I covered Molu the Meta Search engine a couple of years ago, but recently got a note from the site letting me know that a lot of things had changed. When I covered it before I didn’t like it very much — it was in alpha, didn’t work in Firefox, didn’t get me a result count, and basically got on my nerves. Today it’s in beta and I like it a lot more.

Molu (http://www.themolu.com/) puts available categories across the top of the screen. Categories include old standbys like Web and News but also more unusual offerings like “Technical Stuff”, events, and even the Amazon music catalog. But it doesn’t really matter which category you start your search.

Molu's Tree of Search Engines

Getting search results from other parts of the Web is as easy as clicking on other parts of the tree. I was less impressed with the image search results because they simply gives you thumbnails with absolutely no context (Where did this come from? When? What size is the original image?) but you do get four resources to search from. The video search had several search resources as well.

I went through some of the other categories, including news, books, and answers, and while some of the categories are great, with a lot of extras added to the results (like News and Books) the result pages of the multimedia categories need more information attached to them. Even a title page with the thumbnail would be helpful.

Aside from the lack of context on the multimedia results, and the fact that some of the category searches were rather slow, I liked Molu. I can see myself using it for Web and news metasearch, but I’d probably skip the multimedia. Worth a look.