Ambiently: Find Related Web Content

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Written by Samuel Dean.

Like many web workers, searching the web is an integral part of how I get things done each day. For that reason, I regularly try out various types of search engines that can take me beyond standard Google results. My favorite recent find in this area remains Viewzi, which lets you get lots of different types of visual and text-based views of anything you search for. This week, I’ve been trying a tool that bills itself as a web “discovery engine,” rather than a pure search tool: Ambiently.

So far, I’m finding Ambiently very good for some of the tasks that I would otherwise use a search engine for, in particular finding good alternative content on esoteric topics and seeing how my content is being used by others.

It’s very easy to get started with Ambiently. It’s a bookmarklet, so works in most popular browsers. From the application’s home page, you just drag the “Ambiently” button up to your browser’s bookmarks toolbar. Once it’s in the toolbar, all you need to do is click on it to get a list of suggestions for other web pages related to any page you are looking at.

The idea behind Ambiently is to give you suggestions for content that’s similar to the content on the page that you’re currently looking at. It does indeed do this for any web page, but I find it most useful for quickly showing me alternatives to pages on fairly esoteric topics, and particularly useful for quickly looking at how anything I’ve written on the web is being picked up by others.

For example, I went to this WWD page where I wrote a story about the useful Firefox extension, Pencil. When I clicked on the Ambiently button on my Firefox toolbar, I was taken to a list of several sites that picked the post up. There were some sites that had other reviews of Pencil as well.

By contrast, if I search on “Pencil” or the title of my post at Google, I get a long list of Mozilla and Mozilla-related links. Ambiently appears to look at a whole lot of keywords on any web page you’re on and then seeks to find matches for groups of them.

I’ll give Ambiently a nod for indeed being different from a search engine–definitely more of a “discovery engine”–but it’s primarily best at finding non-obvious relationships related to offbeat topics.

Have you used Ambiently? What did you think of the results?