AfterVote Marries Meta Search to Customization
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Last week I introduced you to AfterVote, a small meta search engine company that hopes to make a name for itself in a world of giants. I explained that you could customize the search engine based on how you set up certain tabs. Now I’m going to show you how the items you set up in the tabs enable you to do some interesting things with your search results.
The Joy of Widgets
Last week I did a search on the term “SEO” to get us started. Let me show you that first search picture again so you have something to refer to while I explain those interesting icons.
Okay, now let me continue explaining a typical result. I’ve already explained supplemental results and the icons at the far left, which show where each result appears in each of the three major search engines. It’s time to explain those icons across the bottom of each result.
Those icons do various things, and in this case you can hover over each one to get a tool tip that explains them. They can take you to versions of the page that are cached on Google, Yahoo, or MSN. But that’s just for openers.
I kept the default settings in the display for this, so these are just what the icons that show up by default do. They can show you the Alexa traffic details for the particular domain; clicking on the icon opens up a new browser with the information, which is an approach I prefer over seeing it take me to a new page in the same browser. Sometimes, though, a simple tool tip is best; hover over the PageRank icon and you’ll get a tool tip that tells you the result’s PR.
The group of icons after PageRank offer lots of intriguing options. You can Digg the result. You can add it to Del.icio.us. You can email the link (great if you’re helping someone with research, dropping a hint, or any time you want to share something). You can translate the result into another language; by default, it seems set up to use Google’s translator to automatically translate the page from its original language into English (I tried it with a German language page). You can view logins from the site for bugmenot (a service designed to bypass compulsory registration). And you can view the Wayback entry for the site.
Next: Customizing What You Can Do >>
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