Myriad Search - brilliant new search engine

I love the Myriad Search search engine. :)

Meta-search has always promised the potential of getting the best from the big search engines, but I can’t recall of any meta-search engine working across Google, Yahoo!, MSN and Ask - let alone offering the degree of flexibility to adjust results according to search engine.

The results on Myriad Search are some of the best I’ve seen as an end-user.

From an SEO standpoint, it provides a very fair set of results, because it can offer the filtering strengths of each individual search engine, while also diluting their weaknesses.

Which is a very important point to underline, because as an end-user and SEO, it’s easy to be critical of how the big four search engines provide results at present:

Google - recent spam filtering moves over the past year or so has damaged relevancy, and their restrictive view of newer domains is pretty short-sighted. Google has superb technology and information retrieval is still great, but it is more and more unable to properly deliver new and useful information, because it appears too retentive on issues of preventing manipulation, rather than focussing on more general relevancy;

Yahoo! still has problems with doorway pages and repeatedly sprinkles results from the same domain within results which always looks like a basic mistake. However, Yahoo! does otherwise have a balanced approached to on-page and off-page factors, making it often the most relevant for general information, though not necessarily specific documents;

MSN doesn’t really seem to know what it wants to deliver - it’s swung from the extreme of being too focussed on general links, to becoming far too focussed on on-page content. The results is that I have some small information sites that rank great in MSN in competitive areas, when they do not deserve those positions.

Ask - clustering means it spends too much time fixating on information sites, as commercial sites rarely link to each other unless in link exchanges. Sometimes the clustering technology seems too focussed on .edu site recommendations, which are often woefully out of date. Ask is left tending to ignore great new resources, making it’s search results too narrow to be useful overall.

Myriad Search opens up an interesting new area of user control and personalisation - I can get some of the best results in the industry, and personalise how I want to see those results - and all without the sometimes invasive commercial outlay you might get from other meta and normal search engines.

If I had money to invest, I’d see Myriad Search as a brilliant concept for VC development. As a user tool it is empowering yet brilliant in its simplicity.

As an SEO tool? Well, I haven’t even begun to look at that - but what a bonus!

For more information - Aaron’s announcement at SEO Book, plus engine specs.