What’s an alt search engine like Iterend on its own?

“Seriously, who’s still satisfied with Google here?”, Charles Leadbeater asked the audience of Picnic last week. The former advisor of Tony Blair told the crowd he was absolutely ecstatic when he first discovered Google in the nineties, but recently the search engine did nothing but disappoint him. One of the reasons he mentioned was the lack of context.

Had the team of Iterend been present at this presentation, they would have probably smiled since they’re developing a blog search engine which lets you search within certain time frames and categories. Isolated from each other, it’s not that interesting, but the combination leads to good results. Search in the category “Politician” and Iterend will return all articles mentioning a politician. You can then narrow down your search by clicking on the search tags left. There’s also the option to view related articles.

The idea of Iterend is good, but not original. The visual searching (tag clouds) are well executed by Quintura, Google Blogsearch uses the time aspect as well, and Technorati lets you search in related articles. Yet if you take the general function of an alternative search engine into account, Iterend does a good job with combining them and leading the way like a true pioneer.

But something tells me that the Luxembourg-based team wants to be more than just a bunch of pioneers. From their offices at the Technoport incubator in Esch s/Alzette, they probably want to build the next big search engine. I doubt whether they’ll succeed, simply because there are hundreds of developers trying to do the same. Together they’re showing Google the way, but on their own, their influence is limited.

Iterend is in private beta, so their index is not fully up to date yet, but there are still some invites left on the homepage.