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Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Pick Your Search Engines at Hittery

Hittery.com presents you with a whole bunch of specialized search engines as widgets, and you can customize the dashboard by moving, removing, or adding specific search engines. It’s a bit like iGoogle but for search engine widgets only, and taking the opposite approach to “universal search” approach by Google, which aims to deliver all necessary results from the same single search engine.

One downside of Hittery is that they use Google Custom Search Engines for many of the widgets, but a CSE is not always the best approach; for instance, a code search might yield more relevant results using Google Code Search than searching over domains like code.google.com. A more minor downside I experienced with the service was that the frontpage was a bit cluttered to start out with, and on the accessibility side, I noticed you had to click the back button twice when you wanted to go from a search result back to the dashboard. On the upside, Hittery might provide a good basis for you to explore some alternative search engines or ways to search (if you can live with the fact you’ll always have to input your query into the right box).

As an alternative to Hittery, you might also consider adding specialized search engines – or search engine collections, like multi search – straight to iGoogle.com, Google’s personalized homepage.

On that note, I want to ask: Which search engines other than Google.com do you regularly use? For instance, I often use Flickr’s advanced search, restricting results to Creative Commons licensed content. Sometimes, I’m also using YouTube’s search box when looking specifically for videos. Somewhat more rarely, I’m also using Google Code Search.

[Thanks Jerome!]

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