OK, yes I built it and by using it it also helps me prioritize what I should work on next for it.

I am really the only customer using it at the moment as well.

However, as a product I do find it useful, and I do use it daily. It’s not immediately obvious why it’s a useful product. I base this opinion on the fact that it really hasn’t caught on. So, I believe I need a better way to point out how to use it effectively. I’m not sure if there’s an obvious way to do that, I’m open to any suggestions.

So, how do I use it?

Well, besides making it my primary search engine, I also use it for a daily search. The first nice thing is that I can bookmark that search.

Here’s a search for erlang, zeromq, yui3, python tornado and mongodb.

These are all topics I’m interested in right now. This bookmark basically gives me a page with the option to flick through /date searches for each of these. However, my use of it doesn’t stop there.

So, I use the bookmark above, and I’m presented with the most recent results Blekko has for erlang. Using the left sidebar I’ll usually then flick through /news erlang and /twitter erlang. Last weekend I added support for the Hacker News api, so now I’ll hit /hn erlang as well. Then I’ll do the same for the other searches as well. Go back the the right sidebar, click on say /date zeromq, then work my way through the news, twitter and hn searches there as well.

I implemented Twitter intents when they were first released and have replied from the search results page several times. It’s great how well that works.

One thing I did notice is that the /hn tag has been pretty useful for the erlang search. I caught some interesting comments about erlang that I likely would have never seen otherwise.

Another good example was when I was car shopping. I used Unscatter.com for a lot the analysis I did before choosing a car. Based off of web search and the pricing at the dealer I was pretty sold on the Routan. However searching using the /facebook tag led me to the Routan page where I found lots of people were having problems. My family ended up with a Mazda5 and we couldn’t be happier.

Unscatter.com is still not very pretty. I think the /twitter view is a good example of the direction the rest of the site may follow. Though I am considering a more drastic redesign to make it more readable. I want to get a few more api’s in place before I move in that direction though. One thing I’m looking for is a good instant answer approach. Something where I can offer immediate answers to queries like “canucks score” as some of the larger search engines do. I’m also looking getting media based searching, think images or youtube. I want to get those searches working befor a redesign as that should round out the different types of result displays I’ll need to design around.

So, please give it a try. And hey if you have any feedback feel free to leave a comment here or reach out to me on Twitter ( @joerussbowman ).