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Tabbed Meta-Searching with Twerq: An IP ace up the sleeve?

Twerq wraps a rich AJAX UI around the search engine of your choice (Google, Yahoo, or Live), letting you conduct and maintain searches in parallel on separate results tabs. Its a nice implementation and works very smoothly, and with saved searches and the “QuickTags” features, provides an easy means to access common searches that you do.

Nice implementation aside, I don’t expect commercial success for Twerq, or any meta-search service, for that matter. Just to be clear, “meta-search” sites are those that use Google/Yahoo/??? API’s or page scraping for search results, and attempt to wrap value added features around those results - in the case of Twerq, tabbed results; in the case of othersm, consolidated results, results from multiple sources on the same page, etc etc.

Anyway - the point is, no meta-search engine has ever taken off. The most compelling part of a search engine’s value equation is relevant results, and meta-engines don’t add anything to this other than volume, or at best, some amount of marginal convenience. In the case of Twerq, convenience might be a sellable factor, if (a) browsers didn’t have tabs, and (b) Google History didn’t exist. The marginal convenience value of Twerq is very low given what’s already available with no switching-effort.

Then, of course, there’s the fact that meta-searching is against at least Google’s Terms of Service.

So - the good people at Twerq have an uphill battle. A product segment without any successes, an apathetic response among the techy-public, and questionable legal status. So what’s their angle? Looks like patents are in the works. Hit the “about” link at the very bottom of the page, and the “Development Team”, and you’ll notice the line:

Jeff M. Furr - (Legal Council, Patent Application)

So - is Twerq patenting AJAX-driven tabbed navigation for searching? Or in tabbed navigation in general? Given the dismal state of patent law in the US, you never know what Twerq may be patenting, and what might be granted. Anyway, given the low likelihood of organic success from the site itself, perhaps Twerq is hoping that a patent will provide a sellable asset, or a litigation windfall should some other hapless search engine go the tabbed-route.

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