AfterVote Gives Meta Search Engines Web 2.0 Spin - Check Out Those Tabs
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You can already see what one tab lets you do. The Search Settings tab lets you tell the search engine to either “search all document types” or “Don’t return results which are of type .pdf/.doc/.ppt.” The rationale is that you can eliminate data sheets and academic papers from your results if you wish. On this tab you can also “Open Supplemental Results” or “Disable Safe Search.” (I’ll get to those later).
The Privacy tab is something I think even the Electronic Frontier Foundation would like. It explains how the search engine aggregates content (complete with a “Warning Geek Content” box). But even better, it gives you the option of not having your votes tracked.
The Result Display tab lets you choose to have your results interacted with by more widgets than you can shake a stick at. Let me show you what I mean:
It’s quite a selection, as you can see. I could tell you what some of them do but not all of them; I do know many of them are useful. If I wanted to compile a wish list of things to add to the search engine, it would be nice to be able to hover over each of these listed widgets and see a tool tip that briefly explained what it does.
Finally we come to the blacklist/whitelist tab. This gives you another chance to weight your results. See some site you never want to see again? You can use this tab to do that. See another site that’s so good you want their results to show up as a priority when you do a search? You can do that too.
Next: Searching With AfterVote >>
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