Search.io - The Ultimate Tabbed Search Engine
Search.io is a Tabbed search engine that allows you to query multiple sites at one time, each result page divided by tabs.
Now, I typically don’t like to profile tabbed style search engines… meaning, search engines that don’t have their own results, just display search results from other sites. However, Search.io is rather unique because of it’s scale. Instead of just searching through the major search engines like Google or Yahoo!, Search.io goes way beyond and also allows you to search for CSS galleries, fonts, blogs, video, lyrics, recipes, and on, and on and on.
Since there are so many different options avaialable, we’re only the browser search plugin for “search engines”… however, I recommend you check out the rest of the site for other options.
The design
Since the search results are other search engines I’m going to focus more on the design and user interface.
The first thing you’ll notice when you arrive at the homepage is the roll-over list of search engines available. Now, while I love that it’s a rollover and not a click to get the list, I do have one issue with it… Right now, I’m on small, but probably average user screen. However, the list is actually cut off by the browser so I can’t see all the search engines available. It would be nice to have an auto-scrolling drop down… or I could just get a bigger laptop :)
Once you find the search engine market you’re looking for, you’re brought to a search results page that is of course… tabbed. One of the interesting little features is the ability to switch tabs with an “alt” key command. While this is an interesting little feature, I have to wonder how useful it is. Considering the time it takes to read the key combination, find the alt key and the number… um, wouldn’t it be just as easy to click the mouse? Just my opinion I guess.
Lots of Options
As I said above, the only reason I added this search engine is because of the shear amount of search engines and markets to choose from. From even a designers perspective, many of the options are extremely useful to my day to day life. I would list them all there, but there’s just too go on. Plus, again, I can’t see all the results because of the smaller screen size.
If you have a chance, I recommend you hop on over and give it a look. Especially if you’re on a monitor with a screen size greater than 1024×768. :)
Conclusion
If you’re like me and spend a lot of time using different search engines for different jobs and queries, I recommend you give Search.io at try… It may save you some time.
