AfterVote Gives Meta Search Engines Web 2.0 Spin - Searching With AfterVote
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It’s worth noting that this site is AJAX-powered. What does that mean? Well, certain things don’t require page reloads, which improves the user experience; it speeds things up overall. All I had to do after opening and looking at all those tabs is click the close button and I was back on the home page instantly. Once there, of course, I decided to search…and what better term to search for than SEO?
So what do we have here? First of all, those icons at the top left of the page let you sort your results by AfterVote position (that’s the default), Google rank, Yahoo rank, MSN, rank, Google PageRank, and Alexa position. These are the defaults that AfterVote set up; if you check on different widgets in your settings, you would presumably see different options.
Now let’s dissect the individual entries. While I’ve seen comments that said AfterVote looked cluttered, it’s surprising that they’ve fit in as much as they have without it looking worse than it is. Okay, on the left side of each result you’ll notice little icons with numbers next to them. Those tell you the position for that particular result in each search engine. That alone makes AfterVote potentially useful as an SEO tool – but note that it only returns the top 10 results from each search engine on the default setting. For this search, I only received two pages of results.
I’d like to draw your attention to the first listing. Here’s something that should be a little easier to make out:
Take a look at the blue sentence just above the row of icons; it says “1 supplemental results found, click to toggle.” That’s another example of AJAX in action. You can click on that sentence to see supplemental results, and the page shows them to you without reloading. Otherwise, it stays closed, saving space. This is closed by default; it’s what one of the tabs was referring to when it let you check a box to show supplemental results as open or not. Here’s what it looks like when you toggle:
As near as I can tell, Google doesn’t have a feature like this. It will indent additional results from the same site, but you still get a full result. I’ve searched with Google News; you often get a green link below a result that takes you to links for “all X news articles” that were related. But that takes you to a completely different page with links, and of course the new page has to load.
There is much more to this search engine than what I’ve gone over here, but I’ve run out of room. Please check back next week. Among other things, I’ll tell you about all those intriguing icons.
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