Wednesday, January 5, 2011

Search engine for more websites you love

Somehow the internet gets a little monotonous with facebook despite its infinite applications and endless comments one can make. Wanting to have more than my usual scope of websites - facebook, gmail, designboom.com, ted.com, iht.com and probably some soccer news sites, I looked for a search engine to find similar sites to the ones I currently hop around. I came across moreofit.com but discovered that there's a more popular one called similarsitesearch.com. So which is better?

According to comments on hacker news, it appears that moreofit.com has a better user interface than similarsitesearch.com whereas similarsitesearch.com generates more results than moreofit.com. When i tried it out myself, moreofit.com reaped more search results plus, it has this really neat sidebar that allows you to toggle between the level of popularity and similarity of the list of sites you want. So my preference leans towards moreofit.com. Given the popularity of similarsitesearch.com, it seems it has a headstart in connectedness as it has facebook "like" buttons and the whole lineup of social networking sites to link itself with. But because I'm not an active user of these social websites, it doesn't quite boost itself in practicality with me.

Holy cow. I was suspecting that google would either buy these websites up or do something similar and it seems like I'm right. Google chrome has this extension called "Google similar pages" in its beta version and also, it always had the "similar" button in the search results next to the search item. I tried it out and they're fairly accurate but users mention that moreofit.com derives its data from delicious.com (where users manually bookmark their pages according to categories) so that makes it superbly accurate as the preferences of users are more effective than gathering results from common words.

Hence, the verdict - go try moreofit.com

UPDATE:
Eric: You're right. I didn't compare moreofit and similarsearch that much to give a fair comparison. The quality of similarsearch is far superior.

1 comment:

  1. moreofit.com's search result looks like what similarsitesearch.com generated a year ago. similarsitesearch.com has improved very much since then.

    accurate result is more important than more results.

    ReplyDelete