eTools.ch is a search engine with a couple of interesting twists…

It is a meta-search engine, meaning it doesn’t do its own crawling and indexing of web pages, it sends your search to 10 other search engines, then sorts the results for you. But this is neither new or interesting; MetaCrawler was doing that when Google was called BackRub.   Look at these features, though:

• eTools lets you rank, and even disable, any of the 10 search engines it uses. Thus, if you don’t like the results that Google retrieves, you can eliminate them.
• eTools works with keyword search terms, like every other search engine. Unlike every other search engine, however, it accepts boolean queries, and translates it into the closest equivalent for each of the search engines it uses.
• eTools allows you to select a language limit for your results.
• eTools will export the search result list as either a Pdf or RSS file (essentially an XML file).

from Search Engine Land

MasterKey is an interesting prototype of a new meta-search engine.  I like search tools that generate metadata (in the form of subjects, authors, etc. to narrow one’s search) on the fly.  Vivisimo was the first of these that I encountered, and MasterKey is an excellent example of how to do this in a usable manner.

One thing that needs to be addressed, however:  once you have narrowed your search results, there doesn’t seem to be any straightforward way to go back to a broader set of results, short of modifying the info in the search box.  One has to expect to be able to back up and explore other areas with as much ease as narrowing the search in the first place.

from Catalogablog