Here’s another online, Singaporean-created application I’ve found on the net quite a few days ago - a meta-search engine ala Dogpile, created by 22-year-old William Chee. I have to say however, that I wasn’t all too impressed by this application, and in fact, it’s made me a bit skeptical about AWSJ, The Star and the Today newspaper.

Don’t get me wrong - Turboscout is utilitarian, works well for what it does, and I’m impressed by the breadth of engines it covers, and the press that it’s gotten over the past year is definitely an achievement. However, if you dig a little deeper, you’d realize that it isn’t something that will change the world, nothing to be waxing overly lyrical about, and suffers from key problems that just irritates the heck out of me.

How it works (and why I personally didn’t like it)

Here’s how it works - the Turboscout homepage is utilitarian, sorta like Google except with options for a variety of search engines throughout the web, to filter search for every sort category of files that the Internet currently supports.

So let’s say you punch in your query and hit enter. What happens? Does Turboscout help you aggregate the results from all the best of breed engines into one interface? Or maybe it has an algorithm intelligent enough to sieve out the best from all the various search engines in order to serve out the most relevant out of all the most relevant results from all the search engines? Or maybe it’ll wow me with an innovative user interface that will blow me away!

OK, wrong. It serves out a frame.

Frames?! Arghh…

That’s the magic answer to all our search woes apparently. A frame that sits above the actual search site below. To make matters worse, the frame doesn’t go away when you click on a result! At least it gives you an option of removing the frame…

As you can tell… I don’t like frames in general. Except in very few contexts. I especially don’t like them when they intrude on my surfing behaviour.

Also, this makes for a tidy pickle in terms of a business model. Advertising on top of the actual search engine interfaces hosted on the search engine sites? That’s against the TOS (Terms of Use) of the search engines I believe, plus the search engines would have already have their own sponsored links. How to earn money becomes an interesting question…

A dog-gone comparison

Here’s where Dogpile’s polish beats Turboscout:

• Dogpile uses DHTML layers to present results from the different search engines. Turboscout refreshes a frame.
• Dogpile actual has a useful feature to highlight unique results from each provider in yellow. Turboscout… refreshes… a… frame.

To be sure, Dogpile still doesn’t satisfy me totally - it’s still a bit confusing plus Turboscout’s breadth of search engines (anything from blog search to image search to encyclopedic search) beats the heck out of Dogpile. But, back to my point, Turboscout is just a frame…

In summary…

At the end of it all, I think I’ve got to take my hats off to William Chee for getting publicity all in AWSJ, The Star in Malaysia, and the Today newspaper - all through one press release it seems like. Seems like a good story though - 21-year-old NSF creating a meta search engine.

It’s just too bad that the meta search engine is not actually a meta search engine, just a frame. To be sure, it would be something I wouldn’t have the excuse to do, and I admire William for actually doing something and getting it out there (in response to “If you so good you do it lah!” heh).

But in the end (I’m sorry William), I don’t see anything noteworthy, innovative or even compelling (for myself) about Turboscout. The fact that the press waxes so lyrical about Turboscout has even made me lose faith in the media’s ability to think outside the press release.

But then again, maybe it’s just me…

Posted by adrianlee on Monday, March 6th, 2006 at 3:32 pm.