I wanted to look a bit askance at a search engine which, on its first visit, recommends I visit its “how to use” page. That obscure, that complex, or that different? Whatever, Opsdo’s interesting, though you have to pay attention to how Opsdo is presenting search result pages. Opsdo’s at http://www.opsdo.com/ and is in Alpha 2.

Enter a query in the box at the top of the page, and use the checkboxes to choose categories of engine or individual engines. (You can expand or contract category boxes with the = to the right of a category name. May I suggest “+” instead? It’s a bit more universal.) Once done click search. Categories include blogs, images, reference, and social, and resources within resources ranged from well-known to more obscure. I did a news search for cow. (You can search on multiple categories.)

You’ll get a new page called Summary. But instead of aggregating the results and presenting them to you as one long list, Opsdo presents the search result pages themselves. You can scroll through and interact with these pages, including changing the results. When I searched the news, for example, Google News was one of the results. Unfortunately Opsdo provided me with the default Google News pages, which list search results by relevance instead of date. Opsdo also lists related searches. (Um, cows with guns?) These pages-within-a-page are apparently the product of Bitty Browser.

Opsdo is not going to take over for my normal searches of Google News, Technorati, or any of the other resources that it offers. But if I’m trying to figure out whether a search is going to get me a good set of results, Opsdo would be a great place to go and run the search and then quickly scan the result pages. It’s fast too. Worth a look.