This article is more than 1 year old

Turbo10.com: Getting back on its feet

Google safe for a while yet

As many of you clearly noticed, following Friday's rave review of new search engine Turbo10, in which we argued it was a contender to Google's crown, the site promptly gave up under the demand and disappeared for the whole weekend and most of Monday too.

As difficult as scoring an own goal while shooting yourself in the foot may seem, Turbo10 managed it with aplomb. As literally hundreds of emails testified, Google does at least have the decency to stay up.

Which was all a great shame because the technology really is rather good - compiling, weighting and listing results from your own selection of thousands of different search engines worldwide.

However, the site is back up and if not yet sprinting round the track, it has at least limbered up and started jogging. We asked Turbo10 what had happened and when we could expect the great things it promises.

"Since your article we have received a huge increase in visitors," says Turbo10 CEO Nigel Hamilton. "Our server has almost melted under the load. We have been working furiously to manage the load and have re-implemented two new servers over the weekend. However we have reached the physical capacity of our hardware."

So, it's up, but take it easy. He continues: "We would like to apologise to our existing customers who have not been able to search and also to our new visitors. We are still in beta and the feedback we have received has been really appreciated. We will be upgrading to more new servers as soon as possible."

No doubt due to its premature disappearance, we have had little feedback about what you think, save two emails that have complained over JavaScript errors on the page and one woman who said she couldn't find her company on it but could using Google.

Not much of a test group to draw conclusions with, so we shall stick with our original assertion that Turbo10 can produce better results than Google with the added advantage that it can be used to scour vast areas of the Internet hidden to other search engines (see the earlier review for information on how).

In the meantime, it has also added 62 new search engines to its list, bringing it to the grand total of 1,170.

What we should reiterate, as many anxious readers were keen to point out, is how Turbo10 intends to make it money - by selling sites on a pay-per-click basis. These links with be noted by a "[sponsored]" tag on it. Quite why this irritated so many people is unclear - if one thing has been demonstrated by Turbo10's unplanned holiday it's that running a search engine needs alot of servers, bandwidth and tech support - and that doesn't come cheap.

Anyway, let's try this one again. There is a really good new search engine in beta called Turbo10 that compiles results from the search engines that you choose. We think the design is a little cluttered and we don't like the colours and there are still one or two bugs, but it really is very good and offers an entirely different approach to hunting for information on the Internet.

Try it out. But maybe not right now. ®

Related story
Make way for the contender to Google's crown

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like