October 04, 2006
searchfeedr Searches via Google, Microsoft Live, Altavista, as well as Yahoo!
Reading a group test in this month's Information World Review on specialist searches (an issue that also has a review of deliSearch :-), I noticed this comment about Rollyo:
Another problem is that it lets you define sites that are searched, but not the engine that searches them. ... This is all well and good, but for true search engine customisation we would have liked to choose the engines we trust.
Hmm - not sure I can guarantee that you'll trust these, but here's a new variant of searchfeedr that will let you do the domain based searches using Altavista, Google, or Microsoft Live, instead of Yahoo!.
I can get away with this because I don't rely on using web service APIs for searchfeedr at the moment - instead I both link to, and embed in an iframe, the actual results page from the search engine used. (This is not strictly true - there are versions of deliSearch around that pull the results in from the Yahooo! webservice and display them in deliSearch styling).
My version control is getting way out of hand now, so in future I think I'll add all new features to a searchfeedr Labs page.
As I haven't yet played with the Google Search AJAX API, it might to intersting to a Google or Yahoo embedded resutls interface? The only problem is that - as far as I know - Google doesn't support OR'd URL/page based searches? Which means the Google results would only work on the domain searches.
I'm also working towards getting a stable service with a clean interface up and running, hopefully on its own domain, by the end of the year...
Posted by ajh59 at October 4, 2006 01:46 PM