ExactSeek this morning announced a new beta of their search engine, which now includes news and weblog search as well as some new search engine features. ExactSeek is available at http://new.exactseek.com/.

Urgh, I hate their front page. Too much stuff. It is SO 1998. Oh well, I’ll deal. Search options are via tabs over a query box and include images, articles, blogs, and news. Note when you go to the news tab, you don’t get a news search option — you just get a roundup of news from various sources. This is a little confusing. Searching Articles brings you to search results from GoArticles.com, which is apparently part of the same network as ExactSeek. On one hand, you are not going to get nearly the range of results as you might with a more conventional news search engine like Yahoo News. On the other hand, the search goes back a lot further; I saw results from 2003 in my search. The blog search also pulls from outside resources, providing results from Blog-Search, Bloglines, Blogger (Blogger?) and Blogdigger.

On the other hand, the Web search seems to be homegrown though the database is somewhat limited (A search for fred gets 137,626 results as opposed to 244 million on Google. The press release for the new ExactSeek says “The new ExactSeek search engine encompasses over 100 Million documents.”) Search results include the normal title, snippet, and page size, but ExactSeek has cooked up a couple of other tricks along with a link to a cache. On the results page, you’ll see a query box to do another search. Beneath that box you’ll see the options to find only pages with search forms or forms in general (subscription forms, etc.) (This is something I’ve wanted to do and I could never figure it out.) The results page has the forms for many (not all) of the pages included.

I went and took a look at the advanced search page and found the forms option there, but also other things I couldn’t figure out, like “Number of related search engines.” The help page provided information on some of the new search features, but not much that I could find on the advanced search page.

I’m left a little flat by the new ExactSeek. I like the forms thing, but I wish the forms were better identified in the search results (maybe you could color code them based on what they are?) I think an actual blog index (as opposed to a meta-search) with the same search features applied would be GREAT. I liked the fact that ExactSeek points to an unusual set of alternate search engines (Draze, SearchHippo) but think their own index should be larger. I will probably come back to play with the forms feature.