Quickly Search All Of Your Favorite Sites With Sputtr

sputtr Can you imagine the internet without a search engine? A large social network without the ability to find new or old friends? The ability to only click on link after link after link? The internet would essentially be useless.

Fortunately we will never have that problem, because if we did, the American recession, along with every other recession across the world would be double what it is today.

The problem is that although Google is essentially the answer to every website’s search difficulties, it’s not perfect for individual sites. You’re forced to browse to whatever particular site that you are looking for, type in your search term(s), and browse through your results. Although this typically isn’t a big deal to most people, it would be nice if you could collectively have all of the engines in one central depot. This is what Sputtr does for you.

Sputtr brings together a majority of the top websites across the web, and links quick access to each of their respective search engines. The screenshot below gives you a better idea of what I’m talking about.

sputtr 2

After entering any particular search term, you simply select whichever search engine you would like to use and it redirects you to that site’s engine automatically. It takes a different approach at meta-searching.

It’s free, but not required, to sign-up for an account, and once you do you can customize your Sputtr page, however you like. There are 48 default engines, and hundreds of additional options to add yourself.

sputtr 3

If your particular site isn’t listed already, you can even manually add your own. I’ve done this for MakeUseOf here.

sputtr 4

In the end, this search engine tool is just another in the large collection for the ‘web lazy’. It eliminates browsing to an individual site search, and does so with a very clean, very fast and very easy-to-use interface.

Check it out, and see if it can become your new alternative to searching your favorite and most popular web sites.

Know of any similar alternatives to Sputtr? Is something like this worth switching over to?

Tagged: • •

T.J. Mininday

Hi, my name T.J. and I'm a Techaholic. Since the takeoff of Web 2.0, I have been 'over the top' obsessed with technology, the internet, and just about every single gadget released during that time. Whether reading, watching or listening, I can't get enough. Although the past few years have fueled my obsession, I've loved computers, gaming and all forms of technology since my early teen years(The Early 90s). It took an incredible amount of begging and prodding to push my Dad into purchasing my first $3000 Pentium Pro PC. I was immediately hooked, and I later went on to get a degree in Computer Networking and have been involved in the field ever since. I currently am employed as an IT Field Engineer, and blog part time on TheWindowsFix.com and ConnectedInternet.com. You'll find that I write about many of the same topics as MUO and look forward to contributing to this fantastic blog, for years to come.

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  • http://www.gigglecomputer.com phaoloo

    Thanks for telling this interesting tool.

    Another way to search withing your favorite sites is to use Google Custom Search.

    Simply create one and add your favorite to the Sites list, check the option Search only included sites, then get the code and embed to any blog or site you want.

    • http://www.thewindowsfix.com T.J. Mininday

      Agreed, custom search works slick, as we have it implemented here. I don’t think this falls into the same category though.

  • http://interestsblog.blogspot.com Mohan Arun

    Google Custom Search is different in that you can only include existing websites’ pages. For example you cannot search BlogPulse or IceRocket using Google Custom Search (you can add them but it wont work – I already tried) as those are search engines by themselves. I would add Serph, Flaptor, TweetScan, etc. to this Sputtr tool

  • banana

    I agree that gcse is different. Actually I’m dissatisfied with cses because they work kind of different than google itself. I’ve been running four cses and poorly when I have a doubt that a search term is not found by them I know for sure I would find with ‘site:searched-site search term’ in google. Actually I was thinking about implementing a meta-search engine like sputtr just because I can’t rely on google’s cse. The best way to search in a list of websites is to make use of their own search engine…or as I think implement a search engine which makes use of google main site: search. I’m not happy with cse and I waited very long to give it time to index sites. Sorry.

  • david

    Thanks for this great article!

    I see myself use more and more vertical search engines. For example, I have been using http://greatpdf.com a lot these days for my research papers.