qrobe it logoMetasearch, the fusing together of results from various search engines into a single user interface screams ‘jumble,’ just from the idea. In the past, everyone that has tried to create a meta engine (the slacker way to do search) has had a serious user interface problem.

Qrobe, pronounced krobe, has gotten past this. Qrobe is a meta search engine, working with results from Bing, Google, and if you want, Ask. It brings together all results (with half a second of noticable lag), into one interface that cleanly integrates what Bing and Google each have to say on their own.

While many people tend to stick to one search engine over other possibilities, I have always found it an intriguing idea to combine the top offerings to prevent a possible bias in one engine from compromising my search experience.

Qrobe looks like this, check it out:

qrobe

Qrobe borrowed a very powerful design cue from Bing, and has made it its own. In Bing, you can hover over a small button to the right of a search result that will bring up a preview image of the website in question. Qrobe took the idea, and made it more useful for the power-surfer (who I assume is their user demographic).

Qrobe gives you a similar hover over option, but instead of serving a preview of the website, it gives you the option to share the URL, shorten it, check it for safety, save it, and translate it. All from one little menu. If you are familiar with jump lists, it feels like that.

But Qrobe put back in the preview feature with “peek,” a function that lets you preview a website in near full screen, without leaving the search results. Powerful, I must say.

Finally, Qrobe has infinite scrolling in both web and image results, meaning that you never have to refresh. Bing does this well with its image search, to have it everywhere is intoxicating.

I expected to dislike Qrobe as another iterative, washed-out attempt to use Google’s success for company gain. i was wrong. Qrobe is a very fresh look at search UIs, and just might become my new default search engine. It brings the best search results without the image heavy Bing interface, or the need to constantly load more pages on Google. Impressive.

No word on how Qrobe plans to monetize, but the comapny should be able to find enough users to attract some advertisers, if that is their goal.