I’ve been playing around with Yebol, a newish, and still beta search engine, and to my surprise I’ve found that I like it. Yebol is one of these semantic search engines, in that it combines results found using computer algorithms with results found by people to give you a great mix of search results.

Yebol takes the opposite approach to the now-mainstream way of searching. It’s the same way that Google was a much-improved version of the old cluttered way of searching using AltaVista/Yahoo!, where you had to fight to find the search box amid the tonnes of ads and news feeds. The Yebol home page is still clean and clutter-free, but the results page is organised very differently, with hits from multiple places and many suggestions for refining your search, or for expanding the scope of your search.

Yebol presents results in various categories including expanded searches, top sites for links for your search, Twitter tweets and other related topics. There’s also the familiar list of primary results in the big window front-and-centre. The results are all presented in frames, and you can view more results in each frame using the arrows at the bottom without losing your original page which I think is a very, very neat idea. All these different choices can make staying on topic a little bit harder if you’re surfing for general information. If, however, you want to see how your search subject is linked to other ideas and meanings, Yebol is fantastic.

For example, the obligatory search on the Red Ferret finds links to the site, things we’ve blogged, links from other sites to our stories and people re-tweeting Ferret articles. If you Google or Bing the Ferret, you would have to sort through buckets of sites that have red ferret in the name. Whilst that kind of search is useful sometime, it’s not the be-all and end-all of searching.

Yebol isn’t for everyone, if you know what you want, The Big Three will be there to help in milliseconds. Searching with Yebol is different though, it’s like taking a drive down a quiet meandering backroad, stopping at little tea houses and buying postcards along the way, while searching with Google/Bing/Yahoo! is like an 8 lane freeway straight to the beach, simple, boring. Give it a try, you may just find something you missed.

… however, if they don’t make a Firefox add-on for the search bar soon, I may stop using it very, very quickly.

Yebol utilizes a combination of patented algorithms paired with human knowledge to build a Web directory for each query and each user. Instead of the common “listing” of Web search queries, Yebol automatically clusters and categorizes search terms, Web sites, pages and contents.

Tags: search+engine, yebol, semantic+search, google+alternative