Peerbot Search Engine Offers Searching by Favicon
You know what favicons are? They’re little teeny icons that show up on the address bar in at least Opera, Mozilla, and Internet Explorer. You can get information on what they are and how to put them together at ClickFire .
Peerbot ( http://www.peerbot.com ) allows you to search the Web via favicons. (There are about 96,000 in the database.) That is to say, you can specify a keyword and favicon colors, and get matching favicon results. This site doesn’t work quite right in Opera (something about the redirect in the search results looks off-kilter), but it works fine in Mozilla.
To search, specify a keyword (the more general, I found, the better.) You may also specify the primary and secondary colors of the favicon and how you want to receive results (just a list of icons, or a list of icons with details including title and URL.)
I searched for curling, giving no color preferences. I got nine results, from the Broomstones Curling Club to the Espanola Curling Club. (I chose the detailed search results, they’re much easier to make sense of.) Clicking on the icon redirects you to the site.
The results are interesting. They’re more like directory results than full search engine results. I tried getting a little more detailed, searching for Doberman, and got three results. Then I really pushed my luck, searched for Gardenia, and got no results. As I said, the more general the better.
The page also offers a selection of random favicons, top favicons, and a place for you to submit your own site (obviously if it doesn’t have a favicon it won’t be included in the search engine.) It seems like a really odd idea, but the results I got for my searches were quite good. Worth a look.
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Columist Tara Calishain is writer and editor at ResearchBuzz and author of the new book Web Search Garage
