The new Draze search engine offers users the ability to compare search results from various sources, reducing search time which, according to the search engines, allows users to focus more on their work.
With beta testing carried out at over a dozen universities, it seems that users have been able to find precisely what they were searching for in apparently half the normal time. Impressive results, but with users demanding much more of search these days, and given that the always-growing industry of search engine optimisation is helping website owners gain good search space listings, which means stricter control by the major engines as to who gets in their indexes, will Draze survive in the wider world of search?
With a host of predictable features including a tool bar and multi-topic search functionality including images, blogs, audio, and video this search engine aggregator's basic principle might be relatively new to online search but what makes it stand out to users who have seen this all before? Why would a searcher use a comparison search engine above Google or Yahoo! alone?
By allowing users to compare search results from a single location the search engine promotes itself to those users who it claims are not finding exactly what they need but are actually settling for results served. At Draze the theory is that users search for what they want, are presented with a number of options and can narrow down the selection quickly and easily. This appears to be where users save valuable time.
But what is different in this behaviour from 'normal' search? Perhaps the results page, where Draze offers users the opportunity to specifically select from the major search engines; choose best results with or without Google alongside informing the user where their result came from; and add information on how many listings on that engine the result currently has.
By searching multiple engines at once, Draze provides users with a different approach to finding the most relevant results: it offers the best combined results from a selection of engines. By using the majority of the web's largest engines the Draze search engine also ensures that it provides a strong coverage of the web when returning results.
A neat little product, it will be interesting to see how this approach to search is accepted by the public.
