Pagebull is a visual search engine in the sense that it displays search results simply by visually displaying page thumbnails, highlighting the term(s) searched on. Some search options are available – limiting to particular country results (currently Any, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Russia, Spain, UK, USA) being the main one, though you can also limit thumbnails in 3×4, 2×6 or 4×3 format. As the search engine is data intensive they recommend a broadband connection and recent versions of browsers as well as the activation of JavaScript.
As a search engine it really isn’t anything particularly new or novel, and even the idea of showing thumbnails isn’t new either. It’s not an engine that I’d personally use for serious research, but having said that it’s not without merit either. I did find the display very useful for searches that I run on a regular basis in that it was much easier to scroll through visual depictions of pages and note differences to pages that I was familar with. I also found it quite helpful when looking for visual images in context on a page, rather than images in and of themselves. Consequently not something that I’d use on a regular basis, but I can see times when it might just fit the bill.
Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.
Related Topics: Search Engines: Other Search Engines
Its a bad name – I really though that PageBull was a joke…
Yes a really bad name but I like the thumbnails, talk about a great way to see if the site is a scraper site. Another good aspect to it is the fast way to bookmark the site with several different servies. Given the direction that SEM seems to be heading, it looks like a good idea to me. Dumb name but good idea.
> As a search engine it really isn’t
> anything particularly new or novel
It’s at least a couple of months old:
http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2006-11-28.html#n25