First up was AllTop. Described by its creators as an “online magazine rack” of popular topics. I would describe it as a melange between Google and RRS – RRSoogle if you will. Just type something into the search engine, Sony PSP Go for instance, and then pick the category (eg Games). What come up are a list of relevant websites to that topic and their top five headlines. In their own words Alltop “collects the headlines of the latest stories from the best sites and blogs that cover a topic”.

Alltop’s pretty handy if you just want a quick overview of what’s going on in a specific category, in my case, the technology world (or my other passion – Italian football). It’s updated every hour, so the news is pretty fresh, and you can even “recommend” adding sites to the Alltop feed.

Another interesting site I stumbled across was TinEye – a reverse image search engine. Now, that might sound ridiculous. It did to me. My first reaction was: “Who has any use for a reverse image search engine? Come to think of it, what is a reverse image search engine?” But it’s actually quite inventive. TinEye works when you give it a URL location of an image, or upload an image of our own (like the Republic logo, for instance). Then the site goes to work, finding all examples of use for that particular image. The benefit of all this is that it gives you a great snapshot of how your brand is being remade and used across the internet.

TinEye is still in beta mode, and only has access to just over a billion images, but it’s the first image search engine on the web to use image identification technology rather than keywords, metadata or watermarks. And the general consensus on the web is that it could be a big step in image search.

It even works on your iPhone and has a function called TinEye Music, which finds out more about an album simply by taking a photo of it. Photograph any album cover and TinEye’s image identification system will recognize it and give you links for that album on iTunes, allmusic, YouTube, and Wikipedia. Pretty clever stuff if you ask me.

So, there you have it: Alltop and TinEye. Two ridiculously named search sites that are ridiculously useful. We’re off to search for more interesting sites. And before you say it, it’s not that sort of interesting!