Aftervote Review: A Search Engine With A Social Twist
Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Wednesday, 2 of May , 2007 at 9:50 am
Aftervote isn’t so new. It used to be Younanimous.com. They changed their name, and I like the new name, quite frankly.
So what makes Aftervote so special? Several things actually.
First of all, its meta search features make it helpful. Aftervote takes results from Google, Yahoo, and MSN. They even provide you with each result’s ranking at each of those search engines. While not 100% accurate, it’s as close as one could expect for such a service that doesn’t update in real time. I wish they would add results from Ask as well since it has moved into fourth place, knocking AOL down to fifth. But since AOL is an aggregator and Ask is not it wouldn’t make sense to include AOL, but I believe Ask could be a major player in search soon. Note to the Aftervote head cheeses: Add Ask to your meta results.
Another thing that makes Aftervote special is the social bookmarking results it returns. There are other social search engines but Aftervote’s simplicity and non-pretentious feel gives it an edge, I believe. You can see results from StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, Digg, Technorati, Reddit, Furl, and Archive.org. You just click on the little icon they provide for each service and you’ll be taken to that service’s entry for the result. That’s a helpful feature.
Aftervote also displays the PageRank of each of its results as well as the Alexa ranking. Very helpful. Thank you Aftervote.
In addition, you can bookmark entries on Aftervote and vote them up or down just like on Digg. This is supposed to be a spam control tool. Whether it works well or not remains to be seen, but it might. It is likely that spammers will go up on Aftervote and double- and triple-click their own entries to move them up in the rankings. But Aftervote’s system does give a personalized return for each user without forcing users to sign up for an account. If you vote a website up and another one down then the next time you search for that term you’ll get a personalized return due to a cookie placed on your hard drive by Aftervote. Minor nuisance, but worth it. (Sidebar: The Negative Vote option is currently not operational. If you click it you’ll get a small box pop up that tells you it will soon be activated.)
You can also prioritize websites, block domains and block links from your future results.
Another useful feature I found is the supplemental results feature. If your search terms pulls up a result for a web domain it will tell you if other pages on that domain appear for the same search term. That’s a very useful feature as well, especially for keyword research and research on your competition. I like it.
Other interesting features of Aftervote include an e-mail this feature, Google translation feature, blacklist and whitelist management features, bugmenot password logins icon, and several widgets and plug-ins to make your user experience more useful, including Whois information and Tinyurls. Finally, you can also customize Aftervote to give extra weight to or less weight to Google, Yahoo, or MSN results if you think the results you are getting from a certain search engine isn’t accurate.
There are many things to like about Aftervote, few things not to like. If you want to try something new and find yourself in the mood for a different search experience, try Aftervote. I’m not in the habit of recommending alternative search engines, but in this case I’ll make an exception.
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