Ambiently: A Search Engine in a Bookmarklet

Sarah Perez — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 06:08:51 -0800

To be precise, Ambiently is not actually a search engine, it's a "web discovery engine." What's the difference? A search engine answers your manually typed-in query with a list of links, but a discovery engine provides relevant content directly related to the web page you're currently viewing. At least that's how the company behind Ambiently describes their new search tool. However, since Ambiently also returns a list of links we think it's fine if you want to call it a search engine.

Naming aside, what's interesting about this search tool is that it's not a destination site you have to remember to visit. Instead, you activate your searches by just clicking on an Ambiently bookmarklet to launch a page of related links.

]]> From the Ambiently homepage, you can drag and drop the provided bookmarklet up to your browser's bookmarks toolbar. Once it's there, you can click on it from any web page you're viewing to see a list of related content on the "ambient page" that appears. If you want to switch back to the original web page, you simply click the bookmarklet again.

Ambiently is the kind of tool that will work best when you're looking at a page about a fairly specific topic, not when you want to see suggestions of other sites like the one you're on. For example, clicking on the bookmarklet from the homepage of ReadWriteWeb.com didn't refer us to similar blogs, but rather displayed links where ReadWriteWeb was mentioned and linked to, such as on NetVibes, FriendFeed, and Technorati. However, when clicking on the bookmarklet from the recent ReadWriteWeb post about OrSiSo, we were shown a couple of links of other blogs that had also written about the same topic.

According to the help section of Ambiently's web site, you should be able to modify the query displayed on the ambient page by adding or removing keywords and then clicking "update." But in our tests using Ambiently in both Firefox and Chrome on a number of pages, the section of the page where the actual query displays is no where to be seen. Our guess is that the company has removed this feature to make Ambiently even easier to use, which would make sense, but have neglected to update their web site accordingly.

That said, Ambiently could still end up being useful, especially when researching unique topics which you're having trouble locating through traditional search engine queries. But before we can say that this search tool will actually become a part of our daily routine, we'll have to live with it for a bit longer .

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Cruxlux Reveals Related Web Content

Phil Glockner — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 19:30:00 -0800

At SXSW Interactive yesterday, I met Curtis Spencer (@cruxlux) in the hall between panels. We sat down and spoke for a few minutes and he told me about an application he was developing called Cruxlux. The name describes what the application attempts to do: Lux for light and Crux for the decisive point. In essence, the goal of Cruxlux is to analyze the web page you are visiting, and scour other web sources for related stuff, then present that information to you, summarized, and without actually leaving the current page. Although technically in beta, it is available to use without registration.

]]> Here's how Cruxlux works. It can either be launched from a bookmarklet from within the browser, or if the web page is set up correctly, from a link on the page itself. When invoked, it opens a window over the current page, and contextual links and information start being populated. The more types of information on the page, the more links and stories are mentioned in this popup. However, the links within Cruxlux are not simple redirects to outside web pages. In fact, clicking on most links will actually give you more information right inside the popup, which means you won't be accidentally redirected away from the page you started on. And returning to that page is as easy as closing the Cruxlux window.

At this point, you can feel free to browse the information. We found lots of new related news sources and interesting byways to follow as we explored, but we must admit to a bit of confusion at times. The Cruxlux window is fairly busy and clicking certain items (like the topical slides the run along the top) cause different actions to happen. Also, once we clicked on a topic button, we weren't sure how to return to the original set of results.

This is a relatively new app that is still in active development and we see a lot of potential with the way Cruxlux works. We are looking forward to how it evolves and grows in to its full potential.

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related - ReadWriteWeb

Ambiently: A Search Engine in a Bookmarklet

Cruxlux Reveals Related Web Content