A while back I watched a GeekBrief.tv Podcast Brief #175 and Cali mentioned a site called Sputtr. I keep a running list of sites that I should take a look at and review for this blog. Today is Sputtr‘s day.
Sputtr is a website that gives you the ability to house all of your favorite search engines on one screen. You register as a user, (A simple name and password) and you are ready to start customizing your own search engine page. Here is a screen shot of what the initial page looks like.
There are a ton of options for your searches. But the great thing is that you can customize the page with the search engine buttons that YOU want to use. Here is what my customized page looks like.
I customized my page with the search engines that I use most often. I added Flickr, Zooomr, Twitter, IMDB, YouTube, Digg, Dogpile, Google Blogs, Yahoo Answers, Ask.com, Amazon.com, Life Hacker, Ebay, Myspace, Technorati, del.icio.us and FaceBook. Those are sites I frequent most often and one I would most likely search on a daily basis. But they are not the only options available at all. Not by a long shot. There are tons of options to fit every need. And
Sputtr even has International versions with the International search engines that you may need.
New and exciting search engines are being added often. Just this past Wednesday 8 new options were added including the ability to search Veoh.com (Video Search), Clusty.com (Alternative Search Engine), Shoutwire.com (Bookmarking Site) and Techcrunch.com.
Customizing your personal search page is very very easy. Just click the Customize this Page link. The screen will change slightly and show all the buttons with two little icons to the top right one is a picture of a little hand and the other one is a little X. Here is what that would look like.
Now suppose that you want to move the more frequently used buttons to the left hand side. I say the left hand side because that is my preference for things I would use most often. You can use the little hand icon to move each of your buttons. Just click and hold the little hand icon and drag your button to where you would like it to go. The button that you are moving will “ghost” and you can see it glide over the other buttons which will shift and move out of the way to make space for the button being moved. The image below illustrates that.
Here is a close up of the Flickr and Twitter buttons as I move the Flickr button.
With the Sputtr Customize screen open you can also determine if you would like your searches to automatically appear in another window (or tab) or not. You can also click on the drop down list of all other buttons available. Once you find one you want to add you then click the “Add to Page” link. That Button will now appear in the last available slot. And once there you can click and drag it to the location that you would like to have it be in permanently.
This has to be one of the easiest and cleanest interfaces that I have used for customizing a personal page. And searches are even easier. I simply type in the keywords that I want to search for and then click the button of the search engine I want to use.
Let us say that I am searching for Transformers. I type Transformers into the Search box. Then I can click any button on the screen and that will be the engine that will perform the search. What is great about allowing the searches to come up on other pages is that I could search for Transformers on Google and the come right back to
Sputtr and do the same search on YouTube without having to re-key my search words.
Sputtr also has a blog with all the latest developments to the site along with the newly added search engine options. You can customize to your hearts content with this site. I was very impressed. I’m adding it as one of my default tabs that comes up when I open Firefox. Now I never have to open up and other search engine page it is all covered with
Sputtr.
