Real time search is a big deal right now, and the term “real time” has become the web 2.0 of buzzwords. Services like Twitter Search (currently horrifically crippled) and Friendfeed have mountains of instantaneous data, with so much user content, Twitter and Friendfeed have been dubbed “the pulse of the web”. Still, real time search has many issues, such as filtering, spam and overall relevancy, making the pulse of the web a dead one at times. In these areas that real time search faulters, Google and other search engines excel. So what if we combined forces, and got the best of both worlds? Searchmerge is the first to stand up to such a challenge.

Originally called Google With, Searchmerge is the product of three young entrepreneurs, Simon Fletcher (16/Founder), Greg Cooper (18/Web UI), and Calum Brannan (19/Social Media). Searchmerge integrates three main search engines, Google (traditional search), Friendfeed and Twitter (real time search). While these are the main highlights of the service Searchmerge also will search queries across, Last.fm, Flickr, Youtube, Vimeo and Technorati. Think of of Searchmerge as the web 2.0 version of Dogpile, but is Searchmerge really any good?

UI

Looking at Searchmerge is a very pleasant experience, but actually using certain aspects of the interface can be tedious. To search you need to first select what engines you want Searchmerge to gather your particular query from. While choice is always good, making certain decisions for people is nice also. A wonderful feature  would be to automatically check Google, Friendfeed and Twitter because these are the highlight search engines of Searchmerge, and is arguably the main reason people visit Searchmerge. Otherwise, it does get tedious to check every search engine you want to crawl everytime you visit the site.

There are also some very random quirks  about Searchmerge such as conducting a new search. You will get two bars, one informing that searching multiple sites is hard, and a load bar right above that message. While I could be being a bit critical in this aspect, it would look better if one or the other was chosen.

Searching

My experience with Searchmerge is to say the least, not all that exhilarating. I first pulled a quick vanity search, an old tweet was the first result, followed by some people I didn’t know (still relative though) and finally to my Linkedin page. After about the ninth result there seemed to be no rhyme or reason as to how Searchmerge organized and gathered results for my query. Then I did another search, American Idol + KISS, and while these yielded fairly relevant results on the three search engines independent from each other, it was an absolute crap shoot on Searchmerge. I figured clicking on the real time button would improve the results, they did not, and the results stayed the same. I tried many other queries and clicked on the real time button, mostly irrelevant results were shown.  This made me question the need of the real time buttons purpose and honestly left me a little confused.

Searchmerge is also incredibly slow. I would wait an average of thirty to forty-five seconds to conduct one search. It was so slow, I considered not writing this post out of mere frustration. Waiting that long for a search result is just ridiculous, and it is even more frustrating when the result is completely irrelevant.

Don’t get me wrong, Searchmerge is a splendid idea, and I give kudos to the team for trying. But in all honesty, Searchmerge simply isn’t good based off of my experience with it. Results are all over the place, it’s slow and the interface has some quirks that need fixing. Go try out Searchmerge for yourself and leave your experience in the comments.