BookMach.com - Search Gets Personal

Bookmach combines two popular concepts of this current web era: bookmarks and RSS feeds; however it does so without really using either, in the traditional sense. It’s actually a search engine which aggregates users’ keywords, saves them and updates them as new items are found. Here’s a quick run down of how it works: first, enter a search term and hit the search button or the ‘create new bookmach from this search’ button. Hitting the latter key allows you to create your own page for the specified keywords. Name your page and bookmark the url to come back later. The address will read bookmach.com/yourname/pagename. Alerts and updates may be sent via email or RSS feeds. Bookmach indexes over 3300 blogs, news sites and magazines.

“bookmach is an index of over 3300 blogs, magazines and news sources that possess consistently high quality. all sites are verified to contain both in-depth and comprehensive content, with none of the spam found in other search engines.”

This site has occupied a spot that’s somewhere between social bookmarking and search; it’s a nice twist on both concepts and seems to be useful for a myriad of projects. Bloggers could use it for keeping up with the latest news developments so that their users will be the first to know. Students and academics could use it for research purposes. Site owners could use it to track mentions of their site and the list goes on.

Bookmach is in an unstable position. First there are hundreds of other bookmarking sites, many may not be prompted to switch. There aren’t as many social features as one might expect. Also, the design isn’t the snazziest out there. Besides that, what blogs and sources do they pull their content from? What’s the criteria for choosing sources?