There’s a new search engine that allows you to narrow your search by country and by languge before running a metasearch that gives you results from Google, Yahoo, MSN, and local news sources. Glearch is available at http://www.glearch.com/ .

The front page has a map from which you can pick a country, or you can use the search engine form underneath. The languages are separate so you can search for Chinese-language pages from Congo Web sites if you really want to. (You won’t FIND anything, but…) What comes after the country, language, and query word form is a nice touch: reference information. When you pick a country the page will load with an overview of that country (CIA World Factbook) along with additional pointer’s to the country’s business, tourism and travel, culture, etc.

I did a search for Canadian Web pages, in English, containing reference to the word economy. Glearch provided the top ten results from each of the three search engines in the first paragraphs, but it didn’t feel particularly Canadian. I mean, I had at least two results from Wikipedia, a result from CNN, and only a few results for demonstrably Canadian (that is, .ca) site.

The news tab was much better, with news from The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, and Yahoo! Canada. But I was pretty disappointed in the Web search.

I tried again, only this time I searched for the word economy in Iceland Web pages (again in English.) This time I had better luck. The first page result was for Iceland.org, and there were several .is pages in the Web search results. However I didn’t get any NEWS results! Sigh.

The non-English results were even weirder. I did a search for Web pages from French sites, in German, with the word gehts. This time I got at least two pages with the Germany country code (DE) and one with the Austrian country code (AT). Honestly, I don’t understand how Glearch is delineating these sites.

Here’s the thing: when the results were solid (like with the Iceland search) they were SOLID. There’s enough non-overlap of search engine content that I appreciated getting results from three different engines. And I liked the reference materials at the bottom of the search pages. But sometimes the results were all over the map, to the point where I couldn’t even figure out what the search engine was doing.

I think you could get some immediate use out of the quick reference on the site, but expect to do some experimenting with the search results.