A group of college students from Allegheny College recently launched a new search tool, Gnosh, that is a very useful meta-search tool, similar to Gada, which allows you to easily search for a term and retrieve results from a large range of search engines and social services. You are able to make a search and view results for the term from Google, Yahoo, MSN, Flickr, Del.icio.us, IceRocket, Google Blog Search, Amazon, Digg, and more all without leaving the Gnosh website. You may be saying, “Gada does that too.” It does, but what makes Gnosh stand out is that you can signup to save favorite searches, view your history, subscribe to searches, get social by saving friends, and more.

Gnosh also has results come up in a very nicely organized page with tabs and overviews, making the search experience a whole lot easier. Search Engines and Social services are split into their own tabs and each search engine or social site is also split into their own individual tabs (like you see above). What I really find helpful though are the overview pages. For instance, if you just click on the Search Engines tab when looking at results, it will show the first result from each search engine on the overview page. If I see an interesting result, I would then go to the tab for that specific search engine to view more. I was also happy to see that there are also Wikipedia results. If a match is found, it will show the full Wikipedia page inside of Gnosh. There is only one issue that I had when viewing the results. The results and how they are layed out is perfect, in my opinion, but I didn’t like how it would go back to the main overview page when making another search if you are in a tab already. For example, if I am in the Google Blog Search tab looking at results for the term I last search and then I decide to search for another term. I would prefer the new results to come up in the same tab that I am in when making the search so I don’t have to click through the tabs again to get back to it. It could just be my personal preference though, but I would find that much better.

I also mentioned that the Gnosh gets even better when you signup. You get your own profile page that allows you to save search terms, view your history, and even manage friends. The way you receive friends isn’t clearly explained, but the way it works is very simple. Say that I added the search term, “iPod” to my Gnosh favorites. If you were to search for iPod and then go to the “People” tab, it will then show members that saved the term, iPod, to their favorites. You can then view the members profile, see their recent and favorite searches, and then request them to be your friend. The member would then receive the request and if agreed, the member will then appear in your friends list. In the friends tab is where you would see all the members you are friends with, what members requested to be your friend, and even members that have you listed as their friend. The service is fairly new, so not many results come up yet when viewing results in the people tab. Give it some time and it should turn out to be a great service.

Overall, I feel that Gnosh is an excellent search tool that gets straight to the point, search results. It is very organized, you receive a wide range of results from photos, products, search engines, and even social bookmarking services. Next time when making a search for something, give Gnosh a try and see how it goes. I’m really liking it.

View Gnosh: Think Dim-Sum for the web. (via)