So my Scale0 project for rewriting the infrastructure behind unscatter.com has been put on hold for bit. It’s going to take larger amounts of time to complete than I have right now. So, I’ve gone back to working on the smaller pieces of unscatter.com that can be improved, and knocked a couple out this afternoon.

First, you may notice the new extremely drab logo. The old logo, which was spelled Usc@tter was confusing some people when the first looked at it. Basically some looked at it and said “Unsc” “at” terrrr”? I blame Twitter, or maybe just email. Anyway, until I come up with a better logo I’ve just put the current one up. I’ll have to change the favicon and Facebook page images at some point too, but I’ll worry about that after I come up with a new logo.

Now, I did add something pretty useful too. If you have javascript on, Bing, Blekko and Topsy results will return how many times each result url has been shared. Go ahead try a search and check it out. The point is now you can get idea of the value of a url by seeing if it’s been shared and how many times. I’d like to eventually add something similar for Twitter, but the api they have for doing this is still labeled as private. 

I also got in some bug fixes, primarily related to paging. Facebook is still a little wonky, but not much I can do about it. It’s the way their API works.

I’ve still got more to add in the future. I have, for now, ditched the HTML5 caching. I’m looking into doing more caching on the back end with a couple different approaches coming into play. I’m also going to add more sources like Youtube and see about getting some more instant answer type results in from ChaCha. I noticed I had to go to Google to do “canucks score” because unscatter.com couldn’t give me that data. Hoping ChaCha is a good source for that, or I may have to dig around for some other available APIs. Longterm is still realtime streaming and I’m considering a news portal and possibly a personal social portal for link gathering as well.

For those curious, usage is still pretty much me, myself and I. I’ve been using it as my primary search engine for over a month now and have found it pretty useful. My current two bookmarked searches are:

My technology search list (had to shorten that, default Tumblr theme didn’t like it)

Which allows to me to get the latest information about some technologies I am interested in.

http://www.unscatter.com/search/?q=%2Fnews+redskins&t=%2Fnews+canucks

Which keeps me up to date on my 2 favorite sports teams. One of which has me sporting a pretty thick playoffs beard right now. :)

Always interested in feedback. Right now the Unscatter Facebook Page and Unscatter Twitter account are the best ways to reach me. Or you can just hit me up personally on twitter @joerussbowman