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Google@Omgili Mashes Traditional Web Search With Social Buzz

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Omgili, which we reviewed in 2007 as a top alt search engine, has all ears on culling results from the weird corners of the web: Forums, boards, discussion groups – basically, anywhere you’d find purely or mostly subjective information. It’s the polar opposite of Google search, which is virtually a peer-reviewed journal by comparison.

Their latest relief, Google@Omgili, features a sweet mashup with Google search, charitable users a well-rounded look at the honest-and-balanced web alongside social buzz from and about sources such as blogs, newsgroups, video-sharing sites, forums, discussion boards, Q&A sites, and review sites.

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“We mashed the familiar Google interface (and brilliant results) and added many modest helpful features on top,” wrote CEO Ran Geva in an email days gone by. “The interface is not crowded by results from more resources. Instead, it offers you a deeper insight about your search query with a click.”

The translation function isn’t incredible, but for trending or hot-pin topics, the results can be quite fascinating.

The basic Google@Omgili search yields traditional web results with discussions that link to each result:

Once a user clicks on the “discussion bubble” next to the link, he can preview some of the social chatter linking back to that particular result:

Users can also choose to refine the search to show results from, say, forums and discussions only:

This product also incorporates the Right Knowledge API and integrates Snap.com‘s benefit to give users a snapshot and video/RSS/Wikipedia previews. And of course, users can choose any number of social sites to share Google@Omgili with their networks (but not to share specific search results, which is disappointing) and can choose to add Google@Omgili to their search bar.

Although the original Omgili search offering calls to mind many, many social/forum search engines – most of which have financially struggled or failed, see Twing and Delver – the Google mash gives this engine a much more fascinating and helpful product.

Overall, it’s a nice way to see which links are generating (or supporting) subjective online conversations and might be a excellent tool for tracking down topic experts or sources. On the other hand, it might also be a way to get mired down in the chatter from forum crazies. Six of one, a half dozen of the other – after all, whether you’re brilliantly insane or insanely brilliant, you’ve got to post your theories and rants somewhere, right?

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