Official Find – The Official-Site Searcher

This site claims to make it easier to find the official web sites of top brands and companies. Type in your brand name or company into the search box and you should find the official site at the top or in the top 5-10 search results. For major brands it seems to work well, except that you still have to watch out for advertisements at the top of the results. I had problems, though, with some UK and European brand names and in particular with household cleaning products.

I was on the point of being moderately impressed, but when I ran the same searches in Google most of the results looked identical except for the UK and European brand names. Google managed to find most of those and placed them in the top 3. I then realised that I use Google.co.uk as my default and when I used Google.com the results looked very similar to Official Find’s.

I am not sure what is so special about Official Find. The “About” file refers to their InstaNav which instantly searches for Official Sites with each keystroke and presents results in a drop down menu in the actual search box. You should then be able to select and click on the site without going to a search results page first. They go on to say that “InstaNav tm will make searching at Google and other search engines feel old fashioned!” None of the claimed features worked in Firefox and in IE I kept getting warnings about Active-X.

Verdict: I’ll stick with the boring old fashioned search engines.