Clusty – clusty.com – 3 Stars
Okay, so I say that I’m not going to review a search engine, and then I go and review a search engine in my third post. What gives? Well Clusty is just that cool.
In my defense, Clusty is not a search engine, its a metasearch engine (Yeah Mike, BIG difference). If you aren’t aware, a metasearch engine queries several search engines at once. So Clusty’s results tend to cover a lot of ground. The excellent thing about Clusty is the way it organizes search results by grouping them by subject, so not only are the results more complete, but they’re also more useful.
The interface clean and straightforward to use. It includes a filter for adult sites. You can also use the interface to search to news, images, wikipedia, blogs, jobs, and more. What’s more, the site is now completely “Wii Friendly” (If you don’t know what that means, then it probably doesn’t apply to you.) Look in the “about” page to find out how to add a Clusty Cloud to your blog or website like the one at the bottom of this page.
Internet Movie Database – http://www.imdb.com/ – 4 Stars
Internet Movie Database is the gold standard of cinema information. Librarians love it for its usability and comprehensiveness. One can find information on films, tv shows, filmmakers, actors, and more from around the world. A great source of trivia and source of information for bar bets.
Home page has film industry news and lists of the new and top films and DVDs.
You can also use the site to purchase movie tickets, talk about movies, and even post your resume so you can get a job in the film industry yourself!
Ah…the inaugural post…
Internet Public Library – http://www.ipl.org/ – 4 Stars
Fantastic Site! It provides links to especially useful sites that have been vetted by librarians and library students. This means that their content is trustworthy. It also gives you a finite number or hits instead of the 80 billion from a Google search, so you don’t have to wade through search results to find something useful. In my mind, if you’re not going to a library for your infomation needs, at least go somewhere credible and useful like IPL.
The content has also been catagorized (ya’ll know how librarians like to organize). The catagories are like those in web directories like Yahoo! but better (Of course, I am a bit biased).
The interface is “pleasingly plain”, meaning clean and relatively intuitive. Try the Grokker enabled search too as its pretty interesting.
Overall, I have to say as a nearly lifelong Buckeye that the “school up north” has put something truly outstanding together here!
