kartOO

Has anyone been using kartoo.com? It's a very different kind of search engine and I'm curious to hear other's experiences with it.

just tried it don't really like it, to much flash for my liking

Googlefight confirms it. Kartoo sucks

http://www.googlefight.com/cgi-bin/compare.pl?q1=Google&q2=Kartoo&B1=Make+a+fight%21&compare=1&langue=us

Google: 57,900,000
Kartoo: 74,600

Seriously though - it's ugly, and thank god for Mozilla's flashblock plugin (We hates filthy flash websites, yes we does).

Potentially interesting idea though.
Simon

How 'bout iceroocket looks like a familiar interface , but the whole images on the searches is pretty novel (although it would suck if I was on dialup, but it can be disabled).

Still wouldn't use them over google until they have something like groups.google.com.

-b

IceRocket looks pretty funky... I do like the screen shots of each site. Interface has been ripped from Google, looks very much the same

I noticed the images they use are just for the domain itself and not for the specific link, I guess that is to save disk space, etc.

http://www.icerocket.com/search?tab=web&q=andreas+koepke

I did that search and it returns two Dev Shed links, one of my single posts and the other a link to my profile. The screen shot shown for each of them is of the forum index.

Ohhh! I like Icerocket. The exact phrase checkbox is something google sorely needs, and the thumbnails will be nice if they get the resources of someone like google behind them so they can archive individual links. As it is, they are only marginally usefull.

Kartoo has an interesting idea, but I perfer my search results listed top to bottom, personally....

And this Icerocket thing is really cool.... very nice, actually

Actually, Google's method of locating an exact phrase is superior to IceRocket's.

On IR's interface, you have to use a checkbox, which locks you into either searching for an exact phrase or not - a boolean.

With Google's method, you specify an exact phrase by encapsulating it within quotes. "Exact Phrase" will search for that string. The advantage here is that I can now couple an exact phrase search along with other relevant keywords which may or may not be part of that phrase. For instance, I can search for [ "fender jazz bass" pastorius rocco bootsy ]. Google will look for the exact phrase in the quotes "fender jazz bass" as well as any or all of the words before or after that exact phrase.

This is a much more flexible system than IceRocket's.

Also, for the record, IceRocket isn't using its own technology, but rather acting as an aggregate for Yahoo, Lycos, and other search engines.

And it's slow as all hell on top of this.

Not exactly a winning combination.

I just noticed that all IceRocket's exact phrase checkbox does is put the search quote marks. Like the Dr said, I could do that with google. The problem is, neither one really searches for exact phrase, if you look at the text on the top right just above the results, it's broken apart the words, and sometimes skips common words that are important parts when taken as part of the phrase. I think most of the speed problems have to do with sending all those thumbnails down the wire, which there is a well-placed option to turn off on the results page. Haven't tried it yet, so I don't know if it will remember your settings. I'm sticking to google at least until they get per-page thumbnails instead of per-domain.