I was recently contacted by SortFix who introduced their offering to me and thought maybe I’d be interested in writing a blog post about SortFix. (full disclosure: I have received nothing from SortFix other than their e-mail request).
SortFix is basically a value added search provider who wraps Google search results. Their approach is to analyze other keywords which appear frequently in your search results. You can then drag these other high frequency keywords to either the “Add to search” box, or the “Remove” box. There’s also a “Dictionary” box which defines keywords you may not know.
For example, if you search for “RS6“, you’ll get “Power words” like “v10”, “performance”, “audi”, “carlos”, 2010″, “2003”, “juan”, etc… By adding or removing those keywords, you can tune your search for either the 2003 edition of the RS6, or the new 2010 one, or you can check out the king of Spain, Juan Carlos’, ride.
I can see this being useful for people who don’t have super good Google-Fu. I don’t see myself using it, but I can see it being useful for many other folks. Another point against it is that currently it’s a Flash based interface, and generally I avoid Flash as much as possible. Apparently they are working on a non-Flash version, which would be a nice improvement IMHO.
I really like the idea the idea of offering up high frequency additional keywords to people who are searching for things to help them refine their search. I can see this being very useful for onsite eCommerce searching, helping narrow down products based on common attributes, etc…
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