New search engine gives Google run for its money

Provides whole new approach to scouring the Net

30 May 2003

Turbo10.com is owned by Fleetfoot Internet Solutions Limited based in London's Docklands and promises to offer access to information on the Internet that others search engines, including Google, can't find.

The search engine covers what it calls "Deep Net" - non-static pages that are only covered by specialist search engines - by making it possible to run searches through a huge array of different search engines and then combine the results in one list on its site.

Users can use the default setting of eight of the most popular search engines (about, altavista, bbc, dmoz, encyclopaedia, goggle, msn, yahoo) to search for something or they can build a number of "collections" of different search engines to run specific searches through.

For example, if you wanted to check only news stories, you can set up a "News" search engine collection that checks only search engines dedicated to news.

Turbo10 really comes into its own though with specialist information. Able to search vast databases such as law cases simply and fast, alot of time and effort is saved jumping from one site to another. Currently, the engine covers 1109 other engines but more are being added everyday as people become aware of it.

A company spokeswoman told us that Turbo10 is aiming at the broad market - meaning that it will run in competition with Google. However the company has a different view of how search engines should work.

"We want to become the Hotmail of search - personalised to each searcher," she said. Maybe not the best comparison, but, she says "most search engines have no idea who their users are. We want to change this completely to user-focused searches."

Upcoming features include Amazon-style recommendation algorithms to personalise searching, search profiles that also act as bookmarks, more browsing options and better result annotation. "We want to create a blog-o-sphere of search users and their profiles," she explained.

The big question though is: is the search engine any good? In short: Yes. Very good. Results are fast and accurate. The selection of available search engines may be a bit bewildering but it is very easy to set up different "collections" and they really are very useful in finding small snippets of information.

One big difference is that the search engine does not allow the use of punctuation and logic commands to refine searches as most other engines do, but instead uses "clusters" - collections of words tying together various results - that are clicked on and reduce the results given to that particular topic.

In fact, the only downsides of Turbo10 are that it appears a little cluttered and the colours are not great. Expect to hear big things about it in future.

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