Inquisitor search engine

Thursday, November 10, 2005

Via Technorati's blog I came across a search engine called Inquisitor Instant Search which is very quick as it searches Google as you type, and also gives you different options for searches, e.g. if you type "Technorati" in the search box you see the following compact but userfriendly view (I didn't even have to click the Search button):

As you can see, you can repeat the search on A9, Technorati etc with one click.

There is a Inquisitor 2.1 search extension for Safari on Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger (downloadable upon making a donation) which, as Technorati say, allows you to set Technorati as your default search engine.

Unfortunately there isn't a toolbar for other browsers yet, and the online beta version of Inquisitor is less configurable.

I like the fact (being a keyboard fan) that you can tab down to any of the "did you mean…" entries and hit Enter to see those results on Google.

Wishlist - that when you tab to a "did you mean..." line, the search results box underneath it changes to show the 3 top entries relating to that particular "did you mean" search.

Warning - the link to the Inquisitor blog doesn't work in Internet Explorer, at least the few times I've tried, so don't click it - you may end up having to close down all your browser windows, or at least I did. It works fine in Firefox though.

One caveat: I don't know if it's just my PC, and whether it's something to do with the "search as you type" function, but I have noticed that my keyboard response slowed down noticeably after using Inquisitor, and I'm talking about not just in my browser but also my email, etc. Particularly after I tried to go to that blog link. This has happened two days in a row now. And Alt Tab suddenly stopped working. Is anyone else noticing this who's tried the online version of Inquisitor in Internet Explorer?