Sourcing with Ixquick Search

Ixquick – pronounced It’s Quick…

Quick search that can help minimize noise when searching resumes is essential. I’ve been using Ixquick for a little while now and it’s been helpful. It’s fairly unique and seems to return results sets that are tight and targeted and searches across 12 search engines with one search. The search itself is amended to be complaint against each engine and queried.

The website touts itself as being the world’s most powerful search engine employing the most advanced meta-search technology. Well, I can’t vouch for that but I can say that it’s been pretty rewarding for me.

Ixquick offers you’re the ability to search as you normally would leverage Boolean search or you can you the power search builder. Ixquick pairs your search result with a star rating.

It’s not ranking, but rather a note to signify every search engine that returns that particular result within the first ten results. For example if your results have 5 stars, than your result was ranked in the first 10 results across 5 search engines.

Pros and Cons:

Three key things that make Ixquick and good tool to me:

Power Search and Expert Search: Ixquick is smart enough to understand your search and translate to the search engines it is spidering. This is important because not every search engine will accept the same syntax for your search strings.
It truly Global with the capability to search in 18 different languages. This is important to me since Kenexa is a global company. Our recruiters have the opportunity to leverage another effective tool without having to learn the variations from each search engine. See the full list of supported languages here. In addition to the language ability Ixquick is pretty impressive with it’s international phone directory and the ability to search your results across the web to locate possible profiles and/or locations this person(s) may be active in.
The advance refinement offering of Ixquick is another bright spot. Quickly refine and eliminate your unwanted results. These results will not show up in your search again until you reset that particular search. This has been pretty rewarding especially as you run variations of your search. You have the opportunity to see only new results. This feature is voluntary, so you must activate this.

What I’m not keen on: (more petty than anything else)

The search refinements are not real time meaning you have to hit search again after you refine your search. Not terrible but a few more clicks x 8 hours equals a lot of more clicks.
Navigating the site can be a little difficult. Small text navigation design.

That’s really the crux of it all. Check out a brief run through here and then give it shot and let me know your thoughts.

http://us2.ixquick.com/eng/