Chris Pirillo’s Gaba.be continues to roll out new features weekly. They’ve also made a change to the URL structure for tag queries to become better indexed by search engines. This tag based search engine is still somewhat under the radar for many people, but it is quickly becoming one of my most-used sites for research. It’s also the best place I’ve found to do cross-application photo searches. My original profile of Gada.be is here. → Read More

Company: Gada Launched: October 10, 2005 Founder: Chris Pirillo Location: Seattle, WA Chris Pirillo has launched Gada.be today – a powerful tag meta-search engine that has an incredibly simple and thoughtful design. Shayne Sweeney is the developer who’s building Gada. Gada takes a query and runs it against sites like Google News, Technorati, Flickr, IceRocket, Amazon, Wikipedia, 43Things, etc. Searches can be narrowed via a drop down box to “photos”, “social” etc. for more specific results. The search itself, and any narrowing, are also accompished via the domain name. For instance, a photo search for “web2con”, the tag people are using for last week’s web2.0 conference, is also accomplished by the URL web2con.gada.be/p. The query is the subdomain, and the photo filter is the /p at the end. Allowing easy searches and filtering via the domain name structure is brilliant, and allows for very powerful mobile searches. Note also that the name “Gada” is extremely easy to type on a phone’s number pad. It was borne out of several frustrations. If you’ve ever tried to visit a Web site over a mobile device, you know it’s a pain in the knuckle. The domain had to be simple to key-in from anywhere. gada.be is 4232.2233 on most cell phones and PSPs. Normally, when you want to find something online, you have to choose a Web site (wait for the page to load) enter the query (wait for the second page to load) then see results from that provider. With “gada.be,” you insert the query *AS* the subdomain! Then, there’s having to visit several sites just to get the results you want. Often, this isn’t feasible when you’re on-the-go. Even when you’re sitting with a laptop or chained to a desktop, it’s still a time-consuming process. We all love the individual search services, so why not bring ‘em together? Okay, that’s what we did. Moreover, we dynamically output OPML which you can turn around and import into your favorite news aggregator. gada.be saves everybody time! It’s likely that Gada will become a much-linked to site for definitive results on a term, in a similar way as wikipedia is today. Gada incorporates all relevant information in a permanent URL, and so becomes a comprehensive result set for a tag link. Gada also outputs search results in RSS and OPML, allowing users to easily subscribe to and organize searches. More on Gada on their → Read More