Gada.be is a new meta-search project from Lockergnome’s Chris Pirillo. Gada.be (pronounced “gotta be”) is a very clever tool. It’s not quite a search engine, yet it as elements of that.
What does Gada.be do? Well, you give a keyword or two and it returns results in neatly formatted XML. It pulls those results only from sites that provide XML data. I categorized the results by the source; a kind of search aggregator, and gives you the option of viewing different flavors of search results.
When you search, it actually crafts a URL using your keywords. For example, searching for ‘bigblueball’ gives you this:
http://bigblueball.gada.be/ — a very simple URL format. Short and sweet is Gada.be’s credo, because Pirillo wanted to make sure it worked on his PSP as well as other mobile devices. In fact, the name ‘Gada.be’ was chosen specifically because of how simple it is to type in on a mobile phone — 4232.2233 (smart move).
So our search for bigblueball finds results from a wide range of sources, including Digg, Flickr, MSN, SeekItAll, Plazoo, Ice Rocket and others. Not a comprehensive result set like you’d expect from a full-fledged search engine like Google (where the same search returns about 139,000 hits).
If you scroll to the bottom of the gada.be search results, you can perform the same search on different sets of sites, including blogs, entertainment, geeky, health (“Doctor, I’ve got big, blue…”), jobs, multimedia, news, photos, random, research, shopping and social. One of the more amusing searches was using ‘bigblueball’ on the photos category: http://bigblueball.gada.be/p
One other interesting thing about Gada.be is that it allows you to output results to OPML. This is interesting because it allows you to roll your own search aggregator for use in a portal like Yahoo 360 or Microsoft’s not-so-secret start.com. So you get new stuff from a wide range of sources without having to ferret them out yourself. As convicted felon Martha Stewart would say, “It’s a good thing.”
Gada.be is in beta right now, so you expect changes and occasional glitches in the service.
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