You are only as smart as your search engine.

How do you manufacture polyethylene? Which German King was the founder of the Hapsburg Dynasty? How do you solve a quartic equation?

Twenty years ago it might have taken me several hours in a good library to answer those questions. Today I can do in a few minutes sitting at any computer in the world.

The internet gives me access to a vast archive of information but the interface between me and most of that information is a search tool. The better that search tool is the more readily I can find the information I want and in a very real sense the smarter I become.

Therefore I must thank Tipa for pointing out a free Beta of SearchMe a new visual search engine. It shows you pictures of websites responding to your search rather than text descriptions. I don't know if it will replace Google but it is fun to play with and is particularly handy for finding pages you have seen before but can't quite remember the address. I can't get it to work with Firefox tabs yet but it is only Beta so I assume this will be addressed later.

Comments

Anonymous said…

Am looking at this too...go the invite. The look is like a Itunes library display where you can spin through your music via album art.

4:20 pm

mbp said…

The inability to open links into seperate tabs would be a deal breaker for me but I have found a way around it. Searchme has an option to open links in a new window. I then use the TabMix plus Firefox extension to force new windows into new tabs and also to prevent focus switching. I can now use searchme to browse a bunch of pages clicking the ones I want to send then off to new tabs. Perfect.

5:13 pm

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