Are you ready for another real-time search engine? You’re not? Too bad! If search engine history repeats itself, we’re due for another 12-18 months of real-time search engine releases with new features and offerings piling up to the sky. Then there will be some kind of shakeout and we’ll be left with 3-4 solid ones.
So until then let’s tour the gallery! itpints is available at http://www.itpints.com/ and — brace yourself — it’s in beta. You can do a simple keyword search or you can do an “advanced search,” which is really just specifying what kind of information you want to find. (Options here include blogs, social sites, lifestreaming, video, and images.)
I did a search for dinner and was most impressed with the fact that the search results weren’t just Twitter. Twitter wasn’t even in the majority of the results. Instead there were several blog comments, entries, Digg, etc. I didn’t see any Twitter in the first few pages of search results.
An annoyance: you don’t seem to be able to page both back and forth in the search results. I could go to older results, but once there I could not page back to the newest results. On the other hand, Itpints has gone out of the way to make it easy to share search results, with a “Share” button that allows you to post an item to Twitter, Facebook, etc. Another good thing: RSS feeds are prominently available for search results.
It’s not as “hot” a term as “real-time search engine”, but it seems to me that Itpints would be great to use as a blog comment search engine, especially since it has search-based RSS feeds.
Categories: News