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The Icerocket search engine
Icerocket
- a look at this search engine
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Icerocket is one of the new generation search engines, and has a focus on blog and MySpace searching. Its web search seems to use the Inktomi/Yahoo results feed, and PPC ads from Validclick. A 'Quick View' button opens a small window with a view of the target site. This may have been useful before the days of tabbed browsing, but seems like a redundant gimmick now.
1. Commercial product - digital cameras All pure and sponsored results were useful. The bog search option seems to produce accurate results, with the most recent blog posts listed first, but they are of little real value for product-related searches.
2. Commercial product actual model - a product brand + model name We used the term Sony cybershot. This produced good results in the listings and ads, though the snippets were rather short.
3. Commercial purchase - buy CDs We used the useful 'Exact Phrase' option here. Amazon and cduniverse.com were at the top of the listings, which included a range of music stores.
4. Entertainment - Naomi Campbell While the results were mostly good, with the official site number two in the listings, the snippets which are meant to help a surfer to decide if the site is what they need are far too short. In addition, there is too much weight given in their rankings to so called authority sites - the fourteenth site listed was an old news story from CNN about the model being arrested for assault - this fully eight months before. This is very, very poor and undermines user confidence in the freshness of the results.
5. Entertainment - games cheats We used the 'Exact Phrase' option again. As usual with this search phrase, none of the sponsored results had any connection with cheats. In addition, the first result is from a sponsored feed which is not identified as an ad: it was also irrelevant for the search. Four of the ten top listings were for the same site, ign.com. Overall this search produced a seriously substandard set of results.
6. Precise requirement - Berkeley sociology The search delivers the required page, at the top of the listings.
7. Precise requirement - Dublin Ireland hotel All sponsored and pure results were relevant for the search. We noticed here that the keywords were sometimes highlighted in the listings and sometimes not - the ones not highlighted are sponsored results, mixed in with the pure results and not identified as sponsored advertising. While this is commonly done all over the web, the fact that other results on the page are listed as 'Sponsored' makes it misleading.
8. Precise / Travel - New York London airfare All results were accurate and useful.
9. Research - asthma information The search produced accurate results; at this point we changed our preferences to list 40 results per page instead of the default 10, and the results quality remained high.
10. Research - Iraq maps Icerocket's results are almost identical to Altavista's; both seem to come from the Yahoo feed. The results are acceptable, apart from the pointless and irrelevant eBay link for collectables. The blog version of the search gave very poor, very repetitive results. We admit, we don't know why anyone would want to search blogs for anything, but we are open to suggestions (see bottom of page).
11. Searching - Dogpile.com The site required is at the top of the listings, where it should be.
12. Searching - Ask Jeeves This search gives you what you need.
Summary: While Icerocket's main purpose may be to provide a robust blog search service (they have some interesting blog tools to investigate), the web search engine is acceptable, very fast and reasonably accurate. As with most engines, it does better with commercial terms than with general terms like game cheats. Some of the feeds it uses also let it down in terms of freshness, which is probably due to the ranking algorithm giving too much weight to big name web sites.
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