The developers behind the Gnosh meta-search call it “dim-sum for the web,” and it puts all kind of searched morsels on the user’s plate. For once a search engine has come from an institute of higher learning that isn’t called Stanford.’
Coders from Allegheny College get the credit for building Gnosh, a meta site that sifts search engines and other sources for results.
More about the Gnosh comes from one of its creators:
For example, if you put in “ipod shuffle,” you will get data from Google, Yahoo, MSN, Flickr, Del.icio.us, IceRocket, Google Blog Search, Amazon, you name it. And it’s all presented in a nice, easy to use format.
There are lots of other cool features too. If you make an account, Gnosh keeps track of your searches, and lets you mark things as favorites. You can then put the RSS feeds of your history and favorites into your feed reader for quick access to a search term, while still getting the most up-to-date results.
Gnosh plans to add access to results from Technorati and Digg later. Currently, users can create accounts on Gnosh and save search histories for them. Those histories can be shared as RSS feeds. People can mark other Gnosh users as friends and see what they’re searching, too.
Search results come back as part of a tabbed page. An Overview tab shows the top result that came back from search engines and social sites. The Search Engine tab lists what comes back from Google, MSN, Yahoo, Wikipedia, Google News, and Amazon. Those Amazon results come from the commerce site and not Amazon’s A9 search engine.
Under Social Sites, Gnosh tabs Blogpulse, Del.icio.us, Feedster, Flickr, Icerocket, and Google Blog Search. The other tabs, myGnosh and People, show what the user and the user’s friends have searched on the query already.
In an apparent nod to all things Web 2.0, the home page shows a tag cloud’ of what other people have searched previously. Clicking a tag pulls up that search, and of course the tags vary in boldness based on their popularity.
David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
