The old kvasir was one of the most used web searches in Norway, but they never really managed to beat Google in popularity, so far. So what’s new in the new version of their search, and has this anything to do with “search 3.0″?

The first page is changed to a fancy logo and single search box, as is mandatory these days. The ide about the result page is that it is segmented into displaying results from different sources:

• Companies (kind of yellow-page results with not only name but keyword hits as well)
• Ordinary web results (From Google)
• Images
• Topics
• Encyclopedia (Store Norske)
• News
• Twitter
• Sponsored links (ads)

A quick test show that this is nowhere near the revolutionary “search 3.0″ as they claim. A search for my own company “Cominvent” shows no results other than web results. Not very 3.0-ish… The same search at Finn.no shows contact information as well as a map to my company.

How about a search for “microsoft fast”? This brings up a totally unrelated company on top, then web hits and some images. But where are the news stories about the Microsoft/FAST merger last year? I had to click “news search” tab to get to those results, why?

Finally, let’s try a search for “kakkerlakker” (cokroaches in Norwegian). It brings be a lot of company hits for insect fighting companies, but no encyclopedia hit. But they have a “did you mean kakerlakker” – ah, I mis-spelled it. Clicking the spell correction, brings up a better result, and that is good.

All in all, searching multiple sources is good, but it is neither new not “search 3.0″. Sesam/finn has been doing this for years, and they just gave up competing on the web search arena. Sorry, Kvasir. It takes more to call something “search 3.0″.