After using it for a while in searching, the results are not half bad. And you also have the option of using secondary search engines to populate your results in case what you are looking for is not present in the Faroo Index.

Being P2P it requires a client to be installed on your computer. This may be a potential turnoff for some people. There are other small issues. For example, it assumes that port 80 will be available for it to use, while in my case port 80 is being used by IIS, and so it’s not available. The fallout of this is that the search from the browser’s search bar doesn’t work.

Other problems include no support for FireFox 3 which is my main browser. Regardless, it is a neat idea and I hope it will become much more successful.

Maybe there is a case for integration into Windows Vista, that will really take it forward.

Have you ever searched for icons on Google Image search? Had any luck? No? Thought so. Google is not so good at searching for icon files. You might want to change the look of your desktop by replacing those drab icon files that got installed by default when you installed your applications (that image on the left is my icon for the photos folder on my computer). Or you might be looking for an icon for that new application that you just developed. This is where IconLook comes in.

IconLook is a search engine meant only for icons. It let’s you search on keywords and returns various icons in varying sizes (you can choose to filter the search by size as well). For every icon it also shows you the license information for that file. This allows you to see how you can use the icon file. Most of the icons that I found through the search resulted in open licenses.

There is also a tab for the most popular keywords, which allows you to not think too much about which keywords to search, and there is another tab which shows the most popular icons.

All in all a great little search engine (till Google steps in).

Instant Domain Search – The first one is a simple to use site which basically shows availability of .com, .net, or .org domains as you type your desired domain name. It also presents handy links to services which let you check who the owner of a domain name you want is and whether it is up for sale or not. If your desired domain name is available, then it points you to various domain registrars with the registration pricing listed.

Dominize – a similar service to the one above, except it looks better, is faster and you can use it from your mobile phone as well. It lacks a few features of the one above, but it adds one more feature: as you type, it also pulls up the availability of sub-words – for example, when I typed onlineobservations there, it also showed me availability of onlineobservation and onlineobs.

AjaxWhoIs - this is a service which is also super fast. It also supports more than just .com, .net, and .org domains unlike the two above. There is also a FireFox extension available which lets you use the service from within FireFox without visiting the site.

Bust A Name – this service has by far the most features. Aside from doing the regular domain search as offered by the services above, you can do a word search. You can keep adding words related to your domain, and it will search for domains which are a combination of these words by combining them. For each word entered, it will display to you a list of similar words as well. You can also see if an already registered domain is for sale. (It has a lot of options, which you should checkout by visiting the site).

Domain Hacks – And finally, this service offers what none of the others do. Have you ever wanted to get a domain name like del.icio.us. Well, this service will find such domains for you.

I am sure there are many more tools which allow you to search for domain names out there and so if you know any that are as good or better, please leave them in comments.

This trend was also seen in my WordPress Admin Dashboard which now uses Google Blog Search to show incoming links to my blog. There have of course been a large number of other blog search services through this time. Recently, however, there is a new contender which has been making ripples. It’s called Twingly.

Twingly is in a private beta right now, yet I hear a lot about it all over the Internet. All major blogs I read are reporting it. Apparently, Twingly is going to be a “SPAM FREE” blog search engine. Yes, that’s right.

How do they achieve this? From the FAQ“

Well, we work our way outwards from selected high quality blogs, discovering and including only those that are linked directly or indirectly to the quality “seed” blogs.

This, I think, is both good and bad. Using this engine, I will miss out on all the small time blogs which sometimes do have the most amazing and useful content. I mean it is obvious that you will need to be linked to by LifeHacker or BoingBoing through some channel else you will never be listed on their service.

I suppose that means this blog will never be listed on this service either. The good thing is that when you do search, your results will come from highly authoritative blogs (those are the only kinds the ‘high quality blogs’ will link to); which I guess is the idea behind it anyway.

Another thing claimed by the authors is that they will be coming out with more and more services based on their index of blogs. We will keep an eye of course for these.