Ixquick metasearch engine gets some new features

(March 24 2005) Metasearch engine Ixquick adds an international phone directory, shopping search and other useful features.

Ixquick is known for its professional and creative approach of metasearching, i.e. the gentle art of harvesting search results from other search engines in order to present them in a useful order.

Founded in New York and launched on the Web in 1998, Ixquick is owned by a Dutch company based in Haarlem, The Netherlands.

Ixquick is known for its Star System, where it awards a star next to each result for every search engine that ranks a result as one of the 10 best results for a given search. For example, a five-star (*****) result at Ixquick means that five search engines found the result Top 10 relevant.

"Ixquick's exclusive Star System delivers more comprehensive and relevant results through the consensus reached by the engines it searches," says Alex van Eesteren, vice president of marketing and sales, Ixquick.

"We believe that Ixquick's metasearch technology is not only unique, but one that enables users to find the best results right across the web."

Well, there are other metasearch engines that use similar point systems, and there are definitely other high quality metasearch engines around, but Ixquick did win this years Pandia Award for best metasearch engine. In our book that means a lot.

One of the features that Pandia find useful is Ixquick's ability to translate more complex Boolean searches into the syntax used by the various search engines harvested by the metasearch engine.

Ixquick has now re-engineered its algorithm in order to generate better search results. The company has also updated user interface with a simpler and cleaner design.

In addition, the new Ixquick delivers the following tools and features:

• A repetitive results removal feature that lets you remove results you don't find useful. Ixquick will then delete similar pages from the results.
• A result honing feature where you can checkmark a search result in order to generate mores results of the same quality and relevance.
• An International Price Comparison that lets you comparison-shop over 5,000 merchants in order to find low prices.
• An international phone directory that lets you find people and businesses worldwide. There is also a reverse directory feature you can use to pinpoint the identity of someone who's calling you.

The phone directory is more than a little scary. We had no problem finding our own Norwegian phone listings in the database. If most countries are covered equally well this means that you now have a genuine international phone number index available.

It should also be noted that Ixquick now covers 17 languages, now including Chinese, Japanese and Korean. In addition, each language version includes local search engines.

Press release (PDF-file): New Ixquick International Search Engine Unveiled
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