Omgili: a New Spin on a Web 2.0 Search Engine - Getting Started
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Omgili's home page helpfully offers some example search topics. You can look for consumer experiences of products, such as "best laptop" or "plasma or LCD." You can search for personal experiences, such as "relationship problems" or "gift suggestions." You can look for help with troubleshooting various technical issues; recommended searches here are "Vista installation" and "remove virus." You can look for recommendations ("favorite book"). And of course, you can hunt down opinions on everything from who will be the next president to Britney Spears.
I'm not ready to replace my desktop computer - yet - but when I do, I've often thought that I'd like to replace it with a laptop. So I decide to start with one of Omgili's example searches, "best laptop." Here are my results:
I apologize for having to crop and reduce. What you don't see in this image are the Google text ads on the right, and a few other things that I'll bring up in a bit. As you can see, it starts with clearly distinguished ads on top, which we've all gotten used to by now. The top listing is from Myspace, followed by Digg. Each listing tells gives you some information as to where the link leads, in orange - for example "Page with topic and at least 11 replies." So you won't be clicking through to see someone ask a question to which no one has replied.
The "Preview" link takes you to a page that shows you the original discussion as it was indexed by Omgili's crawler. It is similar to Google's "cached" link in that it lets you see what was there if the original content is no longer available. You can go directly from the page that comes up when you click "Preview" to the actual discussion page with just a click.
Another useful feature of each listed item is the date next to it in grey. It looks as if that is the date that particular discussion started. Sure, that information is usually on the first post of the discussion, but sometimes it can be hard to find - and this way you know that date before you click through, so you can decide whether the discussion's age is likely to make it less useful to you before you commit. Incidentally, along the same lines, you can choose to sort the results by either date or relevance; relevance is the default.
Next: Completing the Search and Omgili Buzz >>
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