Have you ever needed to see the search results for another city — maybe because you want to see what PPC ads are shown somewhere else? Have you ever needed to see search results from a different country, or in a different language? Maybe you’re into real time search, and you’d love a place to find the latest photos and videos being shared on Twitter. Or perhaps you’re planning a vacation abroad, but you’re not sure when is the best time to visit Europe.

It’s time again for another roundup of the latest and greatest search tools and search engines, and in this article, I’ll share five such sites that will answer the above questions (and more). This is the fourth in my occasional series profiling under-the-radar search tools. Links to the previous three are at the end of this article.

SearchMuffin

Look, I don’t name ‘em, I just use ‘em and write about ‘em if they’re cool. And this one is. SearchMuffin has a simple premise: Type in a keyword and choose a city from the dropdown menu, and it’ll show you the Google search results that match. Think of it as a sort of geo-targeted competitive research/PPC research tool. It’s about the easiest way I know of to see the PPC ads that appear in other cities. Here’s a screenshot of a search for “anaheim real estate” in Anaheim, even though I’m up in Washington state.

And best of all, it’s not just limited to major U.S. cities; at the moment, there are 262 choices in the dropdown menu, including such non-metropolises as Roseville, California, and Arvada, Colorado. (No disrespect intended to Rosevillites and Arvadians.)

Glearch

Let’s expand our horizons beyond 262 U.S. cities. What if you needed to quickly see some search results from other countries and/or other languages? Glearch (again, I don’t name ‘em) is an international meta search engine that lets you search by country, by language, and/or by search engine. You can take those three options and customize each to build just the query you want.

In the example above, I’m doing a search for the rock band U2, and I’m searching French-language results on the French versions of Google, Yahoo, and Bing. I’m also including local newspapers, too. The search results page has a tab for web results and a tab for news results. The web results page, like any good meta search site, tells you where each listing was found, i.e., “Ranked 1 by Google search” or “Ranked 4 by Yahoo search.”

Roooby

We’ve written a fair amount about real time search in the past few months, but we haven’t focused too much on the visual element — people posting photos and videos of what they’re doing now. Roooby is one of several real time search engines that capture media, but one of the few that surface both photos and videos. (Although, to be frank, Roooby could do a better job of finding videos by scanning sites such as Qik.com, TwitVid.io, and others that host live video.)

Roooby isn’t the only player in this space. TwitCaps, TwitPicGrid, Pingwire, and Twicsy offer similar real time image search engines.

Spezify

Speaking of media and images, here’s the most visual search tool I’ve ever seen: Spezify. The best way I can describe it is a sort of visual meta search engine. It pulls in results from Yahoo, Bing, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and even eBay and Amazon to create a fairly stunning search results page.

This is serious eye candy. There’s a settings page where you can choose the sources and types of content (images, text, video) you want included. But to be frank, the focus on visuals means the search results have no context whatsoever. You can move vertically and horizontally through the results, but you have no idea why you’re seeing what you’re seeing. It’s innovative to be sure, but for this searcher, it’s too lacking in functionality.

Joobili

Finally, here’s one for our readers in Europe, or for our readers traveling to Europe. It’s called Joobili, and it’s a travel/event search engine with a twist: Rather than telling the search engine what you want to do or where you want to go, you tell it when. There’s a cool date-based slider on the home page to get you started, and once you’re in the results, Joobili lets you see results based on categories (Arts, Sport, Nature, etc.), by country, or by keyword.

If you create an account, Joobili will let you save events to a wish list or a “went” list. You can also rank events to help other users make decisions on what to do and where to go. It’s a clever approach, but as I hinted above, it only covers Europe.

See also:

• Another 5 Search Tools You May Not Know … But Should
• 5 (More) Search Tools You May Not Know … But Should
• 7 Search Tools You May Not Know … But Should

IxQuick, which bills itself as “the world’s most private search engine,” has changed its name to the much-easier-to-remember Startpage.

Startpage is a meta search engine that’s tried to differentiate itself from the pack by using privacy as a marketing feature. In 2006, shortly before the mistaken release of three months of AOL search data, the service announced that it would purge its users personal data within 48 hours. This past January, IxQuick stopped recording IP addresses completely and began offering secure searching via the https protocol.

But judging by the general lack of awareness about IxQuick/Startpage, the focus on privacy hasn’t resonated yet with the general search population. Meanwhile, the big three search engines currently hold on to user data for three months (Yahoo), nine months (Google), and 18 months (Microsoft/Bing).

Wouldn’t it be great if you could use a search engine without needing to touch your mouse? You know, type your query and then scan and even click through to results without actually clicking the mouse button? Or maybe you’re looking for an alternate source of search advertising data, like how many advertisers are bidding on certain keywords. Or maybe you’re into something more mundane, like finding an apartment to call home.

In this roundup of five search tools you may not know about, I’ll introduce you to possible answers to those questions and a couple more. This is the third in my occasional series that profiles under-the-radar search tools. If you missed the previous two, links to those are at the end. But let’s start with that mouse-free search tool….

keyboardr

For some, the computer mouse is nothing more than an inconvenience. Take my hand off the keyboard? No thanks! keyboardr was invented for people like that. It’s a meta search engine that pulls in results from Google, Wikipedia, and YouTube.

Results begin to appear on the page as you type a query, and once you’re done, the mouse is unnecessary. You can use the up and down arrow keys to navigate from one search result to the next, and hit Enter to open the result in a new window.

AdQuants

This one is for the search marketing crowd. AdQuants is a tool that offers competitive research related to any keyword or URL you provide. If you use or have seen SpyFu, you’ll be familiar with what AdQuants does. (One difference is that AdQuants is a free service that aims to make money via custom research.)

The screenshot shows an AdQuants search for “sunscreen,” and the data includes the number of advertisers bidding on that term, and estimates for average CPC, average daily clicks, and related information.

Tweepz

You might be thinking that we don’t need another Twitter search engine, but Tweepz is a bit different from ones I’ve come across, and it’s already helped me find new people to follow. It’s a search tool to find Twitter users, and it offers more functionality than I’ve seen in other Twitter user search engines. One option is to search based on location, and Tweepz quickly found several people local to my area that I’d never found on other Twitter search sites.

After doing a search you can sort your results by number of followers, number following, or join date. In the right column, there are additional refinements and an RSS feed for your search results. In addition to location-based search, Tweepz lets you search Twitter member names and bios. Good stuff.

123people.com

Whether you’re searching for another person, or searching on your own name, you might be impressed with the wide variety of data that 123people.com pulls together on a single page. A search for my name includes photos (from Facebook, Flickr, Picasa, and other sources) … email addresses (mine, and some from other Matt McGees) … phone numbers (not mine, thankfully) … web links … videos … blog posts and news articles mentioning my name … the Amazon page selling my U2 book and my Amazon wish list … and much more.

If you’re searching for a common name, 123people.com lets you narrow your search by including a city name or zip code. There are a few too many advertisements on the search results page for my taste, but it’s still an interesting people search engine.

MyApartmentMap

MyApartmentMap is a search mashup that pulls in apartment rental data from online classified sites and color codes them by price on a Google Maps interface. The site promises “up to the minute reports” for the entire U.S. The interface includes a drag-and-drop marker (see below) that simplifies the process of finding apartments by price in specific cities and neighborhoods.

The search results pages also show average apartment rental prices for the most recent month, as well as a chart showing 6-month trends for rental prices. Based on a few searches I did, the data appears to be quite good in bigger cities but more hit-and-miss when you get to smaller locales.

UPDATE: FanSnap, an event ticketing search engine I profiled previously in this series, is now out of beta. New features since our previous mention include the ability to see available tickets by zooming to row level at venues, as well as a partnership that adds available tickets from eBay into FanSnap’s search results.

See also:

• 7 Search Tools You May Not Know … But Should
• 5 (More) Search Tools You May Not Know … But Should

Google UK recently shared a list of 52 Things to Do on a variety of Google properties (found via Phil Bradley). It’s a collection of tools and tips about using Google products and services for some everyday functions. If you’re a search power user, you probably know most of them already. But Google’s message seems to be, “Did you know you could do all this stuff on Google?”

It got us thinking about non-Google search tools that might have slipped notice altogether, or just fallen off your radar. With that in mind, here’s a list of seven search tools you may not know about … but should.

Read on to discover about how to see search suggestions from all major search engines on one page; a “cover flow” interface to see face images from Google Images; a new way to get recommendations about music, movies and more; new tools to search multiple search engines from one place; a tool for finding hot event tickets and as assist for hunting through Flickr’s many photos.

Soovle

Soovle offers a unique search interface that puts a variety of search sites on a single page. But what makes it unique is that, as you type in the search box, Soovle shows you the auto-completion phrases that each search site recommends. In addition to being original, that function could serve to help with a keyword research project. It looks like this:

Google is the default search site when you arrive, but you can use the right-arrow on your keyboard to quickly select a different site to perform your search. And there’s also a daily update on the top auto-complete terms. Each day, Soovle queries the search sites to find out what they show as the top results for each letter of the alphabet. Pretty cool stuff.

facesaerch

If you like the “cover flow” feature that Apple iTunes offers, you’ll like this new image search engine. facesaerch (yes, “a” before “e”) takes a Google image search, eliminates everything but faces, and gives the results a more modern interface. It looks like this:

It’s nothing groundbreaking overall, but one nice addition is a customizable widget that lets you embed a facesaerch widget on your blog or web page, complete with cool thumbnail scrolling and all. (For your Oprah Winfrey fan page, of course.)

TasteKid

TasteKid is more of a recommendation engine than a search engine. It covers movies, music, and books, offering suggestions for things you might like based on what you search for. The interface is gorgeous (albeit a bit dark/goth), and the recommendations are generally good. Search for U2, for example, and TasteKid suggests you try out INXS, R.E.M., Sting, Bruce Springsteen, Coldplay, and several other artists — most of which fit what a typical U2 fan might enjoy.

There are question marks next to each recommendation. When you mouseover a question mark, TasteKid displays additional information from Wikipedia, YouTube, and Amazon about that artist (or book, movie, actor, etc.). It uses Google Gadgets to offer a widget that can be embedded into your web page or blog.

fasteagle

Fasteagle is a combination search tool and web directory rolled into one interface, with a little touch of feed reader built in, too. The home page gives you quick access to search a dozen different sites, from Google to Delicious to eBay to FriendFeed.

It would be nice to be able to customize those 12 options, or add more to the original 12 to make your own personal search portal. But I don’t see that option anywhere on fasteagle, which is still in beta. Meanwhile, clicking on the categories in the top menu (Tools, News, Business, etc.) leads to new sets of sub-categories in the left-side menu. Under the Tech category, for example, the left menu changes to show sub-categories such as Web World, Tech Vloggers, IT News, Computing, Apple, Google, Mobile Computing, and Web Marketing. That last sub-category includes sites like Search Engine Land, Marketing Pilgrim, Search Engine Watch, and several others. Click on any link, and the site shows up in the main fasteagle window, with the top and side menus still showing — making fasteagle almost like a feed reader that gives you quick access to hundreds of web sites in rapid succession.

FanSnap

Have you searched for event tickets lately? It’s not fun, and it’s not easy. FanSnap hopes to change that by providing a one-stop source for finding tickets to sporting events, theatre productions, and concerts.

FanSnap doesn’t sell tickets; it lets you find tickets being sold by brokers and others in the secondary ticket market. At the moment, I don’t see inventory from official ticket sellers such as Ticketmaster or TicketsWest. They get inventory from more than 50 ticket resellers, making it a much easier way to shop than visiting the individual web sites of that many ticket brokers. To borrow a comparison Om Malik recently made, it’s like Zillow for event tickets.

compfight

Strange name for a Flickr image search engine, but don’t let it keep you away. Compfight offers a handful of customizations that help you drill down into Flickr’s enormous pool of user-uploaded photos.

You can search the full text of a photo page (title, description, and tags), or if that’s producing too many matches, you can just search tags. You can search for photos that allow Creative Commons commercial usage. You can search for photos that are original to Flickr. You can also turn Flickr’s Safe Search on or off. And you can combine all these options in any search combination you want. And rather than Flickr’s clunky, default, 10-at-a-time search results, you get dozens of thumbnails with compfight.

Kedrix

There are plenty of meta-search engines out there, but only one that wants you to “mearch” instead of “search.” That one is Kedrix, which is trying to coin a new word based on the words “meta” and “search.” That doesn’t work for me, but the search engine does, thankfully.

The Kedrix premise is simple: It’s actually not a meta-search engine in the traditional sense. Rather than mash results from different search engines together (as Metacrawler, Dogpile, Mamma, and others do), Kedrix separates the results from the four main search engines on tabs. Google results are all under one tab, Yahoo under another, and so forth. In that sense, it’s more like a search engine comparison tool. And that makes it somewhat more valuable to SEOs (who like to compare results across different engines) than your standard meta-search engine.

InfoSpace recently sold both its local and directory assets and its mobile platform business to Idearc/Superpages and Motricity respectively. So what’s left? Specifically Dogpile and its cousins Metacrawler, Webcrawler and the domain InfoSpace.com. The company also owns the kid-friendly search site Zoo.com. Amid all this, JD Power & Associates has just named Dogpile “highest in customer satisfaction among search engines” for the second year.

There were different results coming out of the American Consumer Satisfaction Index survey of “e-business,” which includes search engines. However, the JD Power ratings for Dogpile belies the company’s tiny search market share, which is less than one percent and gets lumped into the “others” category typically.

Consumers have never clearly understood “metasearch” and InfoSpace has never done a particularly good job of explaining the benefits to users — or those benefits have not been perceived to be enough to overcome the habitual behavior of searchers (read: Google & Yahoo). With the focus now on general search left (though local content can still be found through InfoSpace itself and within general meta search results), the challenge will be for InfoSpace to take some risks and reinvent its products and itself.

FYI, the JD Power study also found:

The number of customers who report using search engines on a daily basis has increased from 66 percent in 2006 to 70 percent in 2007. Google remains the most widely accessed search engine in the study, experiencing an increase in usage of 7 percentage points from 2006 to 58 percent in 2007.

InfoSpace-owned metasearch engine Dogpile, which recently refreshed its homepage and made other, minor changes, published the results of its second “search overlap” study. The first study, released in 2005 and commissioned from the University of Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania State University, found that 84.9 percent of results on search engines were unique to one engine and not found on competitor sites. The study involved Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Ask and also found that among 12,570 random user-defined queries just over 1 percent of first page search results were the same across the engines.

The 2007 study has found further divergence and even less overlap: only 0.6 percent first page search results were the same across the engines.

Here’s a high-level summary of the findings of the April, 2007 study, this time conducted in conjunction with Queensland University of Technology and Pennsylvania State University:

• The percent of total results unique to one search engine was established to be 88.3 percent.

• The percent of total results shared by any two search engines was established to be 8.9 percent.
• The percent of total results shared by three search engines was established to be 2.2 percent.
• The percent of total results shared by the top four search engines was established to be 0.6 percent.

The majority of first page results are unique:

• On average, 69.6 percent of Google first page search results were unique to Google.

• On average, 79.4 percent of Yahoo! first page search results were unique to Yahoo!
• On average, 80.1 percent of Live first page search results were unique to Live.
• On average, 75.0 percent Ask first page search results were unique to Ask.

Top search result was different across engines:

Only 3.6 percent of the #1 ranked non-sponsored search results were the same across all search engines for a given query, down from 7.0 percent in the July 2005 overlap study.

Sponsored links on Google and Yahoo:

• Only 4.6 percent of Yahoo! and Google sponsored links overlap for a given query.

• For 22.8 percent of all queries Google did not return a sponsored link where Yahoo! returned one or more.
• For 9.9 percent of all queries Yahoo! did not return a sponsored link where Google returned one or more.

You can find the complete study here.

I’m generally not a big fan of meta search technologies—I prefer to go directly to the search service I feel will likely give me the best response for any given query, rather than sifting through the aggregated results from several engines.

But recently, developer Stephan Schmid invited me to kick the tires on his Switzerland-based meta search engine eTools.ch, and after playing around with it a bit I came away impressed.

Enter a query and eTools.ch searches the four major search engines (Ask, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo), several European engines (Seekport, Entireweb and Bluewin) and oddly, AltaVista and Lycos, two all-but-forgotten stars of yore. Results display your query terms highlighted in yellow, a preview link, and the source of the result. Each source is linked, allowing you to quickly re-run the search in any of the ten engines queried. By default, results are multi-lingual, but drop-down boxes let you limit results by country or language.

This is all and well, similar to other meta search engines. Where eTools.ch really shines is in its customization options that you enable through a preferences page.

First and foremost, you can change the weighting of each search engine (boosting it from normal to important or very important) or disable it completely. I’ve never seen such a feature in a meta search engine, as obvious as it seems, and it can make a huge difference in the types of results you see. Alternately, you can also change your preferences so that eTools.ch just queries the fastest search engines.

eTools.ch has several other interesting features that set it apart from other meta search engines. According to Schmid, eTools.ch parses each query and really translates it to each target engine, passing through properly structured Boolean operators, modifiers and phrases (most meta search engines simply send your unadorned search terms). It also removes results with tracking information (especially MSN, Yahoo, AltaVista and Lycos— their results contain random redirect links).

You can also save results in either PDF or RSS format, a handy feature if you’re doing research or want to run a search on an ongoing basis.

eTools.ch also has a mobile version with results presented in a simplified, non-graphical layout

Schmid says that he plans to show clustered results, similar to those presented by Clusty, in the near future.

eTools.ch is a relatively rare find—a meta search engine that actually offers compelling features rather than just aggregating the results found by others.

UpSnap, a provider of mobile search and content, has partnered with federated search technology firm MuseGlobal to provide one of the first metasearch engines for mobile devices.

From the press release:

“Mobile metasearch technology from MuseGlobal searches multiple mobile sites simultaneously. For example, if you are looking for a particular ringtone, rather than going to ten different mobile sites one-at-a-time, which will take you 30 minutes or more, you now go to UpSNAP.com and put in one search only. UpSNAP will then search all ten ringtone sites at once and deliver sorted, de-duplicated and uniform results instantly.”

The new metasearch works both through a web interface on any page of UpSnap.com, or via SMS, allowing virtually any mobile device with a text messaging account to use the new service. More information on using the service can be found here.

CrossEngine is the new (and in my opinion better) name for the Mr Sapo meta search engine. It is similar in functionality to TurboScout and Trovando in that it has a search box at the top of the screen with a list of search engines that you can use below that. Simply type in your search, click on the engine that you want to use and view your results in the bottom pane. If you want to try a different search engine, just click on the name and a new set of results will appear.

Search engines of this type are very good when you want to quickly compare results from a variety of different engines, or if you simply want to try out a different engine. That’s certainly the case with CrossEngine, which has in the region of 200 engines available under a series of tabs such as Quick Start, Standard, Images, Videos, News, Blogs and so on. It’s also possible to customise the engine to load a page of your choice in the main pane below the search box element in case you really want to have immediate access to search.

CrossEngine is a neat engine which does exactly what it sets out to do, and does it well. It is worth taking a look at, particularly if you want a change from your usual default engine(s).