Hulbee

What we liked: When you look for something with Hulbee, the site gives you handy prompts of associated keywords to help speed up your search. Typing in “Michael Jackson”, for example, not only gives you a list of links related to that term but also presents you with a kind of mind map (essentially a tag cloud) on the left-hand side of the screen. In this case it suggested words such as ‘life’, ‘pain’, ‘death’ and ‘photos’. These can be combined with your initial search term to produce more focused results and a new cloud of different related keywords that lets you continue to narrow your search until you find a suitable match.

The results are powered by Yahoo (which may change now Microsoft has joined forces with that company), so the site benefits from a solid, established search engine. There is also a Desktop-search tool that lets you scour your hard disk in the same way as you would the web.

Hulbee is especially useful for those times when you just can’t think of a solid set of keywords to type into a search engine. It offers the invaluable ability to refine imprecise searches when you’re researching a topic you are unfamiliar with, although its success really depends on how vague your search was in the first place.

How it can be improved: Hulbee’s different approach can seem cumbersome at first and the need to generate tag clouds makes it seem slower than traditional search engines. Some of the suggested words are of limited use – searching for “MP3 players”, for example, gave us ‘systems’, which didn’t seem particularly helpful. It also suffers from a lack of news, image and video-search facilities.