot or avatar previews, depending on what resource you’re looking at.

I don’t use metasearch engines that much but I liked this one for its speed (very, very fast results) and for the fact that it managed to get three columns’ worth of search results on one page without making me claw my eyes out. Clean and quick.

I covered Molu the Meta Search engine a couple of years ago, but recently got a note from the site letting me know that a lot of things had changed. When I covered it before I didn’t like it very much — it was in alpha, didn’t work in Firefox, didn’t get me a result count, and basically got on my nerves. Today it’s in beta and I like it a lot more.

Molu (http://www.themolu.com/) puts available categories across the top of the screen. Categories include old standbys like Web and News but also more unusual offerings like “Technical Stuff”, events, and even the Amazon music catalog. But it doesn’t really matter which category you start your search.

Why? Because Molu has a great tree of the engines it’s searching to the left of its search results. Going and checking out other search results is as simple as clicking on another part of the tree. I started with a Web search for “woodland ape”. A Web search got me about 51 results, and the results have been nicely upgraded from plain search engine results. For each link there’s a preview screen shot, the ability the open the page in a JavaScript window, social bookmarks in case you want to post the page somewhere else, links to extract links from the page or download it as a PDF, and more (unfortunately when I tried it I could not get the “extract links” feature to work.)

Getting search results from other parts of the Web is as easy as clicking on other parts of the tree. I was less impressed with the image search results because they simply gives you thumbnails with absolutely no context (Where did this come from? When? What size is the original image?) but you do get four resources to search from. The video search had several search resources as well.

I went through some of the other categories, including news, books, and answers, and while some of the categories are great, with a lot of extras added to the results (like News and Books) the result pages of the multimedia categories need more information attached to them. Even a title page with the thumbnail would be helpful.

Aside from the lack of context on the multimedia results, and the fact that some of the category searches were rather slow, I liked Molu. I can see myself using it for Web and news metasearch, but I’d probably skip the multimedia. Worth a look.