While I was attempting to find an article yesterday, I stumbled upon an interesting looking search tool called Interceder (apparently a Spanish word meaning “to intercede”). This dashboard approach at search results definitely caught my eye because it had so much information strategically placed in what looks very similar to SharePoint Widgets. When I ran the search for Thomson Reuters, it produced a number of widgets ranging from basic information on the company, to the latest Tweets, to a breakdown of the latest news placed on a timeline.  I also found that you could display the results in either a basic “list” (news timeline, company info, people mentioned), or in an expanded “dashboard” format (list view, plus, spotlight, video, Twitter, Blog, and related search information.

List View
Dashboard View

It looks like Interceder uses a number of search tools and brings the results back from individual resources into its own widget box. Company information is pulled from Freebase; Videos from YouTube; Blog and News from Google News and Google Blog Search; [got an email from Interceder developer Michael Bade and he let me know that they actually pull news from the Yahoo BOSS service rather than Google News]; Semantic search and related people results from Open Calais; and, Tweets from Twitter Search. The process seems pretty simple, but the results look very professional.  The search is very basic, and no advance search functionality, such as phrase searching, date restrictions or Boolean style searches, appears to be available for more complex searching.  In fact, if you try to do any Boolean searching, it will simply take the first word and leave the rest off the search results.

It looks like the domain for Interceder was set up in 2008, but for some reason I’ve never ran across it before (nor have any of my research friends that I showed it to yesterday.) I’ve put in an email to the Interceder contact address, but it looks like it might be an Australian website (so I may not get a response until tomorrow.)

Even with the simple search capability, Interceder is a fun search tool to use, and I think you’ll find the way it displays the results to be fascinating.  So, go do what I did… search the name of your company, your college, and your kid’s school to see how Interceder structures the search results. If you’re like me, you’ll find Interceder to be a fun way to search the Internet.