SearchRadar bumps Google Ads to show useful results

By Vivek | August 28th, 2007 at 01:03 pm ET         

Webaroo team is really up to something smart this time around. Over the weekend the Bombay, India based startup launched launched a new service branded as SearchRadar.

Thought process behind developing the service was that today only way to effectively search on web involves the typical cycle - ”query -> review -> refine keywords”. While millions and millions of people have mastered this drill, there are still quite a few who don’t want to take that route. Besides that increasing size of search engine index, made-for-adsense spam and spanning the entire web, and users still not willing to go beyond first 10 results compounds the problem.

While Powerset is trying to solve the first problem described above and wean away users from Google, Webaroo Search Radar is now offering a very interesting approach that works on top of Google itself.

To get started, you need to download and install the Firefox/IE plugin for SearchRadar. After that point, whenever you search on Google, SearchRadar brings up a summary of additional results on the right hand side of the page, right where Google Adsense ads show up. These additional results are summary of the millions of pages Google and Yahoo claim to have for all your searches. Search Radar does the equivalent of reading all the results pages and presents the top recurring topics in the pages.

To take a sample case, try searching for xBox on Google after you have installed the extension. What you get from SearchRadar on the right is a summary of all the other gaming consoles in the market and likes. Not that useful for most of us, but can really help people starting out with gaming. Definitely saves them from a trip to Wikipedia. Similarly, searching for “King Lear” bring up interesting summary  on the right.

On the whole, you can view SearchRadar as a tool that performs sophisticated query suggestion for query refinement. Instead of you digging for similar queries or try to come up with similar phrases, it throws them in front of you. Besides that, on-mouseover excerpts linking the original query to the suggested keywords are also helpful.

Only issue right now is that summary is served from a slightly older version of the web corpus. Hence, most of the recent content summary is missing from the results. According to Webaroo, latest crawl and index is in the works, which should get reflected in near future.

Links:
SearchRadar Firefox extension
SearchRadar