Ever since the days of gopher, web workers have been looking for better ways to find things on the web. After the rise and fall of the big directories, search has ruled the roost, and we all know that a tremendous amount of search traffic crosses the net every day. TWERQ is the most recent company trying to build something innovative and community-oriented on top of that traffic.
TWERQ doesn’t have their own search engine; they piggyback on top of the big three, letting you target Google, MSN, or Yahoo (or all three at once). Search aggregation isn’t new, but there are a couple of new twists here. First, TWERQ presents all of your search results inside of a tabbed interface in a single browser tab. If you’re the sort of person who does a lot of searching (as information workers are wont to do), you may appreciate this decluttering of your top-level browser tabs. You can have a dozen sets of search results open at once in TWERQ’s tab in your browser and toggle back and forth between them quickly.
Second, TWERQ enables collaborative filtering by allowing you to build “hives.” You can turn any search result into a hive. If you do so, a little toolbar appears as you visit the sites pulled up by the search, asking you for their relevance to the topic of the hive. You can add related searches to a single hive, and multiple TWERQ users can collaborate on building up hives – as users have already done to build showcase hives for Microsoft Surface and the iPhone, for example. Hives can include images and video search results as well as straight text search results. You can also create password-protected private hives; that could come in useful as a market research tool, for example. Hives also get their own RSS feed, making it easy to keep up with results that your collaborators add.
Search speed with TWERQ is good, and it supports a good set of shortcuts for advanced users to perform searches quickly. But if you’re a power user of one of the major search sites already, you may find it tough to use the results rewrapped in TWERQ’s user interface. For example, if you’re on Google, you can quickly flip from web to image to news to blog results for the same search term. If you perform the same search on TWERQ, you get the Google web results, and that’s it (TWERQ uses PicSearch for their image supplier). That may be a dealbreaker for many, no matter how intriguing the collaborative features are here.
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