Friday, April 15, 2005

WSJ.com - Loose Wire: A Way to Find Everything

WSJ.com - Loose Wire: A Way to Find Everything: "These two factors are what prompted William Chee of Singapore to set up his own search engine, TurboScout (www.turboscout.com). Mr. Chee was frustrated that, knowing Google didn't find everything, he had to type the same search string (a fancy term for the words you are looking for) into lots of different search engines. So he put together a Web page that was smart enough to let him type the words just once, but which would then run off to all the search engines he liked. The results would then appear as normal, but below that a frame would link to the results from each of the other search engines. Simple and very effective. When his friends started raving about it, Mr. Chee decided earlier this year to launch his tool as a public service.
Impressive Options
What he did isn't that unique. Others have aggregated search results from other engines before, but Mr. Chee has managed a couple of things that make TurboScout a real boon. First, the interface is very simple and loads quickly. Second, he's grouped together the best search engines he could find -- 90 of them -- into seven categories, from the Web to audio and video. This saves the user time hunting down the most suitable search engine, or group of search engines. Third, he's prepared a small slice of computer code -- called an extension -- that users of the Firefox browser can add so they can access TurboScout straight from their search box (the little window in the top right corner of the Firefox browser)."

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