When I first got the e-mail about Stinky Teddy, I almost threw it away. I mean, Stinky Teddy? That could be anything. But I read a little more and I was reassured. Stinky Teddy is in fact the name of David Hardtke’s daughter’s beloved stuffed animal. David Hardtke took the name and adopted it for his search engine that collects buzz from all over the Web. Stinky Teddy, complete with cute logo, is available at http://www.stinkyteddy.com.

Stinky Teddy is what I guess you would call real time metasearch. Enter a keyword and you’ll get search results from Bing, Yahoo, VideoSearch, Twitter, Oneriot, and Collecta. These different search types are choosable from the front page via checkboxes; I did a search for superbowl.

Stinky Teddy provides the results stacked on top of each other; Web, News, Images, Twitter, Popular Links, etc. There’s also a “Buzz-O-Meter” that measure how fast tweets are being generated and posts added to OneRiot. My searches brought me discussions on Twitter, fairly current news, and overview Web sites for context. The videos didn’t seem particularly “real-time,” but that was the only spot that seemed weak.

If you don’t like what results are being gathered, you do have some options; a brief preferences page allows you to specify what kinds of resources are being searched, as well as whether you want adult content, where you want to get your “gossip streams” (Twitter, Collecta, and/or OneRiot.) There’s also an option to specify whether you want the gossip streams to influence your search results — I think this means that that concepts that appear in the gossip stream will influence the other search results. I tried turning this preference off and on (it defaults to on) and I found that it made more difference in the video search results than anywhere else — maybe it was my search terms.

Stinky Teddy gets points for the Buzz-O-Meter. It gets more points for not having any Google Web search resource in its search (not that Google is bad. It’s just that too many search tools start and stay with Google search, and don’t explore other sites and possibilities.) the site is planning to look at other things to add to its search lineup, and I’m looking forward to that. I like the search results here but would like to see more.