SearchMerge

With all the hype around Twitter as the future of search, it makes sense that someone would put together a search engine that combines Google results with results from social sites around the web. Enter SearchMerge ( http://searchmerge.com/ ). It's basically just a text entry field and a selection of sites to search, including Twitter, Friendfeed and YouTube, but it has the potential to be very useful. Or, it would, if there were any apparent rhyme or reason to the order of the results.

A search for Download Squad turned up a Last.fm page, our website, a year-old Vimeo video, and a post about netbooks from February, in that order. The results were all relevant, but they could be sorted in a more logical way. SearchMerge is also fairly slow when you're using it to search every available site. The real-time search option is neat, but suffers from the same long wait for results. It's a great idea, but it has a long way to go in the implementation.