Seattle’s InfoSpace has become the first company in the search space to integrate New York-based ASP Robocast’s search technology into its search platforms.
The technology, called RoboSearch, allows a user to automatically browse through any number of relevant search or auction results with one click.
Currently, RoboSearch is only found on InfoSpace’s metasearch engine MetaCrawler. However, seattle.internet.com has learned that InfoSpace is planning on incorporating it into its Dogpile and Go2Net sites in the very near future.
“It’s the end of the ‘search shuffle’ where you’ve had to click back and forth 20 times to see 10 search results. Instead, you simply click ‘Play’ once and sit back to review the pages you wanted to see,” says Robocast CEO Damon Torres.
So how does it exactly work on MetaCrawler?
The results pages returned for any given query at MetaCrawler includes a highlighted link at the top of the page: “Play your search results in a slide show.” MetaCrawler users click on this link and the results page
refreshes, showing each result preceded by a checkbox. Users then scroll the search results, check those results that they are interested in viewing, and then click on the play button.
The results a user wants to view then play like a slideshow, page after page, sequentially and automatically. During ‘Play’ mode, users have seven speeds to choose from while viewing RoboSearch. Also, users can stop, pause and go to the next or previous result, or jump to any page.