Forget building a better mousetrap-the new dream is building a better search engine! Some companies try to build one from scratch. Others try to improve on the results you get from Google. DeeperWeb is one of the latter.
Unlike Webmynd, which tries to improve your search experience by letting you compare results from other search engines and websites on one screen, DeeperWeb focuses on helping you sift through the results Google gives you to find the results that you want. They do this with a tag cloud (called the DeeperCloud) that categorizes results and lets you narrow down your search with just a few clicks. In the example above, I searched for “iPhone 3GS” and then filtered through the results by clicking on the tag for “unlock.”
In addition to tags, you can filter by phrases, sites or zones (.com, .org, .edu, etc). DeeperWeb also has boxes on the side of the screen (called “Zoomies”) that display different categories of results. For example, the “Answers” Zoomie shows information about your topic from popular advice sites. The “Resources” Zoomie shows information from different scholarly sites. The Wikipedia Zoomie shows relevant Wikipedia results, and the “Metrics” Zoomie shows data like survey results, graphs and charts. Naturally, the “Blog” Zoomie shows blog results. There is also a “News” Zoomie, but seems stuck on searching business news and did not provide any relevant information.
DeeperWeb is available as a search plug-in or a FireFox Extension. The plug-in took just seconds to install. The user interface is intuitive, and it’s easy to use the tag cloud to filter. However, it would be nice if you could customize which (if any) of the Zoomies appear on the side of the screen. I also wish DeeperWeb showed more web results per page-there is a lot of blank space that goes unused at the bottom of the page.
On the whole, though, I think the tag cloud element of DeeperWeb is fairly useful. What do you think of it? Would it make it easier for you to get better search results?
Our Rating of DeeperWeb
Categories:web