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Written by J.T. Dabbagian and posted in eHub Reviews

With so many ways to find what you need on the Internet, it’s good to see that companies and developers have realized that there needs to be more then just one way to search. Enter Sputtr. Sputtr aspires to be a metasearch designed to search multiple engines from one single website. The site provides several ways to search, ranging from a basic Google search, to any of Google’s other search types, to social bookmarking and news sites such as Reddit and Digg. It also includes niche search engines like last.fm.

Sputtr’s main interface, as seen in the screenshot above, offers a simplified way to perform a search on just about any website you can think of. All you need to do is type in your search term and click one of the many buttons. Sputtr’s list of web site searches is impressive and adds the convenience of being able to come to one website in order to search a multitude of others.

But in a way, this isn’t really a metasearch engine. A metasearch engine would allow you to search multiple search engines all at once. Sputter, on the other hand, will only permit you to search through one single website at a time. It lacks the searching abilities that I saw in the old metasearch giants, such as Dogpile, mamma.com, and my personal favorite: Profusion. Additionally, The interface also seems rather cluttered. My suggestion is to allow a person to enter their search terms, click the buttons related to the sites they want to search, then perform a search.

Still, what is enjoyable about the website is the fact that so many different websites can be easily converged onto one web search site. This way, instead of having a multitude of websites cluttering up one’s set of bookmarks, all one has to do is visit Sputtr, and almost every search engine you can possibly think of is almost literally at your fingertips. (If you have HP’s new touchscreen, it is at your fingertips.)

There are very few websites above that meet all requirements to be a snappy Web 2.0 search site. My personal hope is that through Sputtr, other web programmers can re-design or create new search engines, building off of Sputtr’s engine.

Sputtr shows great promise in search development for the Web 2.0 generation, and I hope that Sputtr builds on the website, making it into a true metasearch engine. It will be among the first reincarnation of that kind if they pull it off, something that would be undoubtedly popular and generate revenue.

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Emily Chang is an award-winning strategic designer and co-founder and principal of Ideacodes.com, a web consultancy in San Francisco that focuses on the design and user experience of next generation websites, social applications and networked communities. Learn more...
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