techdigest

After Google validated the search engine market space, there are many new comers as I covered in my Smarter Search Engines post. KoolTorch is yet another candidate. KoolTorch claims - “KoolTorch is a next generation, patented technology that provides a USER FRIENDLY interface for viewing and navigating search results. ” I am not sure if it is all that the company claims but it does look like an interesting candidate. If they work on the UI a little more and on their search results, it can be a promising contender in the search engine space.

Things that I liked:

a) It shows me all the 50, 100 results on one page. It truly uses AJAX to enrich the user experience. I can mouse over the result number and it will show me what the result is about.

b) It gives me both the image and text version of the search results interface.

c) It categorizes the results and shows me all the results with all the categories in one interface.

Things that I did not like:

a) Does not work on firefox. It only supports IE right now.

b) It is probably a bug that it returns zero results at times. When I searched on “Salma Hayak“, it returned zero results. When I searched on “Hayak“, it returned lot many results. The first result is a tripod link. With google, the first result was an imdb link. I was impressed with the results when I searched for “Steve Jobs“.

c) I would want it to also show me options to look for the metadata of the results: Like only images, videos, forums, newsgroups etc.

The concept is great but somehow I get this feeling that it is still not pro to go mainstream. The company is probably aiming to just build technology to get bought over by Yahoo, Google, Microsofts of the world.

This entry was posted Thursday, March 29th, 2007 at 5:41 am and is filed under Search, Technology. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.