Hulbee: A First Look

Hulbee is the latest search engine to launch in a bluster of Google-beating promises, but is it any good? Web User's Technical and Reviews Editor Andy Shaw takes a first look at Hulbee


Search is the gateway to the internet. For the last 10 years, Google has held the keys to the gate, with a search engine that many, including some of the largest tech companies in the world, have tried to better. But so far, no-one has managed to beat it.

Hulbee is the latest attempt. The Swiss company isn’t actually making its own search results by going out there and analysing web pages, but uses a refinement of Yahoo’s index to present results in a different way.

The main difference is that is uses a tag cloud – a collection of words related to your search – positioned to the left of the results. By clicking on these words you can add them to your search, in an attempt to hone your results.

Whether it succeeds or not is largely dependent on your searching skill. Beginners may find themselves able to refine imprecise searches, and clicking on suggested words rather than having to think about them yourself may save you a few seconds. However, most people would save more time by constructing a better set of keywords in the first place.

The other problem with the search is that, in our brief and relatively unscientific tests, both Google and even Yahoo itself provided a better set of results in the first place. Being able to click and add more words into a search query doesn’t particularly help, unless your search term is far too vague in the first place.

For example, we searched for ‘website reviews’ on Hulbee, Google and Yahoo in the hope of finding Web User’s web page. Yahoo brought it to the top of the first page – hurray for Yahoo! Google had it on the first page. We couldn’t see it anywhere on the first three pages of Hulbee. However, it did offer us a collection of words to refine our search, though these were of little help. Words like ‘kids’, ‘description’, ‘share’, ‘page’, ‘development’ and ‘design’ aren’t going to get us any closer to the site we’re looking for.

We tried similar searches and got similar results – Hulbee’s list of words only really helped when we made the initial search deliberately vague.

Yesterday, Google launched its own Search Options service which also lets you refine your results. Clicking the ‘Show options…’ link at the top of the search results opens a panel on the side that lets you refine results further, by offering links for showing types of results (just videos or forums posts, for example), only recent results, and direct links to things like image or timeline searches. It’s a quicker way of accessing some of the options that have always been available via Google’s Advanced Search option.

If a search engine is to succeed in beating Google it needs to provide instant results, first time.

Refining a search is all very well. But when Google and other rival search engines offer better results in the first place, Hulbee is left with an interface that may be more natural and intuitive, but is slower to operate and still relies on the basic mechanics of typing words into a box.

www.hulbee.com