AfterVote Gives Meta Search Engines Web 2.0 Spin - First Glance
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AfterVote clearly graduated from the Google School of Search Engine Home Page Design:
I seriously cropped and shrank this screen shot of AfterVote’s home page to try to fit in all the links. As you can see, AfterVote has settings for searching the web, images, and video. That’s a good move since the Internet is such a visual medium and becoming more visual every day. A news tab would be nice, but then again if you started adding new tabs like that where would you stop?
Before we start searching with it, I’d like to bring your attention to the line of links at the top right. The “Install Search Plugin” link doesn’t work with any version of Internet Explorer lower than 7. Trying it with FireFox calls up a window that asks you if you want to add the search engine to the Search Bar; in other words, it appears to be a toolbar plugin not unlike Google’s or Yahoo’s. Home of course just takes you to the home page, while About gives you a page that describes what the search engine does and why it’s cool. Feedback takes you to a pretty standard feedback form; you can even have them contact you. The blog and the FAQ are also pretty self-explanatory.
It’s the red “Settings” link that opens up a different world of searching. You may remember how the three major search engines have been experimenting with weighted searches and personalized searches and other methods that let users add levels of control beyond just doing a general search. AfterVote seems to take it to the next level. Click on the link, and you’re greeted with this screen:
As you can see, the “Engine Settings” tab lets you weight the results of each search engine in the results you receive. You can take the sliders all the way down to 1 or up to 100 or anywhere in between (the settings you see are the defaults). You can also control how many results you get from Yahoo and MSN – anywhere between 10 and 100.
If those numbers sound low to you, keep in mind that AfterVote is playing a game of quality, not quantity. The company brought this point home in its blog when it did a search on its own name in Google. The search engine giant returned nearly 77,000 results – but 75,000 of the results were “supplemental.” As AfterVote explained, “raw hard numbers doesn’t mean a better result for your search term -- it just means thousands of copies of the same data, over and over again.”
Next: Check Out Those Tabs >>
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