Review: Ergo internet search application

Search engines have become such a core part of our daily lives that Google often gets transformed into a verb.

However, the results you get from search engines aren’t always terribly helpful – you generally just get a long list of web links that may or may not provide the information you need.

Ergo is a program that attempts to make better sense of your search results by organising them into categories that help you to quickly home in on the most relevant links.

When you run Ergo, it displays a blank screen with a simple text field at the bottom, into which you type the text for your search.

You can choose to use multiple search engines, including Google and Yahoo, as well as other sites such as Flickr, Youtube or Wikipedia.

Once Ergo has performed a search, it then organises the results into categories that are displayed on screen as a kind of flowchart.

If, for instance, you do a search on ‘Apple’, the results might be organised into categories relating to Apple computers, apple recipes or singer Fiona Apple.

If you then click on one of these categories, Ergo switches to a preview mode that displays visual previews of the web pages in that category (similar to the way Apple’s iTunes displays album artwork).

It’s a clever idea and does help to quickly sort the wheat from the chaff when you’re searching for things on the internet. The question is whether you’re prepared to pay almost £30 simply to fine-tune your searching.

People who perform searches as part of their daily work might feel Ergo pays for itself in improved productivity, but ordinary home users will probably be content with conventional searches on Google and its rivals. If you want to try it out for yourself, there’s a one-month free trial available.