A few days ago Lisa pointed me to YaGoohoo!gle (personally) and today the Librarian in Black pointed me to Search the 4 (via her blog). YaGoohoo!gle lets you do one search and presents results from both Yahoo! and Google side by side. Search the 4 works the same but presents you with a screen showing results from Google, Ask Jeeves, MSN, and Yahoo! Both ladies seemed impressed with these sites. My thoughts: what’s the point!
Back in the early days of meta-search, I was severely unimpressed because those first meta search engines basically did just what these are doing. (Hell, even those didn’t use frames.) Eventually, meta search tools impressed me enough to not only use them (irregularly) but teach them (often.) Why? Because they added features like aggregation and de-duplication of the results.
What’s the point of these two tools? Granted, if you’re someone who teaches searching and you’d like to compare and contrast the results of two, or four, different search engines to see what kind of results they cough up, then I can see some usefulness. However, what users don’t need is a screen divided up showing multiple lists of results, many of which are repeated in each frame.
Doesn’t this sound like we’re going back to the early days of meta search tools. Me, I’m back to unimpressed.
