Yurnet is a search engine with an interesting model — search for things instead of in places. If you want to search for DVDs, but don’t know what engine to use to do that, you could search Google for an appropriate engine, then search that engine, or just go to Yurnet and pick ‘dvd’.
Yurnet takes awhile to get your head around. That’s because at first it looks like a cheesy metasearch engine. If you’re still thinking search where it seems almost rediculous. Which is faster : going to Google Images and searching for what you want or going to Yurnet, picking Google Images, and searching? The answer is they’re basically the same. After corrospondence back and forth to the site creator, however, I finally came to understand that the real point of Yurnet is search what for when you don’t know what site to search.
That said, the site is rather ugly. The final resolved URL is http://ww2.yurnet.com:8080/ — not exactly something that looks pretty in bookmarks. The drop-down select box is a mélange of capitalization schemes, and the ‘vs’ searches (which really are out of the scope of the site) are listed first, giving an initial illusion that alphabetical order is not preserved. Also, some things are listed as wheres still (ie Google Image). Realistically the box should be cleaned up to use the same capitalization schemes throughout and be only a list of whats in alphabetical order, without engine names and the like getting in the way.
No, it’s not a new service provided by Google — it’s a Ning app built on the Google Search API. The functionality is simple. You feed Google Related Pages a URL, and it gives you back a list of related webpages. The data is collected using Google’s ‘related:’ operator. I have found in tests that it gets pretty good results when used on popular pages, but not as well when used on less popular ones.
So what is the point? Why use this instead of just doing a ‘related:’ search on Google? Isn’t this just a nicer interface to something we could already do? Not quite. You see the app also generates RSS 2.0 and JSON(P) feeds of the results. Ultimately that is the point. Results can be integrated into pages, such as blog sidebars, or watched in feedreaders. Because the data is all in the Ning app, other formats will be easy enough to add if people want them.
With all of the efforts nowadays to bring about the ‘Syndicated Web’ it is getting easier and easier to subscibe to the content you want, if only you can find it…
The major search engines list multiple pages from one site and rate things by hits, meaning that once something is at the top it tends to stay there, and multiple copies of it. This makes finding what you want next to impossible, isn’t there some way to list each site only once or something? And how about having the community rate content instead of rating based on hits? I, for one, have often clicked a link in a search engine that looked interesting and later wished I could takes the hits back from the site!
Tags: Web Syndication Search