Searching tips for lazy people: Use “all-in-one” websites
February 3rd, 2007I’m lazy, there’s no doubt about it. And I don’t have a state of the art PC, so I can’t afford having a lot of tabs / windows open. So, when I want to search something, it can be a pain having to search through a couple engines (unless I’m really lazy and use ChaCha), even if I most rely on Google. But if you don’t, here’s how you can speed things up a bit, by searching through a couple websites at a time.
SRCHR is one site that handles several search engines at a time. It’s got loads of engines for you to choose from, and all searches come up at once, so you don’t even need to browse through the different engines on the page. You can customize the page, with whatever engines you want, including several Yahoo and Google searches, plus other engines, stored in different categories: News, Web, Video, Image, Shopping, Bookmark, Social, Blog, Job, Event, and Other (which only includes Google Base and Wikipedia - strangely, Wikipedia has the Yahoo! “Y!” icon). The downside is that, due to the massive use of AJAX, the page moves terribly slowly, especially if you’re using a slower machine, or if you’re using a lot of tabs / windows.
Dogpile is a similar website, which searches through the major search engines, Google, Yahoo!, msn Search and Ask.com. Its interface is much lighter than SRCHR’s, but the range of search engines is smaller. When you type in your search, a list of finds is shown along with the names of the search engines the object was found in. (Also note the way the way this was all integrated into the theme, by replacing Search with “Go fetch!”. Plus, the dog on top’s tail wags from time to time)
But I must say that the best website that fits here has got to be CrossEngine. It’s, in a way, a combination between the two websites above, but a combination of the good things in each one. It has the complexity of SRCHR and the smoothness of Dogpile. CrossEngine is, as you’ve guessed, a way you can search through tons of search engines at once. The default search made is in Google, but you have a multitude of engines too choose from, so much in fact that naming all of them would bore you to death here (better check it out yourself). The website is extremely clean (it’s actually a bar at the top of the page that allows you to switch between engines), and I was impressed with the arrangement and categorizing of the engines. It could and will save you the time, given the chance.




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