Warp speed into the skwormhole!

March 2000

Pandia recently launched its new metasearch engine, making it possible for its visitors to search several search engines in one go. But what if someone came up with a metasearch directory, where you could click your way a directory structure and get listings from several of the best search directories?

Well, we are not there yet. Still, Skworm has done something equally interesting. It is a search directory, all right, but each category opens up a "skwormhole" where you can tick off relevant search engines and do a metasearch using these. For instance, if you select the Macintosh category Skworm will let you search sites like Apple, Mactopia, MacCentral and Macfixit. You can personalise Skworm by deciding what search engines Skworm shall search.

There are some 250 search engines divided into 58 "skwormholes".

It is certainly an intriguing concept. The advantage of using Skworm is that it gives you a practical gateway to searchable sites devoted to specific topics. The downside to it is that it demands a lot of screen space. Skworm actually opens up the result page from the various sites in a separate frame. It would probably be better if it the frame could present the search results only. However, we can see why they have not done this. Programming a script that can rip out the search results from 250 sites would be very demanding, indeed!

And no, we do not know what a "skworm" is.

• Go to Skworm
• About.com has more on Skworm

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