As we flounder under a perpetually escalating storm of information on the Internet, search is becoming more prevalent than ever. While the big three engines may rule the digital seas, niche and custom search engines are claiming their small, but respectable harbors by focusing on areas like health, science, finance, and even cooking. Aiming to leverage these specialty engines are a new generation of search aggregation tools, and Ars Technica went hands-on with two of them to see if we can spend less time in a search box, and more with the results we need.
Also known as "custom search engines," or CSEs, the simple idea behind these tools is to offer a dashboard for various search engines that focus on content and visualize results beyond the bland set of 10 URLs and descriptions that is truly getting long in the tooth. Why search with a single one-size-fits-all sledgehammer when you can aggregate results from a variety of specialized engines?
The first CSE on our list is Hittery which, at first glance, isn't much more than a bunch of various search services collected on a single page. A default batch of search engines is presented to new visitors, separated by topics such as sports, code and scripts, celebrity gossip, health and medicine, and so on. The search boxes can be rearranged in any order or closed completely if you simply don't need that particular service, and menus at the top of the site allow you to choose from a wide variety of what Hittery distinguishes as "normal" and "custom" search engines.
The other CSE that we think is worth a look right now is Addictomatic, as it takes quite a different approach from Hittery's. It offers a single search box that fires off your query to multiple search engines at once. With a tag line of "inhale the web," Addictomatic will display a handful of the top results from a wide range of popular search engines, social networks, blog searches, and media outlets.