Gada.be

Joined: Dec 19, 2002 Posts: 4191 Location: The Village

Quote:

Check out our Cool New Search Engine

Have you noticed weird little "gada.be" links scattered throughout our Lockergnome's newsletters, feeds, and Web site? That's because it's our new metasearch engine - created just for users like yourself!

Largely, I've found it easier to tag or link to an aggregated location of results than it is to tag to a specific vendor all the time. Share the love, man! Announcing the public beta of http://gada.be/ (yes, that's .be). This is a metasearch service with a few unique features, no matter where or how you view it. gada.be is for anybody with access to the Web and in need of immediate, impartial results.

You're going to save time and bandwidth immediately; imagine how long it would take to traverse all those sites just to find the one thing you were looking for!? If you tend to view only the top results for a cursory search, why not just feed you the top results in one easy spot (where you can subsequently subscribe to them)?

It was borne out of several frustrations. If you've ever tried to visit a Web site over a mobile device, you know it's a pain in the knuckle. The domain had to be simple to key-in from anywhere. gada.be is 4232.2233 on most cell phones and/or PSP. Normally, when you want to find something online, you have to choose a Web site (wait for the page to load) enter the query (wait for the second page to load) then see results from that provider. With "gada.be," you insert the query *AS* the subdomain!

* http://corpse-bride.gada.be/
* http://corpse.bride.gada.be/

Those are two different URLs, each with a different set of results. A dot between two keywords implies a quoted statement, whereas a dash implies the AND operator. You can enter your query either as the subdomain *OR* at the end of the gada.be URL, as you might note.

Too geeky for you? Then you're thinking too hard about it. We're currently collecting results from ~140 sources! Remember, there's more than just a default category to be selected or accessed.

Then, there's having to visit several sites just to get the results you want. You don't want fancy graphics - you want RESULTS! Often, this isn't feasible when you're on-the-go. Even when you're sitting with a laptop or chained to a desktop, it's still a time-consuming process. We all love the individual search services, so why not bring 'em together? Okay, that's what we did. Moreover, we dynamically output OPML which you can turn around and import into your favorite news aggregator. gada.be saves everybody time! You can read more about us here.

We're fueled by dynamic (keyword-driven) search results in RSS or Atom formats; if you know of a service that we're not utilizing, please tell us what the output string is (exactly) so that we might integrate it. The keyword(s) must be visible within the URL! This has to be easy for us to use so that we can make it easy for everybody else to use. You don't need to understand RSS to be able to use gada.be.

There should be virtually no learning curve with this particular service. You know how to search for stuff, right? Done. We have plugins available for your favorite sites and programs, too:

* Konfabulator Widget (Tweaked by Ron Buttiglieri) [More]
* DQSD Plugin [More]
* Firefox Search Plugin [[url=http://www.getfirefox.com/]More]
* Internet Explorer Extension
* ActiveWords
* yubnub
* Bookmarklet (Firefox)
* Bookmarklet (IE)
* MovableType Plugin
* BlogWare
* FeedDemon

Remember, we have all sorts of categories... showing results from ~140 different sources, not just the ones on the Default page. Linking to a category page is just as easy, too - just add the designated letter to the end of your gada.be URL):

* http://corpse-bride.gada.be/o
* http://corpse-bride.gada.be/p

Easy peasy, lemon squeezy. And if none of it makes sense to you, just try it, link to it, play with it, etc. Have fun, and please send me feedback!

Yours Digitally,
Chris Pirillo