There is a new Swedish service available that helps you find relevant web pages.

By Pandia Guest Writer Lars VÃ¥ge, Internetbrus.com

Web inSuggest can, according to the owners, not really be called a search service, but is rather a recommendation engine. You tell the service what kind of sites you are interested in and get a list of similar sites in return. This list is based on the interests of other users, so the system is a bit similar to Amazon’s “People who bought this book also bought the following…”

Web inSuggest comes in addition to the already existing Image inSuggest, which helps you identify related images from flickr.

So how does it work? At the inSuggest pitch black home page you will find Web inSuggest to the left and Image inSuggest to the right. You are asked to enter the URLs of a few sites that you like to get personal recommendations.

In Web inSuggest there is a form at the very top of the page where you can enter addresses and click on “Add”. Alternatively you may drag and drop some of the web pages displayed below to one of the four empty squares found below the form.

Given that we write a lot about search services and know a lot of sites that do the same, I entered the URL of our Swedish search oriented site Internetbrus.com. Web inSuggest generated a page with eight recommendations, most of them Swedish language blogs oriented towards library related content.

What if I want a more focused set of recommendations? I added the site of our friends over at Pandia, but that did not make much of a difference. If I start with Pandia.com and leave out Internetbrus.com I get a strange mix of sites, although they are not uninteresting.

When I do searches based on my personal interests, however, I see clearly that Web inSuggest is definitely worth a try.

What I do not get is where they go to get the data they use to generate these recommendations. There is no information on this on the web site itself or in the press release.

We should probably ask the developer himself, Dennis Gustafsson from Norrköping. Last year he was elected to the position of “Engineering Hero” by The Swedish Association of Graduate Engineers.

This article was originally published in Internetbrus, a Swedish blog on search engines and Internet searching that has been online since early 2001. It is written for both searchers and educators.

Internetbrus is owned and edited by Lars Våge and Lars Iselid. Lars Våge works as a librarian at Mitthögskolan and a programmer for JL Informationsteknik. Lars Iselid is a librarian at the Umeå University Library, freelance journalist for the computer magazine Datormagazin. He can be found blogging under the pseudonym Cyrille at Iaslash.org.

Lars and Lars are co-authors of a book on Internet research: Informationssökning på Internet.