Update on CrossEngine

A few hours after I had posted my comments on CrossEngine, Greg Notess of Search Engine Showdown emailed me asking if we in the UK were seeing a different version from people in the US. My screen shot was different from what he was seeing on his screen. A quick check confirmed that CrossEngine has already made changes to the interface. The Formats tab has gone and the filetype search has been included under the Web tab (the Standard tab renamed). The audio search, previously included under Formats, now has its own tab, which seems far more sensible to me.

A few further comments now I have had time to look at it in more detail:

• Live.com and Exalead are missing from the file format search. Both sometimes come up with unique sources when, for example, I am carrying out a highly specialised search forPowerpoint presentation or a spreadsheet containing market data. Exalead in particular does tend to pick up more European sources.


• Accoona is missing from the News tab.


• On a positive note, it is good to see the Gutenberg project listed under ebooks in the reference section. This was around long before Google et al and way before we all had lovely graphical interfaces to the Internet. I can recall having to FTP texts to my computer... oh Happy Days - NOT!

By the time you read this, CrossEngine may have changed something else but I'm all for that. At least it demonstrates that they are actively developing it (and possibly monitoring what the blogosphere is saying about it?). The problem for me is what am I going to see when I demonstrate it to a workshop on advanced search strategies in Swansea next week :-)