John Dilbeck Musings

I guess each of us has our preferences for which search engine we like to use.

For the last couple of years, I’ve preferred to use Google for most of my searching, although I still use others to compare the results.

If I’m researching keywords or I want to see which sites place well on various search engines, I’ll use a metasearch engine such as ixquick.com.

A couple of weeks ago, SiteSell released their Search It!, which really isn’t a search engine, but is a front-end tool to help you search for a wide variety of things using preformed search queries.

Recently, I became aware that Amazon.com has released a9.com, which can search several databases at the same time, including google, google images, inside books at Amazon.com, inside a movie database, and more. You can read more about it at Why Use A9.com?.

A9.com has the interesting feature of saving your searches so you can reuse them later. It also has a diary and a place to store bookmarks. I haven’t used all the features, yet, but it’s great to be able to search for something, such as “Murphy, NC 28906″, and see results from Google, from inside books at Amazon.com, and images returned from Google. It offers some truly useful features that I’ll be using in the future.

Try it out for yourself and see what you think.