I’m always eager to try new search engines. I’ve got about 12 of them bookmarked on my trusty Rockmelt browser (yeah, I like to try new browsers too). Everything from Blekko to DuckDuckGo to Wolfram Alpha has been either a flavor of the month, or turns out to be a useful niche engine that can help you in certain situations.
Today I discovered a beta engine called Bottlenose that seems to have some promise. The idea is that it’s a “now” engine, specializing in finding things that are trending, happening now, or widely discussed in social media. The site gives you a pretty good results page, which looks more like a content magazine site than a search engine, with a bunch of snippets, hashtag links, social streams, comments, and readable excerpts from articles on the subject you searched.
Searching for Now instead of Then
Bottlenose search appears to have promise for those situations where you want to search something for which there’s a lot of historical content on the web, but you are looking for something that just happened related to it, and you don’t want to weed through old pages.
Now of course, Old Reliable Google has custom options to filter your searches by date, or by News, Blog, etc, which is a fast way to narrow down, but not nearly as much fun as exploring content that has been assembled by virtue of its trendability, and not just its publication date. Also, Bottlenose lets you bypass the need for making those custom settings, as it assumes you are looking for the new and the now on your topic.
Here’s a good example…. there’s many, many gigabytes on the web covering influential musician Kurt Cobain (ah, Kurt, if you had only lived to see your own Wikipedia page), so a search for him on a traditional engine will lead you to fairly predictable sources.
A search for him on Bottlenose, however, may be different every day, as it’s pulling things said about Kurt in real time. The search I did today pulled down a number of versions of a story that made its way through the music press today, as Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins fame name-dropped Kurt Cobain in a mini-tirade against the music site Pitchfork that was just angry and interesting enough to blow up a little on the web, at least within the circles of folks who care about that sort of thing (yes, me!)
Bottlenose searches for trends, not records
I’m looking forward to playing with Bottlenose a bit more, to see if it can supplement my searching and improve my ability to stay current on news, and get to the front curve of trending conversations. Seems like a promising tool for bloggers, marketers, and journalists in particular, or for those who just love to live in the here and now.
OK
JM
