Friday, February 25, 2011

Better cocktail searching

As Google belately tries to keep its search results relevant, a number of alternatives are available, including the rather interesting Blekko. This new search engine allows you to narrow your search to lists of previously entered sites, labelled with what they call slashtags. With masses of poor cocktail websites out there, I've frequently been frustrated by Google searches.

Obviously there are different aims for searching the web. A completely open search will often be needed, for example when looking for some obscure information on a little known cocktail. However, the Blekko slashtag approach can be really handy when you want to weed out some of the poorer hits for more common search terms.

Try searching for Mai Tai in Google, and most of the top hits are for some pretty poor pages on this classic drink. Narrowing the search using my "/msp/cocktails" slashtag produces all the Mai Tai entries on my favourite 16 cocktail sites. Some I know, some I'd not seen before but best of all, no swamping of the results from the myriad of average cocktail web sites out there.

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