September 4, 2003

Whittlebit is a search engine which as I understand it launched in July. It's odd, and yet somehow cool, to see a search engine with Google ads on the front page.

Whittlebit is called such because you can "Whittle" down your search results based on how you react to the search results. For example. Say I'm looking for information on the SOAP protocol. I enter SOAP in the search box. I get back ten results, including obviously useful ones ( Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) 1.1) and obviously not-useful ones ( Soap Opera Digest & Weekly ).

By each result is a red thumbs-down icon, and a green thumbs-up icon. I click on the thumbs-up icon by the first result. Then I go through each item and click on either thumbs-up or thumbs-down, depending on how relevant it is to my search. (They'll get a yellow glow around them so you know you've clicked them.) The ones I'm not sure about I leave alone. Then I click "Whittle," which is at the top of the page next to the query box.

The page will refresh and I'll get a new set of results at the top of the page, along with a note about what terms were added to my query and which terms were excluded from the results. I get another set of results I can vote on, and keep going.

I like search engines that allow you to specify the kinds of pages that are getting you the results you want, and this is off to a good start. However, it would be good to have a page excerpt and visible URL in the results in addition to a page title; sometimes you can't get enough information about what a page is from just a page title (and sometimes the page titles just aren't good.)

Source: Research Buzz

        

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