New search engine released: Fastoo
Today I'm releasing a new search engine: Fastoo.
After Nibbo, I decided to work on a home page/search engine hybrid named Search Dial; although I was not really satisfied with the resulting functionality, I was happy with the foundation, as it proved to be reliable and very quick to load.
Based on that foundation I built a new search engine, named "Fastoo"; it's based on Google search results, but it has a live preview panel; also, users can mark their favorite domains to directly preview them when they appear in the search results; for instance, if you search for a movie title and IMDb is in your direct preview list, there's a high chance that its preview will load automatically, showing the movie information.
How is this related to Nibbo? Well, I plan to merge the foundation used in both Search Dial and Fastoo with functionality, code and design from Nibbo in order to create the next iteration; I believe that speed is Nibbo's worst defect, and even if a few features are lost, it will make it better.
I'm against this kind of drastic changes; in my opinion, the right approach to this kind of renewal is to create a separate product, but the reality is that Google will be discontinuing a large number of the data sources that form the core of Nibbo, so I believe these changes are necessary.
I will work hard to make this new version as good as I can; after it's released, feel free to provide feedback on the changes, I'm always happy to hear what you have to say.
Changes coming
Today Google made an announcement about the deprecation of a number of APIs.
Unfortunately, most of these APIs are the very reason why Nibbo was created in the first place; the fact that they're disappearing will severely reduce its functionality.
What does this mean? Well, on the bright side, Nibbo is not very popular the way it is at the moment, so I see an opportunity to take a different direction, maintaining the search aggregation nature of it, of course. I've a number of ideas for this, and I'll probably be developing them this summer, so you can expect a lot of changes this autumn.
New engine: Bing Images
A new search type is now available: Bing Images.
It works exactly like the other images search, but it uses Bing Images as its source; it also has a different set of options.
We believe the preview mode (when it's in the sidebar) for the image searches works quite well, but that the "main search" mode could be better, so we expect to add some improvements there soon enough.
The Bing search has also been updated, and now it looks more consistent with the Google one; also, it will now show links to the cached version.
New features added
Today we're releasing some new features:
- Larger previews column: the previews column has been expanded a bit (from 250 to 330 pixels). This is used to show more information, like the domain where the result is, or more images; the old width is still used if the browser width is small (less than 1000 pixels). It's possible to configure this feature from the settings panel.
- Flickr search improvements: the maximum number of preview rows has increased to 4, and also clicking on the images will open the "gallery mode", like the regular images search.
- "Other tabs" widget for sidebar: it was included a few days ago; it's quite simple, just shows search links to the the other tabs, so it's not necessary to scroll to the top to perform the search in another tab; also, it gives the possibility to hide the tab bar in the settings panel and still use the tabs feature.
- "Top" button in sidebar: just a button in the sidebar to go to the top without having to scroll all the way up; it's only visible when the page has been scrolled.
- Configurable separator character: the bullet character ("•") was used to separate different information placed in the same line; that character is now configurable from the settings panel, and the default character is now "›". For instance, it's possible to use a blank space, dash ("-") or middle dot ("·").
We plan to release support for the Bing Images search in a few days.
Development milestone reached
We just uploaded some changes, like the ability to add any engine from the search results page, an informational message when the search returns no results (or failed), and several bug fixes.
The objective of a large proportion of the changes we've been added lately was to allow users to customize everything from the search results page (adding/modifying/reordering/removing engines/tabs/sidebar items), and from today all those actions are finally possible.
The "Latest" tab returns as a default tab; it seemed to be quite popular before, and with the changes on the Flickr search, and the addition of Bing News, it should be better than before.
New engine: Shopzilla
Yesterday we added a new search engine: Shopzilla, which performs a search on Shopzilla's price comparison database; also, it has been included in the Shopping tab by default.
We also improved the Amazon search quite a bit, as it had some problems, but it should work a lot better now.
Enhanced Flickr, news and feed searches
Today we've upgraded the Flickr, news and feed search engines; the largest changes are in the Flickr one, which now shows a lot more information, including the description, the author, upload date and number of views.
New feature: Bing News engine
Today we added support for another search engine type: Bing News; it's also included by default in the "Media" tab.
That's all for the time being; more improvements coming soon!
New feature: Customizable engines and tabs from search results page
Today we're happy to announce that it is now possible to configure engine previews and tabs from the search results page.
In the case of the tabs, you may click on the current tab label to edit the tab name, or use the arrow next to the name to rename or remove certain tab; also an "add tab" button has been added, and the tabs may now be dragged in order to reorder them.
For the preview engines, a contextual menu has been added, which allows for edition and removal; it works exactly like the the sidebar customization we posted about earlier.
We'll soon be adding the capability to add any engine (including custom engines) to certain tab from the search results page.
We also detected some issues with Internet Explorer 8, which are now resolved; if you're experiencing any problem with IE, let us know and we'll look into it.
New feature: Customizable sidebar
The basic concept behind Nibbo is to offer a hybrid between a search engine and a customized home page; today we've advanced one more step towards this vision, by adding the possibility to customize the sidebar.
Each section can be minimized or expanded; when it's minimized, it will show the number of available items in it, and show a tooltip with them when hovering it. Also, they can be relocated by drag and drop.
Click on the little square with an arrow to show the available actions; the options, refinements and related searches sections also have an additional actions: Edit; in the case of the options section it allows to edit the current engine attributes (name, icon and number of previews when shown as a preview); in the other two, it offers the possibility to define the number of items to show.
The sections can also be removed; in that case, an "Add" button will appear at the bottom of the sidebar, and clicking there will provide the list of available sections.
We've also tweaked the preview boxes; the toggle icon is now part of the favicon, and will appear when hoveing the preview header; also, the name of the engine in the header is now a link to the main results page, and the rest of the header is used for drag & drop.
We hope you like the changes; feel free to provide us with feedback!