Is there really room in the world for yet another search engine? After all, we already have Google, Yahoo, and Live Search (I assume that Cuil was just some sort of practical joke gone horribly wrong). But don’t be so quick to discount newcomers: MelZoo is an innovative search engine that displays results in a persistent sidebar.
I’ve actually wanted this sort of search result presentation for years. I find that opening pages from a set of search results in their own tabs is a clumsy hack compared to MelZoo, which split the browser in half. Hover over a result on the left, and the result displays at full size on the right. Each result gets cached, so you can quickly browse and compare a half dozen search results just by hovering over each one in turn.
I haven’t had time to assess the accuracy and freshness of MelZoo’s searches, but I did search for “BNET Dave Johnson” (what, did you think I’d search for Rick?) and the first result was the story I wrote just two days ago about Cloudlet’s tag clouds for Google. Sharp!
