The IET (Institution of Engineering and Technology, formerly the IEE) is soliciting feedback from members about a series of dedicated search portals they are developing. The aim is to have an online resource specific to a particular sector.
The initial trials are built around the Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS). The idea is a good one in principle, for example restricting the returns to the search term “Ford” to 1580 results (Google would give you over 300 million results for this term!). Some kind of filtering of results has got to be a good thing for specialist sectors, but with the main approach being restricting the number of sites addressed by the search, it’s difficult to see whether this is filtering or censorship.
The new portals will also offer community features, and the ability to rate (and presumably improve) search results. It will be interesting to see the results of this test, and we’re pretty confident that other sites in the electronics industry will make their own attempts to out-Google Google by focusing on a specific niche.