A new "encyclopaedia-based search engine", Factbites, went live last week, aiming to provide quicker access to basic facts than most search engines offer.
Factbites developer Luke Metcalfe says his motivation for building the search engine was that people mostly aren`t after Web sites - they`re after information. "I wanted to build a site that serves the facts straight up."
It is geared to giving the searcher the relevant information at first click, while a search engine like Google concentrates on giving users lists of the Web sites that contain the relevant information.
Factbites attempts to condense the content of the Web site in a three-point summary so users don`t click through unnecessarily.
For example, a Factbites search for "Nelson Mandela" immediately turns up a bullet-point list of facts about Madiba - when and where he was born, why he is famous, and links to biographies and news about him.
A Google search for "Nelson Mandela" turns up pages of links, starting with "News about Nelson Mandela", then a link to his biography and various other sites. All of which look interesting, but if all you want to know is "Who is Nelson Mandela?", Factbites offers the faster route to an answer.
A Factbites search for "dog" resulted in a number of choices, with each link having the three-point summary of the Web site content underneath it. The same search on Google resulted in more links but at least half the results didn`t relate to "dog" directly. For instance, one of the first options was to click through to the dogpile.com search engine.
While Google is an information and research tool, Factbites is intended to be more of a brief educational tool. "It is never going to be the place to locate your lost aunt, or order items from your corner store," says Metcalfe.
It looks like a handy tool for quickly settling a trivia debate, though.
On the downside, Factbites is not for the person who doesn`t like scrolling through Web pages, as all the results of a search are crammed onto a single page. In addition, the database only covers 800 000 topics so far. While this may sound like a lot, users will get a lot more 'no search results` than if searching on Google.
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