It shouldn’t be too surprising that there’s been such a move toward custom search engines in the last couple years — it does get difficult searching through the twenty kazillion pages available on a general search engine. Search engine tool Topicle http://www.topicle.com/ currently has over 1100 user-made search engines to browse through. You may also make your own.

You can search for search engines, browse by recent or popular, or browse alphabetically, from Aad50 to Zivity. The numbers with each search engine indicate how many URLs are being searched.

I choose to search Kitchen Appliance Search, which has 11 URLs. When you choose a search engine it’ll drop down beneath the main form. All the ones I looked at appear to be Google Custom Search engines. Seems like a much easier interface to use, though. Anyway, I did a search for spatula and got at least 280 results — the custom search engine results form did not provide a count. Grr.

I had better luck with more specific search engines — there’s one for automotive forums, for example, and Taguchi Testing. The URLs for each search engine are listed beneath the search form; you have the opportunity to rank each URL that’s in the search engine, as well as report spam. If you really dig a particular search engine, you can add it to your browser or even embed it on your Web site.

What I didn’t understand looking at this site was why there were so many search engines searching just one URL. It would be nice if there was a function to filter those out. It’d also be nice if there were a way to get an RSS feed of the latest search engines — people come up with some really interesting topics…