* Two recency search aggregators
Search aggregation is hot. If you haven’t come across the term before it is a service that takes a search string and runs that search on a selection of sources such as search engines and archives and returns a single page of relevant results. Make no mistake, search aggregation is quite a complex thing to do and its potential, given the myriad sources on the Internet that can be searched, is huge.
A subcategory of search aggregation is “recency search” wherein the only the most recent source content is returned. Our first recency search aggregator is Very Recent (tag line: “The Buzz Search Engine”).
The first thing you’ll notice about this service is that it is ugly. Definitively, brutally, unremittingly ugly. Why? I have no idea. It is almost as if the author chose to produce something that only they, its parent, could call beautiful. In fact this site is a good candidate for modifying with Greasemonkey.
Another odd thing about Very Recent is that there is no information about the author or the company, no way to contact them, no details of the service or what sources it uses, and the only additional information on the site is a privacy policy that is about as unrestrictive on what they do as can be crafted by devious lawyers.
A little research revealed that Very Recent was created by Tom Churm who also authored (among other services) the interesting free service RSS2PDF that takes RSS or Atom feeds or OPML files and generates a PDF file from it.
So what is good about Very Recent? Well, it works. It returns useful data and is very fast in comparison to other similar services.
According the Search Engine Land blog the sources searched by Very Recent include Twitter’s Summize, Google Blog Search, Technorati, Flickr, Yahoo News, YouTube, and Digg. The default home page of Very Recent shows the latest headlines and a list of search terms from Google’s Hot Trends USA, which when you click on one of them, launches a search of that term in Very Recent.
Also according to the Search Engine Land posting Very Recent is, itself, very recent although the developer hasn’t bothered to label it “alpha” or “beta” and it appears more experimental than a product in development. Even so, the service is useful as it is.
Not so experimental is Addict-o-matic another recency search aggregator with a lot of polish. Its search sources include Google News, Google Blog Search, topix, YouTube, technorati, Yahoo News, Blinkx Mainstream Vid News, Flickr, Newsvine Tags, icerocket, Delicious Tags, Digg, Addicto Top Blogs – Bloglines, Truveo Video Search, Bloglines, Yahoo Top News Sources, Ask.com News, Google News Images, Twitter Search, Yahoo Web Search, WordPress.com, Live.com News, Wikio, and Twingly Blog Search.
The results presentation is a three column layout with the results for each source displayed in its own panel. You can enable or disable which sources are displayed in a search (“Available Sources” under the logo on the left) and clicking on the “X” in the top right of any panel removes it from the results. You can also rearrange the panels by drag and drop. One complaint I have is that when you have an empty column there’s no way to get the remaining panels to expand (for example, occupy two columns width) to use that space.
The results page also provides links to featured searches, search terms used by other users, and the service’s Newsfix Pages, searches on general topics such as “Election 2008,” “Top News” and “Gadgets.”
The results page includes a link to a page of links that allow you to share or bookmark your search on Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, reddit, BlinkList, Furl, and Ma.gnolia. Addict-o-matic also includes a feature to add the service to your search bar. You can also provide your search to others by simply copying and mailing or posting the URL of your current search results page – for example, my search for “web applications” can be found here.
Addict-o-matic is missing one major feature (also missing from Very recent): RSS feeds for your searches. That alone would move the service from terrific to amazing. I’d also like to see a feature to send a daily e-mail of results and the ability to combine the results from all sources into a single display organized by relevancy.
So who needs recency search? The obvious candidates are marketing and PR folks from who these recency search engines are great tools for getting a snapshot of what’s being said about anything you’re interested in. They are also a great tool for getting the broadest take on any news topic so anyone who relies on current events as part of their job will find them indispensable.
Search aggregation in general is still relatively new but I believe that it will become much more relevant to everyday searching as more sources that provide a more vertical content focus become available.
