For the past couple months I’ve been using Unscatter.com as my primary search engine. I configured Chrome both at work and home to search it by default. Since I’ve done this, I’ve added quite a few features and fixed more bugs.

For example paging is working reasonably well, though I intend to start caching results so I can always get you back to the results set you were looking at. Google sometimes is better than Bing or Blekko, so I provided a quick link to perform your search on Google. I’ve tuned the search query history so you don’t end up with a ton of previous queries when you make minor changes. I use /twitter a lot, so I enabled Twitter intents so that I could interact with Twitter directly from the results. I also added pulling Facebook like counts for some searches, in other words social validation for results.

I’ve got my own bookmarked searches that a check at least once every few days. I’ve been finding it a little rough, but usable. Some of the things missing are spelling suggestions and search suggestions based on the query, which will come eventually.

My current work is centered around an idea I’ve had for scaling the site. It’s probably going to eat up most of my time for the summer to build it, especially with me taking a vacation for a couple weeks. So right now is really a good time to play with unscatter.com if you’re interested in it. The only changes I see happening in the near future is I’ll likely finish the caching layer to improve performance and save me some bandwidth costs. I’ll get more into the whole infrastructure plane in another blog post, for people interested in topics like scaling and high availability I think it will be pretty interesting.

First, I wanted to share the vision I have for Unscatter.com. It’s finally fully matured in my mind, and I’m pretty excited to have a pretty solid plan for what I want to do. www.unscatter.com is now the first of 4 products that will be offered under the unscatter.com domain. The other three are my.unscatter.com, news.unscatter.com and checkin.unscatter.com.

The overall concept is that I believe there is a new layer of the internet on which to build on, and it’s the API layer. Other sites that drive search, content and social interaction are also becoming authentication providers and content distribution engines. It’s the second coming of the portal, and honestly when all put together, Unscatter.com is really in concept a portal. It’s a 4 part portal, and those 4 parts are:

Search (www.unscatter.com): There are multiple places to search on the internet. From the giants like Google and Bing to the site specific sites like Twitter. Depending on your search you might find one, some or all useful. Unscatter.com’s goal is to pull these search interfaces together than you can easily move between all of them to find what you’re looking for.

Social (my.unscatter.com): As a Facebook and Twitter user, I love utilities like Tweetdeck. I haven’t found one though that really fits all my needs. I’d like to have an RSS reader built in. I’d like to be able to see just messages with links or pictures. My.unscatter.com will be my attempt at creating a social client that meets the needs I have, and hopefully I’m not the only one who thinks the things I come up will be useful.

News (news.unscatter.com): As I’ve gotten older I’ve become more interested in what’s going on around me. Funny thing is, I don’t really watch the evening news. I get most of my news from the radio and the internet. I actually had Unscatter.com as a pretty functional news portal at one point. In fact a friend of mine who is a journalist for a local paper found some of it’s local features using the Fwix API were useful for her work. So, I intend to provide that again.

Location (checkin.unscatter.com): This is lowest on the priority list. I don’t really use these sites, but when I looked at what I was planning on offering it made sense to include this. The basic gist is like my.unscatter.com, checkin.unscatter.com will give you an interface to your location based sites like Foursquare, GoWalla, Facebook or Google Places. I haven’t started thinking this part all the way through yet, I got enough to do before it.

I don’t have an aspirations of making unscatter.com the only site you use on the internet. That’s just silly. My goal is to provide a good starting point for when I need to find information or when I have some time for social based recreation. The social and location sites may eventually offer paid for premium features. Search and news I hope to keep completely free.

I’ve had a lot of fun building unscatter.com, and I only see that fun continuing. I’ve created some interesting problems to solve, and I can’t wait to make more.