It seems like new players are emerging every day in the search engine industry, and one of the recent entries is RankNoodle.com. I stumbled upon their site a few days back, and stopped by to check out if they added anything to the search space. However, I was not really excited at what I saw! Forget competing with the top players like Google, Ask and Yahoo, this one is not even close to its recent peers like SearchCloud, which at least offer a fresh approach to search! Neverthless, here is an unbiased review if you are interested.
First of all, I don't think it makes sense to enter the Search space, unless you have a different algorithm or offer semantic search which would be the only alternative to Google that people would warm up to! In any case, RankNoodle tries to incorporate the "better" features of individual search engines, thereby trying to provide a more appealing user experience. Does it work? You'd have to see for yourself.
The Home page is pretty bland, even in a simplistic way. With just a Search Box at the top, followed by Recently Searched keywords, is still acceptable. However, the list of Top 100 Searches is totally distracting, and definitely not valuable! In fact, I was embarrased to see what "things" people search for the most - and can be extremely unsuitable for kids!!
Once you enter a search term or phrase, you get to a detailed page which is substantially useful, but only if it exists in their database! Yes, I tried 3 different queries, "Recipes", "Diet", "Technology" and "Gadgets", and I only received results for "Gadgets" - can you believe that?! Maybe they should consider more work on their database and search algorithm before they make it live to public!
If your query does return some results, then you get to see the only nice feature of this site. A definition/explanation for your search term, followed by related Conversations, followed by actual Search results. I think they need to make it more user-friendly, and of course, more accurate, but the way they present it is good. On the right sidebar, you have a section for related Articles, images and Videos, again, an asset to few, but will be ignored by most.
If there are no results to match your query, it shows some error message, but you actually have to go "back" to enter a new search term! there's no way you can just type it again on the same page - totally unacceptable! i think they need to fix that. Also, the speed is really slow, but I can give them some slack for being a newly-launched site. There's nothing in the About Us page, but luckily there's some information in the Contact page; again, I would have prefered if they had updated these things before launching the site, as it helps improve credibility.
In any case, I think RankNoodle, like any other new search engine player, has a lot to accomplish before it can even try to lure users. I would give it a second shot when they have a more complete database. You cannot expect people to use your site if 3 out of 4 searches return no results!
Hope they try to address these issues soon enough, or its a No-No game for RankNoodle!
