Chris Pirillo's Gada.be: Metasearch Plus Ease of Use For Mobile Searchers

When Scoble
mentions something that might be of special interest to the mobile searcher, I’m of course going to give it a look.
Yesterday, he wrote of a new metasearch service from
Chris Pirillo called http://gada.be. By the
way, Gada.be also works on regular web browsers too!

Basically, enter your search terms as part of the url BEFORE the domain gada.be and run your search.
For example, interested in searching for the term “airlines”? Simply enter http://airlines.gada.be (in other words, the query terms become the subdomain)
and you’ll be shown top results (no descriptions, however) from Yahoo, MSN, Flickr, Wikipedia, FindArticles, Google News, and others.

At this point, results pages show no advertising. Cool! I wonder if this will continue? It will sure make the pages load a bit more rapidly. Would mobile users be willing to pay for no advertising but faster load times?

Here’s another search, this time for [FBI AND CIA AND Washington AND Offices]:

http://FBI-CIA-Washington-offices.gada.be.

By the way, if you begin your search on the gada.be homepage you can also run your search in more specialized database categories like multimedia, photos, news, and shopping.

Have you noticed that my searches use both dots and dashes? What about search syntax? Well, there is just a bit. Pirillo writes:

• A dot between two keywords implies a quoted statement (chris.pirillo.gada.be)
   
• A dash implies the AND operator (robert.scoble-blogger-microsoft.gada.be)

Chris: How about a list of those category slugs and a way to limit to only words in the title? Also, a list of all of the search services available throughout the service?

Well, I’m off to use gada.be with my mobile browser. Let’s take a look.

Sometimes the default search offers too many choices. Here are some early
suggestions:

• The results are fine but what about a tool to make the pages I click

  on from
  the results links more “mobile” friendly. I’m thinking of a service like Skweezer or access to a proxy that reformats pages for mobile devices.
   

• Also, titles often tell little, what about a link to see the full snippet right from the actual results page?
   
• Automatic source selection with an option to see more. Especially in a
  mobile situation I sometimes want only a few sources. Do I really need results from Technorati, Feedster and IceRocket and the same time? Yes, maybe I do. But what about giving me one or two choices and then a offering link to see others.
   
• Perhaps I missed them (likely the case) but services like Answers.com and IMDB
  would also be useful.
   
• Gada.be would be another great use of dynamic clustering. Allow users

  to
  cluster by topic, source, url, etc. Kind of a Clusty for the mobile searcher.
   

• Chris, you should talk to Dave Pell at
  Rollyo. How about a Rollyo/gada.be hook-up that would allow a user to search only the domains they want.
   
• If you go for some personalization in the future, the addition of Greg
  Linden’s Findory would make lots of sense.

Well, I’ll keep playing and report back soon. First impressions, not bad in concept at all. Kudos.