Ever since Google’s success, there have been many niche search engines springing up. Omgili, which searches forums and discussion boards and promises to separate simple webpages from rich discussions, is one that has been around for more than an year and has somehow managed to escape the attention from the blogosphere.
Following the ‘find, read, discover’ mantra, Omgili lets you search for discussions and topics from over 10,000 forums. They provide the example of “Best Laptop” which results in several topic discussions, such as ‘the best laptop for linux,’ ‘the world’s best laptop,’ and ‘best laptop for gamers.’ Each search result is given with a Google-style snippet and a preceding option to see Omgili’s analysis of the discussion. While it’s no where near perfect and the formatting is a bit abrupt, it’s something that could improve over time.
Omgili is just one of those cool ideas that needs time to get to a level where it’s actually usable — it’s not as if there’s no need for it, but just that I could do a search like this one and get much better results from Google. Of course, once it does get to a level where it’s algorithm is able to give super-relevant results and it has nearly every forum in its index, that’s when I’ll be saying Oh My God I Like It.
[tags]Omgili, Forums, Search Engines[/tags]
