Type of Engine: Meta-search.
Overall: Needs Improvement.
If this engine were a drink it would be…Bud Light, the wingman.
Intro
KaZaZZ! is a search tool that as far as I can tell doesn’t really offer much by way of useful differentiation. Their claim to uniqueness is their Search Mind Reader which pre-populates queries based on analysis of previous queries you’ve done. Maybe there’s a future to this if the query suggestions can really pinpoint my interests, but even then I’m not sure. Just because I searched for something today doesn’t mean I’ll be interested in the same topic tomorrow. And even if you looked at my search queries over time, how would that help predict future interests? Maybe I’m missing something here, but with their current implementation it’s not useful to me.
UI and Features
KaZaZZ! is a meta-search engine with a selection of tabs to focus your search. One thing they do is they limit the number of results returned. A search for Santa Cruz only returned 80 sites. Personally I don’t think limiting results is the right answer to increasing relevancy. It seems the sites that get returned are the ones that multiple engines have agreed upon.
On the search results page, check out the right hand side. Most of the refinement links are generic, such as News, Pics and Shop. But the one that got my attention was Music. It offers links to music files, though unfortunately for the query I tried, Mark Lanegan, most of the results were dead links. A nice idea though.
Oh, and Kazazz has a men’s search engine called MaZaZZ! and a women’s search engine called WaZaZZ! . Oh boy. Since I don’t have too much of a search history with their sites, the pre-populated Search Mind Reader queries for MaZaZZ! were exclusively female actresses and models. And for WaZaZZ! the queries were about dieting, beauty and fashion. Groan. The fashion queries were things like Guess, Benetton, Estee Lauder, etc. In other words, they’re trying to send users to shopping sites.
Conclusion
Another meta-search engine joins the fray. I’m not convinced they offer anything particularly useful, though it’ll be interesting to see what they do with the Search Mind Reader functionality in the future.
