4 Multi-Search Engines to Consider for Your Home Page

The selection of a home page is critical to one’s WWW experience. It’s your base, your gate, from where you could launch into a seemingly-infinite number of browsing paths. If your Web use involves a lot of searching, then you probably have Google as your homepage.

However, please allow me to present some multi-engine search engines which you should consider to take the place of your current home page.

Search Hacker (NSFW!)

SearchHacker hosts 15 different custom search engines from its homepage: Real Estate, Baby Names, Webcams, Audio Files, Jobs, Video, Wallpaper, Free Stuff, Questions & Answers, Product Prices, File Search (with filetype filter), Passwords, and BitTorrent.

Unfortunately, the first of the engines listed is an adult image search, featured prominently on the homepage alongside a troubling image of a Disney Princess character (!), so I cannot suggest using this site from work, unless your IT department as well as your coworkers are liberally tolerant of such things (Hint: Most are not).

Yahoo! Glue

Yahoo’s Glue returns multiple types of search results, such as videos, news, images, and biography, on one page. The odd thing is that many of these results come from non-Yahoo sites like YouTube and Last.FM. There’s no plain-vanilla Web search with Glue, but there is a handy Yahoo search box in the upper right.

Serchilo

Serchilo can be thought of as a command-line interface for Web search. For example, type “g keyword” for a Google search, or “g! keyword” for an “I’m Feeling Lucky” search. If you’re shopping, try “a keyword” for Amazon or “e keyword” for eBay.

Once you’ve memorized the commands, a search plugin is available for your browser. If you register, you can create your own commands.

Katapulco

Katapulco wins the multi-search game hands-down because of its quick and simple interface and availabilty of over 90 search engines from a single command line. It uses a shortcut system much like Serchilo, but allows for its users to create custom commands without signing up for an account. Use of more than one shortcut at a time is possible, and such results appear in a tabbed interface.

Katapulco will be my new home page for a while, but I’m sure that I’ve missed some great ones, so please share your favorites in the comments.

Honorable Mentions: The original multi-search, Dogpile, Dogpile’s cousins, as well as Twingine (Google + Yahoo).