EightBlack.

This recent article in The Age technology section talks about some local Aussie folks, who in their capacity as engineers for Yahoo! developed a search interface called Alpha.

The article goes on to quote Google’s Co-op and the smaller US start up Rollyo.

I was naturally intrigued but when I took a closer look I couldn’t help but wonder about Search Automator.

I met Derek Franklin in the US about 2 years ago and he’s successfully launched Search Automator 3. His search interface must be the coolest search portal around. Ok, you have to buy it as opposed to Google Co-op and Rollyo but it’s only US$17 bucks (dont agree with Derek’s price point) but hey, it’s his product.

Derek’s no slouch when it comes to search.

He’s also one of the most respected Macromedia Flash experts around, having written 8 books on the subject and sold in excess of 500,000 copies.

Take a look and see for yourself.

Here’s Derek’s interface and below is Yahoo!’s new project Alpha.

As far as I can tell, you can do a whole lot more searching with Derek’s application than you can with Alpha, you get free upgrades for life and the product is in its 3rd release cycle, rather than being in beta.

That’s the thing about the internet. Sometimes you think you’re blazing new trails when in fact the grass has already covered the tracks before you. Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t stop working on that one thing though.

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This entry was posted on Monday, April 9th, 2007 at 11:03 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.