What could be more fun than taking on Google in the search engine business??
I’m working with a company called IceRocket.com. (http://www.icerocket.com). IceRocket is a brand new search host that combines the best of spidered search, meta search, and what we hope are some unique and different features that make using the engine more efficient and addictive.
I’m not involved in the day to day, I’ve offered to help come up with some unique features that hopefully can allow them to separate from the pack. To me, this is a unique way to “design my own search engine”. The features that are and will be included, are the things I look for when I’m doing my searches.
Some of the things you can already find at http://www.icerocket.com are:
Web Search
– Thumbnail photos of results homepages – One of the thingsI hate about all search engines is that you click on a site hoping for a quality site, and you get an empty or shell website. The photos of the site give a quick look so you can see before you click. This can be turned on or off.
– Quick View – Without leaving the results of search page, you can see the top 40 pct of the destination page as a short cut to deciding if the site is what you are looking for.If its what you want, a quick click and the page opens up completely.
– Info – This is the traffic ranking from Alexa. It lets you know before you click whether anyone else goes to the site according to Alexa.
News Search
A new feature that handles the traditional function of searching news sites, sorted by date.
Picture Search
IceRocket has the exclusive search on non-traditional pictures sites. We search the old standbys, and the web, but also index non-traditional sites like webshots.com. This is a great place to find out if one of your friends took a picture of you and posted it for the world to see!
We will very soon be adding the ability to search Moblogs and other camera phone sites for pictures as well!
Find A Friend
This is a search engine of the “Look at my Picture” sites, like Game to Fame, Face the Jury, SinglesNet, Hot or Not, and more. We will be adding more sites and more features to this. It’s an addictive part of the site. You can get hooked just searching for pictures.
Email a Search
This is for PDA users in particular and is unique to Icerocket.com. It’s a pain in the butt to go to a search site, whether it’s Icerocket, Google, Yahoo, or wherever and input a search term. However, most PDAs are very email efficient. So we have created a “Search Relay”. All you have to do is send an email with the search terms as the subject to search@icerocket.comand it will return the results to you via email. You can do the same with pics@icerocket.com or news@icerocket.com.
So try it out and let me know what you think and if there are any other features you would like to see added. If we can do them, we will!!!
This is just the beginning, watch out Google, here we come :).