Skip to main content

New kid on Web Search Block: Fazzle.com

Larry Dignan made a good point about innovation in this post:

Do your part: Visit an alternative search engine by ZDNet's Larry Dignan -- Charles S. Knight has compiled a handy list of the top 100 alternative search engines on Read/Write Web. The one problem: No one has time to check them out. Indeed, Knight notes that people use the four main search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask.com) for 99.9% of their searches. That fact leads to another [...]



So I decided to give a try to atleast a couple of search engines mentioned in that blog.

I tried Fazzle.com and then I tried to compare the relevance of results (put more simply, I tried to check if I am able to find what I want to, on first page) with Big Daddy of them all, Google. Honestly speaking my faith on Google was somewhat shaken: Fazzle was showing better results!


But Google obviously has its strengths so now though Fazzle is my default search engine in IE7, Google Desktop's floating bar is also present on my desktop.

A nice feature of Fazzle is that you can see the preview of any search result page, on the results page only, and hence don't need to open the page to see, if it really has what you want. However, we as Googlers might feel search box a bit too tiny! Several other search options like audio,video,images,downloads etc are also there, but I haven't used them. There is also a news listing on the lines of Google News, but I didn't find it as good!

There are some observations that I would have liked to share with you, but for now, they are too immature! So try out Fazzle and other engines. There would definitely be something different from Google

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

How I converted a table in an email to a graph on a website? Hint: Azure Functions and Logic App

This mini-project started as a necessity.  I get an email like this everyday, which gives daily numbers for different metrics. The problem with such an email is that it is difficult to keep track of or gauge the rate of growth of these metrics. If you want to know how what the previous day's numbers were you need to go to the previous day's email.  The better option any day is to have a graph that shows the values of the metrics every day. Something like this: With this goal I set out to make this system but with as less coding and expenses as possible.  First obvious step in the process was to get hold of the email and extract its text. The easiest way to do this is to use Azure Logic App.  Here is what my logic app looks like: When any new email arrives in my Outlook 365 account, with a subject that contains "System usage Stats as on", it passes the body of the email to an Azure function named 'EmailTextCleanerFunction' (code below), whose job is to clean an...

Changing Eclipse Workspace Directory

Recently I moved my entire Eclipse installation directory but the workspace was still getting created in the older location only. And worst there was no option to select the Workspace directory in the Window->Options->Workspace menu. To change the workspace location in Eclipse do this. Goto ECLIPSE_HOME\configuration\.settings directory, edit the org.eclipse.ui.ide.prefs file and change the RECENT_WORKSPACES value to the desired location. If you want that Eclipse prompts you to select workspace when you start it, change the SHOW_WORKSPACE_SELECTION_DIALOG value to true. And you are done!

Hands on review: Yahoo! Mail app for Windows 8

Before you start mocking me for using Yahoo! Mail, let me explain that this is NOT my primary mail account and I use Gmail and Outlook.com for my daily use. Yes, this Yahoo! account was once my daily haunt but that was during college days and those days are long gone. I don't use Yahoo! Mail much but still there are some group subscriptions and I just log in once in a while to see what's happening in those forgotten groups. And due to this reason, I have always kept track of changes in Yahoo! Mail and the fact is that you can blame them for everything but not really lack of trying. Though most of those tries just ended up cluttering the UI and adding somewhat needless features. However, now we hear that new CEO Marissa Mayer is focusing once again on the mail and first major product to come out is Yahoo! Mail app for Windows 8. So how is it? The Login screen is pretty neat and purple background with an envelope watermark is very pleasing, very Yahoo!. However why ...