Xavier Media®

Once again we've seen yet another search engine. This time it's called RankNoodle.com.

If we start with the design I have to say that they've done it quite good. The design is clean and time-less (i.e. no fancy animations that will grow old ). I also like how they've designed the search results page.

Instead of how you do it at for example Google and Yahoo where you have to select if you would like to do a web search or search for images, you do everything in one search at Ranknoodle . When I searched for Xavier Media (duuh) I first got an article about Saint Xavier High School, then the web search results right under. In the right menu I got Related Articles, Images and video search results. Unfortunately they couldn't locate any articles more then the one about Saint Xavier High School (maybe they should check out the article about Xavier Media from AboutUs.org ).

When you hold your mouse pointer over one of the found images you get to see the full image, but since they show the images to the right of the thumbnails the pictures end up outside your browser window   )see the example screen shot above). This is a little bit bad since even if you click on the image you're not taken to the source page (i.e. the page where they found the images) which is also bad . They should give photographers and web site owners credits for their pictures….

One of the better features is the function where users can rate the search results. You can give a good result a "Thumbs up" and a less good results a "Thumbs down". More search engines should add something like this and I also hope that they will add the possibility to write reviews about sites because that will really add value to the search results.

I did a second search, this time for web hosting but miss-spelled hosting to see if they would suggest any new spelling. Unfortunately not, so if you spell wrong you don't get the "did you mean to search for…." most search engines show. This is almost horrible since users today are used to the spelling functions all the big search engines got.

This is a good search engine, but in the need for some more development. To play with the big boys they need to add a spell checker (I can recommend the Yahoo! Boss API), an advanced search function so users can search for results only from a specific web site for example and they also need to fix the image search.

Check out RankNoodle.com today you to because they could get big soon.

About the author
Andreas co-founded Xavier Media® in 1996 and has since been involved in all kinds of development, marketing and making money online.